For decades, U.S. and Israeli officials and analysts have warned that Iran maintains a network of terrorist sleeper cells throughout Latin America, ready to attack Western interests at a moment’s notice. So where are they?
With Iran embroiled in a major and potentially existential conflict with the United States and Israel, it would seem an ideal time to activate such a network — if it existed. But the utter lack of recent action by Iran or its proxy group Hezbollah in Latin America highlights how disconnected these claims are from reality.
Decades of disinformation
Concerns about Iran’s activities in Latin America stretch back to the early 1990s, when U.S., Israeli and Argentine authorities blamed the Iran-backed, Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah for a pair of bombings in Buenos Aires.
The first bombing, in 1992, targeted the Israeli embassy in Argentina’s capital, killing 29 people and injuring 250 others. The second bombing, in 1994, targeted the headquarters of a Jewish community organization known as AMIA, killing 85 people and injuring more than 200 others.
In both cases, the evidence of Iranian and Hezbollah involvement was largely circumstantial. The 1992 bombing allegedly came as retaliation for Israel’s assassination of a Hezbollah leader named Abbas Musawi, and the 1994 bombing purportedly responded to Israel’s bombing of a Hezbollah training camp.
Compelling alternative theories suggested that agents of the Syrian government or Argentine neo-Nazis may have carried out the attacks. But American and Israeli authorities helped their Argentine counterparts build up the Iran theory, even though some officials acknowledged in diplomatic cables that the evidence was thin and the Argentine investigation shoddy.
Painting Iran as a rogue nation sponsoring terrorist attacks in the U.S. backyard bolstered arguments in favor of aggressively constraining the country’s military ambitions and nuclear program to ensure the United States and Israel could maintain the advantage against one of their primary global adversaries.
Politicizing the narrative
The use of the AMIA bombing to paint Iran and Hezbollah as security threats in Latin America continued into the 2000s as the United States responded to the 9/11 attacks by invading Iran’s neighbors, Iraq and Afghanistan, and generally increasing its focus on national security threats emanating from the Middle East.
The international law enforcement organization Interpol issued “red notices” in 2003 targeting Iranian officials allegedly involved in planning the AMIA attack, and when those notices were rescinded in 2005 due to concerns about Argentina’s investigation, U.S. diplomats pressed partner countries hard behind closed doors to have them reinstated by early 2007. The notices remain in effect, except for one against Imad Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah leader who died in a 2008 car bombing in Syria.
When Barack Obama assumed the U.S. presidency in 2009 and began seeking a deal with Iran regarding its nuclear activities, the executive branch largely stopped using the AMIA attack as a cudgel. But political actors and organizations opposed to rapprochement with Iran took up the mantle.
An illustrative example came in 2013, when the State Department concluded that Hezbollah had no operational presence in Latin America. Weeks later, Iran hawks in Congress held a hearing to counter that message by featuring an analyst from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Matthew Levitt, who testified that Iran did, in fact, maintain a network of operatives "tasked with sponsoring and executing terrorist attacks in the Western Hemisphere.”
Another key figure in promoting that narrative, Joseph Humire, now holds a high-level policy post in the Pentagon. In his previous career as the head of a think tank called the Center for a Secure Free Society, Humire authored several articles about Iran and Hezbollah’s purported operations in Latin America, including a 2020 report that claimed Hezbollah was helping keep former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in power. However, Humire’s credibility suffered a blow when it was revealed last year that he oversaw the publication of fake news about the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua while serving as the think tank’s director.
The reality of the threat
Notably, there has not been a single actual terrorist attack attributed to Iran or Hezbollah in Latin America since the AMIA bombing. Still, despite the almost total lack of evidence, the notion that Iran maintains a network of terrorist sleeper cells in the region has persisted.
The issue grew in prominence in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas against Israel. Weeks after the attacks, as Israel mounted an extremely aggressive military response, Brazilian authorities arrested two men suspected of working with Hezbollah to plan strikes against Jewish targets, including synagogues, in the capital Brasilia.
Prominent U.S. think tanks, including the Wilson Center and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, seized on the news of the foiled terror plans as support for their warnings about the threat posed by Iran close to home. But Brazilian authorities bristled at the suggestion the plot indicated a wider problem that they could not handle. The investigation led to the conviction of one of the suspects and a broader probe into Hezbollah financing operations in Brazil, but authorities uncovered no further plans for other attacks.
Claims of Iran and Hezbollah presence in Latin America continued to resurface in the buildup to the current conflict with Iran. In March 2025, weeks before U.S. President Donald Trump ordered military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, lawmakers from both parties introduced legislation seeking to require federal agencies to more aggressively counter the purported Hezbollah threat in Latin America.
The RAND Corporation put out a report around the same time inaccurately claiming that “academic literature and government reports almost universally indicate that Hezbollah's activities in the region pose potential threats to U.S. national security.”
The vocal pronouncements about the supposed threat of Iran and Hezbollah in the hemisphere belied the reality that their activities in the region amount to little more than a fundraising operation, as the most recent State Department report on global terrorism, from 2023, makes clear.
The purported terrorist sleeper cells were not activated in response to the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, and they have not been activated amid the current conflict with Iran. The lack of retaliatory attacks underscores that claims about the danger posed by Iran and Hezbollah in Latin America rest on a shaky foundation.
Inflating the threat posed by Iran and Hezbollah distracts from the actual threats in the region, which are mostly related to “homegrown” armed actors like gangs and guerrilla groups. Addressing genuine risks is essential, but exaggerating and misrepresenting threats ultimately undermines sound policy and does little to enhance security.