Iran continues to build infrastructure in the Western Hemisphere to further its aims. This includes routes, money-laundering channels, and logistics across borders. Too many in Washington treat these as disconnected issues. While American policymakers speak in categories—narcotics, terrorism, migration, sanctions, cartels—Iran built a system that makes those categories obsolete.
Hezbollah helped assemble that system in the Tri-Border Area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, where counterfeit commerce, narcotics facilitation, and trade-based money laundering created durable channels of money and access. Assad Ahmad Barakat, sanctioned in 2004 and arrested in Paraguay in 2018, used front companies and extortion networks to raise millions of dollars for Hezbollah-linked activity throughout the region. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has designated more than 100 Hezbollah-linked individuals and entities across at least ten Latin American countries over the past two decades.
While American policymakers speak in categories—narcotics, terrorism, migration, sanctions, cartels—Iran built a system that makes those categories obsolete.
Scale protects the network. More than 2,000 metric tons of cocaine move through Latin America each year. Even a fractional cut matters for terrorist budgets. In September 2023, the U.S. Treasury Department described the seizure of 500 kilograms of cocaine from Hezbollah-linked operatives, worth about $15 million, hidden in fruit shipments from El Salvador. Treasury also documented cases in which as much as 80 percent of profits flowed back to Hezbollah.
Mexico is the hinge. Nearly 90 percent of the cocaine entering the United States crosses the U.S.-Mexico land border. Routes through Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador generate enormous payments for smugglers, facilitators, and territorial gatekeepers. It is a continental supply chain available to the highest bidder.
Iran tested that logic years ago. In 2011, an Iranian operative tried to hire men he believed to be tied to Los Zetas to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington for $1.5 million. The plot failed because the contact was a U.S. informant; nevertheless, the premise did not. The regime already had shown what mattered most: Cartel-linked intermediaries could provide deniable reach inside the United States.
In contrast, routes built for contraband also can move operatives. In March 2024, a U.S. border patrol apprehended Lebanese national Basel Ebbadi. He reportedly told authorities he had trained with Hezbollah. A man claiming Hezbollah ties who moved through the same illicit corridor used during a mass-migration period confirms the fact. Nor is the danger theoretical. United States courts have dealt with Hezbollah operatives such as Ali Kourani and Alexei Saab, both tied to surveillance and operational activity inside the United States. The border presents not only a trafficking and migration problem but also provides access to adversaries.
The northern flank deepens that access: Mexico provides throughput; Canada provides concealment, with laundering channels, opaque cargo flows, and Hezbollah-linked criminal networks turning North American commerce into operational cover.
Washington keeps striking fragments and calling it pressure, but a machine built on convergence will outlive every policy built on separation.
Now the system is maturing. It is no longer only criminal and covert but, rather, hardens into overt state-backed military cooperation in the hemisphere. In December 2025, the U.S. Treasury confirmed that Iran and Venezuela had cooperated since 2006 on Mohajer-series unmanned aerial vehicles, rebranded locally as Autonomous National Surveillance Unit drones. The Mohajer-6 can reach roughly 120 miles, remain airborne for about twelve hours, and carry precision-guided munitions up to 220 pounds. Venezuela has displayed these systems publicly since 2022. The point is straightforward: The same Iranian presence that hides in trafficking, laundering, and covert facilitation is now taking visible military form in the Americas.
In 2024, the United States conducted about $2.0 trillion in goods trade with the Western Hemisphere, while remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean reached roughly $161 billion. In fiscal year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection processed more than 36.6 million cargo containers. Iran does not need to control that volume. It only needs to hide inside it.
This is why the current policy is bureaucratically blind. American federal agencies still divide counternarcotics, counterterrorism, sanctions enforcement, border security, and hostile-state penetration into separate missions, separate desks, and separate legal frames. Washington keeps striking fragments and calling it pressure, but a machine built on convergence will outlive every policy built on separation.
The answer cannot be managerial. It has to be punitive. Cartel networks that facilitate Hezbollah-linked finance or logistics should be treated as terrorists, not processed as routine narcotics actors. Banks, front companies, and commercial intermediaries moving money for designated entities should face secondary sanctions, asset seizure, and criminal exposure. Security assistance to permissive jurisdictions should depend on measurable counterterror-finance results, not diplomatic etiquette and recycled talking points. The U.S. government should target cartel-proxy convergence as one hostile enterprise, because anything less means policing symptoms while the disease expands.
