Venezuela is an attractive way-station for Islamist groups, which have a quiet but longstanding and profitable presence there. It is a historically significant fund-raising and organizational base, and the U.S. Southern Command estimates that “Islamist terrorist groups raise between three hundred million and five hundred million dollars per year in the Triple Frontier and the duty-free zones of Iquique, Colon, Maicao, and Margarita Island, Venezuela.”²  The basic model is said to be a simple “pay to play” system, in which Lebanese Shi’a merchants are persuaded by Hezbollah agents and financiers, through varying degrees of coercion, to “tithe” to Hezbollah.³

As in most of Latin America, Hezbollah, Iran’s chief terrorist proxy, is the primary Islamist force in Venezuela. Capitalizing on the network of enterprising Lebanese Shi’a merchants throughout the larger cities, it uses the South American country for fundraising and various forms of money-laundering, smuggling, and fraud. Apart from illicit financial business, however, there have been few overt signs of Hezbollah activity in Venezuela—save for the occasional Hezbollah propaganda that has periodically surfaced on the Internet or airwaves.⁴ 

While an acknowledged threat-finance concern, because there are no reports of organized al-Qaeda presence or activity, Venezuela is “off the map” for operations-based counterterrorism watchers. The country’s Muslim population remains small. According to the U.S. State Department’s 2007 International Religious Freedom Report, there were approximately 100,000 Muslims in Venezuela, forming 0.4 percent of the nation's population.⁵  While Margarita Island’s Muslim population is almost entirely Lebanese Shi’a, there are Sunni Muslims elsewhere in the country, and Caracas has a largely Sunni population of 15,000 which is served by the largest mosque in Latin America, built by the Saudis as a sister mosque to the Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Ibrahim mosque in Gibraltar.⁶  There are other mosques in major cities of Maracaibo, Valencia, Vargas, Punto Fijo, and Bolivar. Local cable television outlets in Margarita carry al-Jazeera and the Lebanese Hezbollah outlet LBC, while on the mainland the Saudi Channel is available via satellite as well.⁷

The picture of Islamism and society in Venezuela resembles that of much of Latin America. This is to say that while there is a vague anti-globalist sense that pervades society, actual friendship with Islamist aims is at the political and not the social level.⁸  While the Latin American left at times can sound Islamist in its politics and its understanding of who the “enemy” is, there appears to be no sizeable conversion to Islam taking place in Venezuela—or, indeed, in the region. To the contrary, in the past 150 years of immigration from the Middle East to the New World, the opposite trend has held sway. A large number of prominent turcos (immigrants and their descendants from the Middle East) originally were Muslim, but have been genuine conversos (converts to Christianity) for generations. Thus, the presence in Caracas of the largest mosque in the New World reflects Venezuela’s cosmopolitan self-image more than it serves as evidence of an Islamist trajectory. Finally, as in most of Latin America, birth rates among Venezuelan Muslims, who tend to be considerably wealthier than the population at large, are equal to or lower than the modal birth-rate of the population. New Muslim immigration, meanwhile, is understood to be minimal (although detailed statistics are hard to come by). The picture of Islamism in Venezuela, therefore, is decidedly a still-frame.

Ever since Hugo Chavez took his first trip to Iran in 2001, upgraded relations with the Islamic Republic have become a cardinal tenet of Venezuelan foreign policy.⁹  In October 2010, Chavez announced an initial study of a nuclear capacity for his country, a move analysts believe could be largely one of cover for Iran’s program which Venezuela has been supporting for several years.¹⁰

In November 2008, Iranian and Venezuelan officials signed a secret "science and technology" agreement formalizing cooperation "in the field of nuclear technology."¹¹  As part of that outreach, Iranian Minister of Science, Research and Technology Mohammad-Mehdi Zahedi led a delegation to hold talks with Venezuelan high-ranking officials in Caracas. The delegation visited the Venezuelan Foundation for Seismological Research, Caracas Central University, the Simon Bolivar University, and the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research.¹²  During the visit, Chavez promised to provide the Islamic Republic with 20,000 barrels of petrol a day, despite the sanctions on Iran’s economy being contemplated by much of the responsible world and in spite of Venezuela’s own problems in supplying its domestic markets with fuel.¹³ 

A whirlwind visit to Iran by Chavez in September 2009 yielded a new deal on nuclear cooperation.¹⁴  The agreement was the most recent addition to a rapidly growing list of bilateral pacts between Caracas and Tehran. The mutual benefits of such cooperation are undeniable: helping Venezuela develop its oil industry could ensure an important source of supply for Iran, which lacks refinery capacity despite being a major oil producer. And, at least on paper, many of these projects appear benign. Upon closer inspection, however, the commercial links between Venezuela and Iran provide reason for considerable concern. An example is the Venezuelan-Iranian joint venture tractor company “VenIran.” Ostensibly founded so that poor Venezuelan farmers could take advantage of Iranian technological advances, the firm has in fact been implicated in the supply of bomb-making materials. In 2008, Turkish customs inspectors intercepted, in containers bound for Venezuela and labeled "tractor parts," a bomb-making lab and all the nitrate and sulfite chemicals that needed to stock it.¹⁵  Other joint ventures in oil exploration, petrochemicals, steel and auto manufacturing are under ever-increasing scrutiny.

