Latin America Cocaine Ledger Shows Hezbollah’s Quiet Hunt for Cash

Reporting by The New York Sun and journalist Hollie McKay traces how Hezbollah survives sanctions by leaning on Latin America’s cocaine routes, Venezuela’s passports, and quiet money transfers, after December 2024 shattered Syria’s Captagon economy, from Lebanon to Brazil storefronts.

Deniability as a Business Model

At a remittance counter in São Paulo, the conversation is about rent, school fees, and the next grocery bill. Cash moves with urgency. That ordinariness is camouflage: the same channels that keep families standing can carry money meant to keep wars going.

In reporting and interviews gathered by Hollie McKay for The New York Sun, Hezbollah is cast as a hybrid criminal‑terrorist enterprise built on income that travels. Cocaine linked to Latin America, Captagon once mass‑produced in Syria, and laundering routes spanning four continents are described as generating billions of dollars annually. The proceeds bankroll precision‑guided missiles, pay fighters, sustain a social‑welfare empire inside Lebanon, and keep overseas cells active from Buenos Aires to Bangkok.

The urgency now is scarcity. With Iran battered by sanctions, the Assad regime collapsed, and Lebanese authorities cracking down on smuggling clans that once operated under protection, narco‑dollars shift from useful to existential. David Daoud, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The New York Sun that the group is strapped for cash and will go wherever the money is easiest. He stressed that open sources rarely show a clean, direct link because the group stays insulated, letting others touch the product while it collects cash and plausible deniability.

Researchers in Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict & Terrorism describe this outsourcing as a shield that blurs accountability for investigators.

Diaspora Networks, Repurposed

The hemisphere’s role begins with migration, not trafficking. Decades ago, Lebanese Shiites fleeing civil war built trading houses, charities, and remittance routes—legitimate bridges between the Americas and Lebanon. According to the report, by the early 2000s those same diaspora channels were being leveraged to facilitate cocaine trafficking and launder proceeds. The intimacy that makes a community resilient can also make it vulnerable, because trust is the first infrastructure criminal networks exploit.

The mechanics are brutally pragmatic. Cartels cultivate, cut, and move cocaine; Hezbollah supplies protection, forged documents, or secure transit corridors in exchange for a percentage, usually paid in cash meant to be hard to trace. Laundering becomes a performance of normality—money disguised as trade, family support, or routine business. Research discussed in the Journal of Money Laundering Control notes how ordinary‑looking transactions and “clean” intermediaries can keep beneficiaries blurred, even when the transfer itself looks innocent.

Venezuela After Captagon, the Trail Bends West

No country sits more uneasily at the center of this account than Venezuela. The Maduro regime is accused of issuing genuine Venezuelan passports to operatives, granting landing rights to Mahan Air—described as an IRGC front—and disregarding “narco‑flights” departing Simón Bolívar International Airport. A disrupted attempt in January 2025, involving several tons of Colombian cocaine allegedly meant to be traded for illicit arms, is presented as a rare moment when a largely hidden system briefly surfaced.

Caroline Rose, director of military and national security priorities at the New Lines Institute, told The New York Sun that Hezbollah‑linked networks are seeking to ramp up illicit operations to reduce dependence on Iran and generate alternative revenue streams. She pointed to likely hubs in Latin America and West Africa, where ties to Iran through countries like Venezuela, diaspora strength in Brazil, Argentina, and Côte d’Ivoire, and conditions conducive to criminality enable collaboration.

The other hinge broke in Syria, where Captagon once functioned as a state‑protected money machine. Under Bashar al‑Assad, the country became the world’s largest producer of the amphetamine pill, churning out tens of millions monthly. Rose said Hezbollah coordinated with the regime’s Fourth Armored Division, commanded by Maher al‑Assad, shaping routes, ports, and laboratories along the Lebanese–Syrian border. After the regime fell in December 2024, new authorities demolished labs, arrested producers, and sealed routes, squeezing the revenue that once seemed untouchable. Rose said regime figures such as Wassim Badia Al-Assad were given safe harbor in Hezbollah‑controlled areas, even as the trade shrank.

Inside Lebanon, Rose described raids against Hezbollah‑protected syndicates and smuggling clans like the Zeaiters, with arrests and killings that signal a shift in impunity. She warned that Western countermeasures often fixate on the Middle East, rather than mapping partnerships linking Hezbollah to cartel and mafia partners in Europe, Latin America, and West Africa.

For Latin America, the caution is not that every remittance is suspect. It is that cash‑heavy marketplaces—from the coca economy of Colombia to the bazaars around the Triple Frontier, where Ciudad del Este sits in the shadow of borders—can become someone else’s quiet treasury. The task is to follow networks without turning diaspora life into collateral damage, and to protect the everyday economies that keep families breathing.

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