In December 2012, Paraguayan authorities detained Wassim el Abd Fadel, a suspected Hezbollah member with Paraguayan citizenship, and charged him with human trafficking, money laundering, and narco-trafficking.
International authorities had connected Fadel to Nelida Raquel Cardozo Taboada, a Paraguayan national arrested in France the same month with 1.1 kilograms of cocaine concealed in her stomach. Cardozo Taboada claimed that Fadel and his wife hired her as a drug mule, prompting an INTERPOL investigation into Fadel’s finances.
According to Paraguayan police, Fadel deposited the proceeds of drug trafficking and pirated media sales into Turkish and Syrian bank accounts linked to Hezbollah.
The Fadel arrest drew new international attention to a long-running phenomenon. Over the past decade, policymakers have expressed growing concern over Hezbollah’s activities in Latin America, especially its connections with drug cartels along the U.S.–Mexico border, and its efforts to fundraise, recruit operatives, and launder money.
Hezbollah maintains a support network in the region—drawn largely from the Shi’a and Lebanese expatriate communities—to serve as logisticians in its criminal operations.
Today, with dwindling financial support from its traditional state backers in Iran and Syria, Hezbollah increasingly relies on criminal enterprises such as counterfeiting, arms trafficking, and narcotics smuggling to sustain its financial reserves and stock its arsenals.
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/3042Matthew Levitt is director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God