It is clear that Iran sees its Venezuelan connection as an important means to render international sanctions impotent. The joint ventures erected between Caracas and Tehran, and the purchase of Venezuelan enterprises, allow Iran to do business with U.S. companies and even within the United States itself. Because of the direct connection between Caracas and Tehran, efforts to contain trade with Iran are futile without cutting off the billions of dollars of legitimate U.S. trade with Venezuela, according to Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morganthau.¹⁶  These ties, moreover, are expanding; in April 2009, the two countries launched a bi-national bank with $200 million of initial capital—with each country contributing half—and a final goal of $1.2 billion.¹⁷  The bank is supposed to finance projects of mutual benefit to the two countries. Based in Venezuela, it will offer a convenient channel for Iran to sidestep U.S.-led sanctions along with the several branches of Iran’s Saderat Bank already open there.¹⁸

Although the greatest fears of the Iranian-Venezuelan relationship relate to Iran’s looming nuclear weapons capability, the strategic partnership between Tehran and Caracas runs deeper. Since Iran’s fraudulent June 2009 elections, Chavez has taken pains to express his affinity for the Iranian regime. He has offered “total solidarity” to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, equating attacks on him as an assault by “global capitalism,"¹⁹  and condoned the brutal tactics of Iran’s domestic militia, the basij, in their crackdown on opposition protesters.²⁰  Iran has reciprocated these friendly feelings. When he decorated Hugo Chávez with the Higher Medal of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2008, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Chávez “my brother… a friend of the Iranian nation and the people seeking freedom around the world. He works perpetually against the dominant system. He is a worker of God and servant of the people."²¹

What all this may mean, in the longer term, may best be considered in light of the curious 2006 case of the rise—and apparent fall—of a group advertising itself as “Hezbollah in Venezuela.” Though it was largely eclipsed in the news media by the U.S. 2006 mid-term elections, Hezbollah en América Latina’s failed attempt in October 2006 to bomb the U.S. (and perhaps Israeli) embassy in Caracas was a significant event. The group, based within the country’s Wayuu Indian population, boasts of activity in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador and Mexico on their website,²²  which is written in Spanish and Chapateka (a combination of the Wayuu language and Spanish). However, the backbone of the organization is located in Venezuela on the western border with Colombia. The members of this group are locals and not Muslim in origin despite their tenuous claim to be Shi’ite supporters of Hezbollah and Iran.²³

In its manifesto, the organization asserted that Venezuelan society, with its interest in sex, money, industry and commerce, has become a "swamp of immorality and corruption."²⁴  In response, it claimed that political movements and parties cannot provide an answer to these problems because they are also part of the problem. Thus, only "a theocratic, Political-Islamic force can liberate society from this situation."²⁵  Hezbollah Latin America "respect[ed] the Venezuelan revolutionary process, and support[ed] its social policies as well as its anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism," even as it rejected socialism in favor of an Islamic order. Tellingly, the group urged everyone to vote for and support Chavez.²⁶

It is not coincidental that this phenomenon occurred at precisely the moment when Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad became close allies. It does, however, point to an alarming possibility: that Hezbollah and radical Islamist groups need not import Islamists from the Muslim world to Latin America. Rather, they can be "home-grown" in the region, because the social and emotional conditions provide fertile ground. Furthermore, this new available human capital does not need previous connection to Islam; it can be converted to Islam, because Islamism is not merely a religion but also a political movement.

This principle helps explain the near-perfect symbiosis of the “Bolivarian” Revolution promoted by Chavez with the aims of Hezbollah: “Hezbollah Latin America respects the Venezuelan revolutionary process and supports the policies of this process that have to do with social benefits for the poor, as well as the anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist policies of the revolution. It does not, however, support the socialist ideology. This is not because we are opposed to it but because we are theocrats and we obey a divine prerogative.”²⁷

While the incident could easily have been a one-off propaganda campaign, it will be important to watch, over the longer term, for this sort of cultural and ideological solidarity at the popular level between the traditional leftist, anti-globalist, and anti-Semitic forces of nominally Catholic Venezuela with the radical Islamists of the Middle East.