A man gestures the victory sign as he holds a Hezbollah flag, on the second day of the ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed group Hezbollah, in Tyre, southern Lebanon, Nov. 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Aziz Taher

Hezbollah, the Iranian regime’s chief proxy force in the Middle East, is turning to a new pool of recruits in Latin America, moving beyond its traditional recruitment networks as it expands its regional footprint and deepens its illicit operations across the Western Hemisphere.

According to a new report by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a US-based think tank focused on Middle East policy, Lebanon-based Hezbollah is seeking to recruit convicted criminals, particularly in Brazil, by exploiting their financial hardships and resentment toward the justice system — a shift experts say could help the Iranian-backed terrorist group maintain plausible deniability and distance itself from its illicit operations.

In a joint effort with Israeli intelligence services, Brazilian authorities uncovered a Hezbollah-linked recruitment and funding network through Operation Trapiche, an anti-terrorism investigation launched in November 2023 that exposed efforts to establish clandestine operational capabilities across Latin America and expand the group’s infrastructure throughout the region.

Under Hezbollah’s emerging strategy, individuals with no prior ties to the terrorist organization are recruited in Brazil, sent to Lebanon for training, and then allegedly tasked with surveilling synagogues, Israeli diplomatic missions, and prominent Jewish community figures upon their return.

Lucas Gualtieri, a Brazilian federal prosecutor specializing in organized crime and author of the report, argues that this new strategy could help Hezbollah conceal its role in potential attacks by recruiting individuals driven by financial incentives rather than ideological allegiance, allowing the terrorist group to portray its operations as isolated criminal acts.

“The point of hiring such men is deniability — an attack executed by local ex-convicts could read as a hate crime by fringe extremists rather than an operation directed from Beirut,” Gualtieri writes in the report. “Hezbollah’s need for deniability is even stronger now that it is calibrating its exposure after three years of highly damaging operations by Israel.”

Operation Trapiche recently led Brazilian authorities to arrest Lucas Passos Lima, an alleged Hezbollah recruit, whose trip to Beirut reportedly involved weapons-handling training and the acquisition of surveillance equipment to support the group’s clandestine operations in Latin America.

Investigators revealed that Lima allegedly filmed three synagogues, a Jewish cemetery, the Israeli embassy, and a rabbi in the Brasília region after making two trips to Lebanon in 2023.

The newly released report also sheds light on the financial networks allegedly sustaining Hezbollah’s recruitment efforts, pointing to Brazilian tobacco businesses suspected of financing recruits’ trips to Beirut for training in clandestine communications, alongside the use of cryptocurrency transactions to fund these operations.

Brazilian authorities have recently charged São Paulo broker Dante Felipini with money laundering and terrorism financing, accusing him of establishing multiple digital wallets to channel funds to Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Under Brazilian law, financial gain does not preclude a terrorism charge when an individual knowingly participates in a terrorist operation — an interpretation experts say could broaden the scope of prosecutions targeting criminal networks working on behalf of foreign terror groups.

Gualtieri warns that the central challenge for regional governments is identifying Hezbollah-linked networks before they can carry out attacks, emphasizing the need for tighter financial oversight, greater scrutiny of shell companies, and closer monitoring of cryptocurrency transactions to disrupt the Islamist group’s recruitment and funding operations.

“Hezbollah’s innovation in Brazil was to buy what it used to bring: local executors, local revenue, and commercial laundering. Each purchase was meant to leave nothing traceable back to Beirut,” he writes in the report.

For years, Hezbollah’s operations in South America have been largely concentrated in Colombia and the Tri-Border Area — where Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil intersect and illicit activity has long thrived — an especially notable hotspot for organized crime across the region.