Think Hamas is just a Gaza problem? Think again. For decades, Washington’s bloated analytical class and the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs have churned out repetitive monographs on Hezbollah’s commercial empires and Iranian cultural centers in Latin America. Officials pat themselves on the back for tracking old threats while remaining utterly blind to Hamas.
This bureaucratic inertia represents a fatal strategic error. The Iranian-funded Sunni terrorist organization has quietly established a functional secondary front right in America’s backyard — moving cash, radicalizing university campuses, and probing for sanctuary. By ignoring this expanding footprint, Washington leaves a massive, dangerous rear area completely unchallenged. Hamas undeniably lacks the global logistics of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the international narcotics empire that Hezbollah enjoys. However, terrorist operatives do not need to reinvent the wheel. Hamas piggybacks on the same porous geography, lawless criminal corridors, and ideological openings that its patrons in Tehran already paved.
Look at Brazil’s Chui-Chuy border with Uruguay. In the 1960s, this remote frontier served as an active recruitment ground for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Today, that same geography serves a new generation of jihadists and Palestinian doleiros who use this arena to move massive amounts of cash through informal networks, which investigators track back to Hamas-linked channels.
Fortunately, some Latin American leaders see the threat clearly, even if the intifada Ivy League bureaucracy does not. Argentina designated Hamas a terrorist organization in July 2024. Ecuador followed suit in September 2025. Costa Rica did the same in April, explicitly grouping Hamas alongside Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Guard. These threats are not hypothetical concepts for future briefing papers — the danger unfolds in real time. In June, Costa Rican intelligence forces detained a Palestinian national carrying Spanish documents with clear Hamas ties. Deployed swiftly home in July, his capture forced Costa Rica’s foreign minister to sound urgent alarms at the Organization of American States.
While right-wing, pro-freedom governments fight back, regional autocrats and Marxist leftovers roll out the red carpet. Venezuela’s rogue regime handed out official passports and state identity documents to Hamas members through its corrupt migration channels. Following the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres, leftist governments in Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil provided blatant diplomatic cover and rhetorical defense. This political shield fuels an explosion of radicalism on university campuses that rivals the worst excesses of Columbia or Harvard. In Brazil, public universities host events openly celebrating the Oct. 7 atrocities, while front groups such as Samidoun turn universities into narrative pipelines, using Spanish-language propaganda to poison the minds of the region’s youth.
Defeating this threat before it arrives at our southern border requires both Washington and Jerusalem to execute three urgent policy shifts. First, U.S. policymakers must launch a dedicated Southern Periphery Financial Task Force focused exclusively on Hamas networks in the Western Hemisphere. This financial intelligence unit must feature real-time data integration with allies such as Ecuador, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Paraguay to hit doleiro clans with devastating targeted sanctions.
Second, every U.S. security assistance package delivered to Latin American partners should include a mandatory Hamas disruption annex requiring governments to legally designate Hamas as a terrorist organization, dismantle campus front groups such as Samidoun, and automatically expel flagged terrorism suspects within 90 days.
MY COUSIN COINED ‘GENOCIDE.’ THEY STOLE HIS NAME — NOW THEY’RE CALLING OUR FAMILY ‘GENOCIDE DENIERS’
Finally, the United States and Israel must launch an aggressive, Spanish-language narrative denial program to dismantle Hamas’s systematic propaganda apparatus in regional universities.
Right now, Hamas views Latin America as an open, uncontested space. By focusing exclusively on Hezbollah, the lazy Washington foreign policy establishment surrenders this vital territory by default. Failure to confront this rising, deeply hostile network today ensures this secondary terrorist actor will inevitably emerge as the primary nonstate threat to our long-term national security and regional stability.
Jose Lev Alvarez is an American Israeli scholar specializing in international security policy. A multilingual veteran of the Israeli special forces and the U.S. Army, he holds three master’s degrees and is completing a doctorate in intelligence and global security in the Washington area.