Hamas’s Footprint in Latin America

The Islamic Republic of Iran has methodically built a Hamas foothold across Latin America, extending its “Axis of Resistance” deep into the Western Hemisphere. Paraguayan counterterrorism forces first confirmed this forward deployment in November 2000 by arresting Salah Abdul Karim Yassine in Encarnación. Yassine—a relative of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin—was directly linked to bomb threats against the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Asunción. Shielded by fraudulent Argentinian and Paraguayan documents, he had previously operated within the lawless Triple Border region around the time of the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. His arrest provided early, undeniable proof that Hamas viewed the region not as a distant fundraising zone, but as live operational terrain.

This infrastructure has since matured from localized cells into state-level collusion, anchored in Caracas. In 2006, Venezuelan Vice President José Vicente Rangel publicly declared that Caracas would welcome Hamas leaders “with pleasure”—a rhetorical pledge that successive Chávez and Maduro regimes transformed into institutional protection. By May 2020, the depth of this alliance became clear when U.S. prosecutors charged former Venezuelan National Assembly member Adel El Zabayar with narco-terrorism, exposing a 2014 presidential-palace meeting organized to connect FARC commanders with senior leaders from both Hamas and Hezbollah. El Zabayar allegedly procured rocket-propelled grenades, AK-103 rifles, and sniper weapons from the Middle East for the former Nicolás Maduro-led “Cartel de los Soles.” Beyond arms trafficking, Venezuelan authorities systematically issued state passports to Middle Eastern operatives, turning political solidarity into global mobility. As Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned Paraguay’s Congress in November 2025, Venezuela remains the primary South American nexus for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Where state protection ends, sophisticated financial pipelines and criminal alliances begin. In 2024, Brazilian investigators mapped a network of Palestinian doleiros (informal money changers) operating along the Chuí-Chuy border with Uruguay. These agents routed capital directly to the Palestinian territories by plugging into Brazil’s most powerful prison gang, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). Law enforcement has scrambled to disrupt these nodes. In June 2024, acting on a U.S. intelligence alert identifying Palestinian national Muslim Abuumar as a Hamas operative, Brazilian federal police deported him and his family—a removal swiftly upheld by a São Paulo federal judge. Months later, Italian investigators uncovered an identical financial architecture, tying a short-lived, Bahía-based front company named Infopal to a broader European Hamas financing network. Ultimately, these illicit corridors seamlessly move the millions that regulated global banks would immediately block.

Regional diaspora structures further insulate these financial pipelines. Chile hosts roughly 500,000 people of Palestinian descent—the largest community outside the Middle East. While mainstream diaspora organizations have explicitly condemned the October 7 attacks and recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as their sole legitimate representative, the sheer scale of these commercial and solidarity networks creates vulnerabilities. Sophisticated actors continuously exploit these dense networks, using hawala mechanisms and legitimate front companies to divert funds clandestinely.

Faced with this creeping threat, a regional counter-coalition is finally fighting back. In July 2024, Argentina became the first Latin American state to officially designate Hamas a terrorist organization. President Javier Milei’s office explicitly tied the designation to the October 7 atrocities, Hamas’s subordination to Iran, and Tehran’s historical role in the 1992 embassy and 1994 AMIA bombings, triggering immediate asset freezes. Momentum built in May 2026 when Honduras blacklisted both Hamas and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). By June 2026, Costa Rican intelligence and migration units intercepted Palestinian national Abuawad in Alajuela province, detaining him for immediate deportation following a tip from U.S. Homeland Security Investigations regarding his Hamas ties.

Collectively, these defensive measures expose a deliberate, decades-long Iranian campaign to project hostile proxy power just south of the United States. The division of labor is highly efficient: Caracas provides sovereign protection and authentic travel documents; Brazilian and Triple Border gangs move the capital; and sprawling diaspora structures inadvertently yield the necessary cover.

To shatter this axis, Washington and Jerusalem must move past passive monitoring and deploy a coordinated, asymmetric strategy. First, Washington should immediately declare any Venezuelan passport issued after 2014 to a non-Venezuelan as presumptively invalid for U.S. visas or entry whenever the holder matches Hamas-related financial or travel intelligence, forcing Caracas to bear the diplomatic and financial costs of its illicit passport racket. Furthermore, Jerusalem should grant Argentina, Paraguay, Costa Rica, and Ecuador real-time access to a joint Israeli-U.S. database that cross-references Triple Border trade invoices against known Hamas-linked hawala signatures, providing regional partners with an advanced interdiction capability they cannot build independently. Finally, Washington and Jerusalem must jointly fund, equip, and embed a permanent “Hawala Interdiction Cell” directly within Paraguay’s financial intelligence unit in Ciudad del Este. Staffed by a U.S. Treasury attaché, an Israeli financial intelligence specialist, and two local analysts with full access to Brazilian and Argentine customs data, this cell would map and freeze the specific invoice and informal transfer patterns already established by the Chuí-Chuy doleiros, transforming the Triple Border from a permissive playground into a sealed choke point.

Hamas does not need a geographic sanctuary in Gaza to threaten American hemispheric security; it only needs the financial and documentary pathways that Latin America has carelessly left open. By treating this southern front as a distant echo rather than an active threat, Washington and Jerusalem are effectively subsidizing the next major failure of Western intelligence.