Iran’s Influence Campaign Expands Across Latin America

Iran’s Quiet Influence Campaign in Latin America Poses Strategic Challenge

American intelligence and security officials searching for Iranian activity in Latin America may be looking in the wrong places, according to regional experts. While Washington focuses on visible indicators like sanctions evasion and criminal networks, Tehran has methodically built a far more durable infrastructure of influence across the region that dates back decades.

Since the 1980s, Iran has strategically exported its revolutionary ideology to Latin America through carefully constructed networks that embed Tehran within the hemisphere’s political landscape. This effort accelerated dramatically in the early 2000s when Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad deepened cooperation, with Venezuela providing critical financial and logistical channels that helped Iran circumvent international sanctions.

“Iran has embedded itself in the political ecosystem—building access, narratives, and pre-positioning leverage in the United States’ traditional strategic rear,” notes one regional security assessment. This approach represents a fundamental shift from episodic engagement to permanent entrenchment.

At the center of Iran’s strategy is an extensive religious and cultural network. The United States Southern Command has identified more than 80 Iranian religious centers across Latin America—a disproportionate presence given the region’s relatively small Muslim population of less than 5 million among nearly 700 million inhabitants. These religious outposts span multiple countries including Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Cuba, and Costa Rica.

The 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people, provides a troubling case study. Mohsen Rabbani, an Iranian cleric who arrived in Argentina in 1983, served as imam at Buenos Aires’ Al-Tawhid mosque while building religious and cultural networks connected to Tehran. After allegedly masterminding the 1994 attack, Rabbani escaped to Iran but continued his Latin American outreach from Qom, Iran’s clerical center.

Iran’s religious outreach has proven particularly effective in creating conversion networks. In Abancay, Peru, reports indicate a Shi’a center has converted approximately 100 locals, some of whom later traveled to Iran for religious training. This pattern creates self-sustaining ideological pipelines that allow Tehran’s influence to reproduce itself throughout the region.

Complementing these religious networks is a parallel institutional infrastructure. By 2012, at least 36 Iranian-linked cultural centers operated across 17 Latin American countries. Today, that number has grown to approximately 80 centers spanning the hemisphere. Iran has also opened six new regional embassies in the past two decades, which experts say function as bridges between cultural diplomacy and the activities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Education plays a crucial role in this system. Al-Mustafa International University—an Iranian-funded educational organization sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2020—claims presence in more than 50 countries, including three in Latin America. The institution has trained tens of thousands of foreign students to promote Iranian ideology worldwide. U.S. officials have identified the university as a platform potentially supporting recruitment and intelligence operations linked to Iran’s Qods Force.

Financial networks further strengthen Iran’s position. U.S. authorities estimate that Hezbollah-linked criminal networks in Latin America generate up to $200 million annually through narcotics trafficking, smuggling, and money laundering—particularly in the Tri-Border Area where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet, a region where illicit activity reportedly exceeds $5 billion each year.

Iran has also developed sophisticated information operations targeting the region. HispanTV, Tehran’s Spanish-language state network, reaches nearly 600 million Spanish speakers and maintains a cross-platform audience exceeding 250,000 followers. Rather than simple propaganda, the network normalizes Iranian perspectives, amplifies anti-Israel narratives, promotes conspiracy theories, and cultivates ideological sympathy among regional political movements.

Unlike traditional soft power approaches that prioritize visibility and immediate impact, Iran’s strategy emphasizes embedded continuity—focusing on intermediaries rather than mass audiences, structure over visibility, and persistence over immediate results. Latin America provides fertile ground for this approach due to uneven oversight of foreign-funded institutions and receptivity to anti-U.S. narratives in certain countries.

Security experts warn that by the time Washington fully recognizes the extent of the threat, Iran’s infrastructure will already be deeply entrenched, normalized within local communities, and significantly harder to counteract—leaving the United States to confront a strategic challenge in its own hemisphere that Tehran has been methodically constructing for decades.