US must focus on Venezuela to prevent Hezbollah in our backyard: Trish Regan
A major player in the Nicholás Maduro regime has announced his support for Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó and new elections. Most importantly, he’s willing to spill the beans and name names, admitting that both former President Hugo Chávez and embattled President Maduro courted drug traffickers and, alarmingly, Hezbollah.
I have reported on the connection to Latin America as far back as 13 years ago when I uncovered banking records in the lawless no-man’s land tri-border town of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. It was from this wild, lawless place that the terror attacks on a Jewish community center and the Israeli embassy happened in the 1990s.
The bank records I uncovered showed massive amounts of money being transferred from that tri-border region in Latin America to Hezbollah: $100 million -- at that time it was the largest source of funding for Hezbollah outside of Iran.
Today, in all of Latin America, which includes Venezuela, that number has quadrupled to at least $400 million.
More than a decade ago, I began hearing of Venezuela’s connection to Hezbollah because anytime you have a criminal regime in charge, you run the risk of bringing in more bad guys, drug runners and terrorists.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed Hezbollah’s presence just recently.
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And tonight, we are learning from the man who ran Venezuela’s intelligence division for more than a decade -- the same news: that Hezbollah is active in Venezuela.
So, it seems to me Venezuela is, most definitely, a country we need to focus on. We don’t want Hezbollah in our backyard. We don’t want terrorists, and we don’t want Russia, China or Iran or drug traffickers.