Ever since the US and Israel began their war against Iran on 28 February, attention has naturally focused on the Gulf and the wider Middle East, with some looking as far as Russia and China as Iran’s natural allies. Yet on the other side of the world, in Latin America, Iran has also had ties. Political, diplomatic, and economic, those ties are real, but their wartime value is uneven and often overstated.
Tehran has spent years cultivating links with states and governments that share a common enemy with it: the United States. Among those with an anti-American posture are Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba. With Iran being hit by waves of US-Israeli bombing, however, the nature and depth of those links have become increasingly apparent.
Are these strategic relations? Or do they mainly amount to a generalised sense of anti-imperialist solidarity? That distinction is crucial, since the language used to describe Iran’s Latin American footprint often slides quickly from ‘influence’ to ‘threat’. Some worries relate to Hezbollah-linked finance. Others rely on looser associations, old evidence, or securitised narratives that blur the lines between sympathisers, criminal networks, and centrally directed activity.
A serious analysis must resist two temptations: dismissing the issue as rhetoric or inflating it into an imminent second front. The more credible argument is narrower. Latin America offers Iran selective strategic depth, but that depth is limited, indirect, and contingent.
Forms of support
Outside the Middle East, strategic depth should not be understood in purely military terms. In Latin America, it includes diplomatic backing in international forums, sanctions-era partnerships, state-to-state channels that outlast crises, symbolic reach into Washington’s hemisphere, and permissive environments that may ease intelligence, facilitation, or financial operations. This is a wider concept than proxy warfare, but a more realistic one.
Iran’s ties in the region have been shaped less by cultural affinity than by converging political interests, above all, a shared hostility to US pressure and a search for external partners amid isolation. Studies on Iran’s relations with Venezuela and Bolivia show that these ties have shifted according to leadership, ideology, sanctions pressure, and commodity cycles, rather than following a fixed alliance logic.
This broader understanding of strategic depth also helps separate state relationships from the more contested question of Hezbollah-linked activity. Policy analysis suggests that the group’s 30-year presence in Latin America has been driven primarily by fundraising and logistics, often through networks ranging from direct sympathisers to actors with looser or more indirect ties.
It also underlines a point often lost in alarmist commentary: there is limited credible evidence that these networks are close to becoming an expansive operational attack architecture across the region. That does not make them irrelevant, but it does limit their value to resilience, finance, and facilitation.
Relations with Venezuela
If Iran has had a principal state partner in Latin America, it is Venezuela. The Caracas-Tehran relationship deepened during the eras of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and endured beyond both leaderships. This is probably Iran’s strongest regional relationship, built through state visits, trade, and security cooperation. Their ties were not the product of a natural alliance, but of converging anti-imperial postures reinforced by sanctions and political pressure.
