We’ll Soon Find Out If Iran Really Poses a Threat in Latin America
For over three decades, at every moment of geopolitical tension involving Iran, some analysts of Latin American security have raised the question of whether the region will feel the fallout in the form of terrorist attacks. Those warnings were already brought to mind after Israel launched its air attacks against Iran 10 days ago. They have taken on added urgency now that the U.S. joined that campaign in what the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump claims—and hopes—will be a one-off bombardment of Iran’s harder-to-reach nuclear facilities this weekend.
Iran’s connections to two deadly bombings targeting the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish community center in Argentina in the 1990s demonstrated an ability to strike globally with its proxies. If those capabilities still exist, now would seem to be the kind of moment for Iranian proxies to lash out. On one hand, Latin American authorities should be prepared for whatever threats they can identify. On the other hand, if no attacks occur, this may be the moment to rethink the plausibility of the Iranian threat in the Western Hemisphere altogether.
In 1992, a suicide bomber drove a pickup truck full of explosives into the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and wounding over 200. Two years later, attackers drove a van full of explosives into the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina, or AMIA, killing 85 and injuring over 300. An Iranian-linked group called the Islamic Jihad Organization took credit for the first attack, and investigators have long believed that Hezbollah conducted the 1994 attack at the direction of the Iranian government. One day after the AMIA bombing in 1994, a plane crash in Panama killed 21 people in what authorities believe—but have never proven—was likely a third bombing attack linked to Iran.
The investigations into those bombings have been complicated, but the general consensus is that Iran was in some way behind all three. After 1994, however, the situation becomes less clear. There have been zero successful terrorist attacks in Latin America linked to Iran in the past 30 years. Occam’s Razor would suggest this demonstrates that the issue is no longer particularly relevant.
On the other side of the debate, analysts point to numerous events that suggest close calls and continued Iranian interest in building up capabilities to conduct attacks in the Western Hemisphere. In 2014, Peruvian authorities detained a man linked to Hezbollah who they claimed was scouting targets min the country. In 2016, Bolivian authorities claimed they seized explosives from a warehouse that was tied to Hezbollah’s financial networks. In November 2023, Brazilian authorities say they disrupted an Iranian-linked plot to bomb Jewish synagogues and Israeli diplomatic missions in the country. Those incidents are on top of well-documented reports of Iranian-backed proxies engaging in the illicit trafficking of weapons and drugs, as well as money laundering, around the region. This cooperation with organized crime is not the same thing as the terrorism that the region fears, but it demonstrates an Iranian presence and cooperation with transnational criminals.
The current conflict between Israel and Iran should put to the test all the threat analyses about Iran’s presence in the Western Hemisphere that have been written over the past several decades.
Then there are Iran’s official ties with the region’s authoritarian governments, particularly Venezuela. In addition to assistance in evading the global sanctions that the U.S. has placed on both countries’ oil industries, Iran’s formal cooperation agreements with Venezuela have included military assistance, weapons sales and the joint manufacturing of armed drones. Analysts who want to find threats have plenty of reasons for concern there. But here, too, there is not actually any record of those weapons being used for operations against Israeli or Jewish targets. In light of this, these deals can also be viewed as vehicles for corrupt networks in both countries to enrich themselves, while providing the Venezuelan military with new toys to keep it happy, since disgruntled security forces could pose a real threat to the regime in Caracas.
Perhaps the strangest incident occurred in 2011, when an Iranian agent connected to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, flew to Mexico and attempted to pay the Zetas drug cartel over $1 million to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. There is no indication that the Zetas considered accepting the offer, which would have resulted in significant U.S. retribution had the plan been carried out. In any case, the plot was disrupted when an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency was tipped off, after which Mexican authorities assisted the U.S. in detaining the IRGC agent.
In other words, despite a long list of alleged plots, connections and hypothetical threats, there has not been a single successful attack in Latin America linked to Iran since 1994. Is that a reflection of luck and/or skill on the part of the region’s governments that are trying to stop these plots? Have analysts eager to find a link that isn’t there overhyped plots that are in fact not very serious to begin with? Or has Iran kept its powder dry for a critical moment in which it faced a threat it needed to deter?
Here it’s important to take note of the political economy of policy analysis in Washington, where discussing Latin America’s very real security threats often elicits yawns. By contrast, finding some way to tie those security threats to China or Iran attracts eyeballs—and funding. Unfortunately, as a result of that dynamic, reports detailing the Iranian threat to the region get written, whether that threat is real or a mirage.
In theory, the current conflict between Israel and Iran should put to the test all the threat analyses about Iran’s presence in the Western Hemisphere that have been written over the past several decades, as this is the exact scenario in which analysts have predicted that Iran’s partners and proxies would act. The fear of just such an attack by these proxies is supposed to serve as a form of deterrence for Iran. Now that Israel is directly destroying targets across Iran, Tehran must demonstrate that its deterrence capabilities are real or risk being seen as a paper tiger that can easily fall.
In the short term, governments across the Western Hemisphere should prepare for the worst and be vigilant against threats. But at some point in the coming weeks and months, if no threat emerges, it is time to reassess whether the threat is still real, if it ever was. After all, the region has plenty of other security threats and non-security priorities worth spending time, attention and resources on.
James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a firm that does political risk analysis and bespoke research in emerging and frontier markets, as well as a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Latin America Program. He has two decades of experience analyzing politics, economics and security in Latin America and the Caribbean.