Israeli Official: Hezbollah Has Bases in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela

Israeli Ambassador to Costa Rica Mijal Gur-Aryeh denounced on Monday that Hezbollah and other Iranian radical groups have established bases in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Gur-Aryeh issued the warning in remarks during an online press conference with Nicaraguan journalists working in exile on the subject of Israel-Nicaraguan relations — organized by the Israeli Diplomatic Mission in Costa Rica after communist dictator Daniel Ortega recently ordered the rupture of Nicaragua’s diplomatic ties with Israel.

“I can say that there are also other countries in the region that have Iran and Hezbollah bases, and in particular Venezuela and Bolivia,” Gur-Aryeh told journalists.

The Israeli diplomat stated that her government is following Hezbollah’s presence and that “when we see that there is an opportunity to stop these terrorists, we cooperate with governments on the American continent.” 

Gur-Aryeh was asked if Israel maintains cooperation with the United States in Latin America against Hezbollah, which the diplomat responded affirmatively.

“It is very, very close … We share information,” she said, stressing that she “cannot say more than that in the media” due to the nature of the intelligence.

The Iranian regime, and its proxy terror group Hezbollah, has maintained a decades-long presence in the region that has dramatically increased in recent years under the auspices of leftist governments such as Venezuela’s socialist regime — whose dictator Nicolás Maduro publicly lamented the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, killed in an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) airstrike in late September.

Bolivia, led by socialist and pro-Iran President Luis Arce, has been widely denounced by experts as the Islamic regime’s “most successful project” in spreading its influence in the region. Arce’s government has signed several agreements with the Iranian regime, including a deal for the purchase of Iranian-made drones and a highly controversial “memorandum of understanding reportedly on defense and security” whose contents have not been publicly disclosed.

Bolivia is among the leftist-led Latin American nations that broke ties with Israel in response to the start of its self-defense operations against the jihadist terror group Hamas.

While Ambassador Gur-Aryeh did not disclose specific details to the Nicaraguan journalists, she listed Hezbollah’s terrorist attacks against Israeli targets in Argentina as an example, and asserted that the Israeli government “clearly knows that they were handled inside the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires.”

The Argentine government believes Iran, via Hezbollah, is responsible for the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) — the deadliest terrorist attack in the Western Hemisphere prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“We have this information about attacks in the past and I can only say that we are following the situation now as well,” Gur-Aryeh said.

Similarly, the ambassador assured that there is cooperation “all over the world … unfortunately, very close cooperation between terrorist organizations and organized crime.”

“They cooperate very fluidly. In fact, you don’t generally know when organized crime ends and when terrorism begins, because many of these terrorist groups are very, very involved in organized crime,” she asserted.

The Bolivian government rejected Gur-Aryeh’s “irresponsible statements” in a note issued by its Foreign Ministry on Tuesday, in which it claimed that “Bolivia is a pacifist state that promotes the culture of peace, which is why it has constitutionally assumed the prohibition of installing foreign military bases in its territory.”

“Unsubstantiated statements such as the one issued by the Israeli diplomat, seek to generate confrontation between Latin American states, governments and peoples, contrary to the objective outlined in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) to consolidate Latin America and the Caribbean as a zone of peace,” the statement read.

“The Plurinational State of Bolivia calls upon the brotherly Latin American countries not to fall into these provocations that seek to affect the brotherly relations between states and peoples of the region,” it continued.

Prior to Monday’s press conference, the Ortega regime released a statement condemning other comments made last week by the Israeli Ambassador and Consul Amir Rockman, who accused the communist regime of allowing Iranian-linked terror groups to freely operate in Nicaragua and of turning the country into a “platform for terrorism in the region.”

“Israeli officials claim that in Nicaragua there is now a terrorist base being used as a platform for terrorism in the region. In this regard, Nicaragua rejects such statements, which are aimed at diverting attention from the genocide being carried out by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories,” the statement reportedly read.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.