Venezuela: When A Failed State Becomes A Terror Conduit

For years, Venezuela’s collapse was misdiagnosed as an ideological experiment gone wrong or an economic tragedy caused by sanctions. That framing was convenient - and dangerously incomplete. What unfolded under Hugo Chávez and later Nicolás Maduro was not merely state failure. It was the deliberate conversion of a sovereign nation into a permissive hub for transnational crime, narco-terrorism, and Islamist extremist networks aligned with Iran.

This was not accidental. It was strategic.

Long before Venezuela’s economy imploded, its institutions had already been dismantled. Chávez hollowed out the judiciary, politicised the military, and fused party loyalty with state power. Maduro inherited a system designed not to govern, but to protect a ruling elite at any cost. In that vacuum, illicit actors flourished - drug cartels, money launderers, and eventually, Islamist terror-linked organisations.

The most documented presence belongs to Hezbollah -it Iran’s most powerful proxy. Multiple U.S. Treasury designations and intelligence assessments have confirmed Hezbollah’s long-standing operations across Latin America, with Venezuela as a key node. The group leveraged Venezuela’s lax border controls, compromised passport system, and state-run enterprises to move funds, personnel, and illicit goods.

In 2017, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami for facilitating drug trafficking and maintaining ties with Hezbollah operatives. El Aissami was accused of issuing Venezuelan passports and identity documents to Middle Eastern individuals linked to extremist groups - an extraordinary breach of national security that no functioning state would tolerate. This was not the work of rogue officials; it reflected systemic complicity.

Caracas was not merely a haven - it was an enabler.

Iran’s role in this network cannot be ignored. Over two decades, Iran and Venezuela developed a strategic alliance masked as South-South cooperation. Flights operated between Tehran and Caracas with minimal oversight, often referred to by intelligence agencies as “ghost flights” due to the absence of passenger transparency. These routes raised repeated alarms about covert transport of personnel and material tied to Iranian intelligence and proxy operations.

This alignment was ideological, financial, and operational. Iran needed access points in the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela needed allies unconcerned with human rights, corruption, or legality. It was a marriage of convenience between two regimes isolated for their own misconduct.

U.S. intelligence assessments and investigative journalism have consistently warned that Hezbollah used Venezuela’s informal gold mining sector and narcotics trade to launder money. Gold extracted illegally from Venezuela’s Orinoco Mining Arc became a parallel currency, traded through criminal networks that benefited both regime insiders and extremist financiers. Terror financing did not require official budgets - only state blindness.

The threat was not limited to Hezbollah alone. Intelligence officials have flagged Venezuela as a permissive transit environment exploited by broader extremist ecosystems, including logistical support networks linked to Hamas. While Hamas’ operational footprint in Latin America is less overt, its financial and facilitation ties intersect with the same criminal pipelines used by Hezbollah - pipelines that Venezuela allowed to function.

When a state ceases to control who enters, who exits, and who profits, it becomes more than weak - it becomes weaponised.

Defenders of the Maduro regime often argue that Venezuela posed no direct threat to the United States. That argument misunderstands modern security. Terror networks do not need to launch attacks from a country for that country to be dangerous. Financing, logistics, document fraud, and safe transit are just as critical as explosives. Venezuela provided all four.

By the time Washington escalated pressure, the damage was already done. Millions of Venezuelans had fled, destabilising neighbouring countries. Criminal syndicates had internationalised. Extremist proxies had embedded themselves into illicit economies that stretched from South America to the Middle East.

At that point, non-intervention was no longer neutrality - it was negligence.

Critics who frame U.S. action as imperial aggression ignore a basic principle of international responsibility: sovereignty is not a licence to host terror infrastructure. When a regime allows its territory to be exploited by organisations designated globally as terrorist entities, it forfeits the moral shield of non-interference.

Venezuela under Maduro was not a victim of geopolitics. It was an active participant in its own degradation. The regime chose alliances that prioritised survival over legality, ideology over citizens, and secrecy over stability.

History will remember Venezuela not just as a socialist experiment gone wrong, but as a warning: when corruption meets extremism, and the state becomes complicit, the consequences do not remain contained within borders.

The United States did not act because it sought dominance. It acted because Venezuela had ceased to be merely a national tragedy - and had become a global risk.

And in the realm of security, denial is often deadlier than action.

While I do not agree with Donald Trump on many issues, it would be intellectually dishonest to deny that, in this case, the action he authorised had become unavoidable. When a regime systematically dismantles its institutions, facilitates transnational crime, and allows terror-linked networks to embed themselves within state structures, the cost of inaction eventually outweighs the risks of intervention. By the time the decision was taken, Venezuela was no longer merely a failed state but a permissive hub for criminal and extremist activity with regional consequences. One may disagree with Trump’s politics or style, but the reality is this: the crisis had crossed a threshold where doing nothing was no longer a responsible option.

(Savio Rodrigues,  Founder & Editor-in-Chief of GoaChronicle.com and a global geopolitical analyst known for sharp, uncompromising insights on power, politics, and security.)