Tehran-trained clerics are planting deep roots in Latin America.
Across Latin America, Iran’s public face appears innocuous: mosques, cultural centers, schools, halal meat inspectors, religious literature, social work and even Boy Scout groups. Yet beneath the veneer of piety, outreach and interfaith dialogue, Tehran leverages connections with anti-American regimes and movements to gain a foothold in the region, and to indoctrinate local Muslims in its brand of revolutionary Islam. Rather than relying on the traditional tools of statecraft, Iran advances its agenda with mosques and missionaries.
Tehran’s use of Iranian and Lebanese Shia clerics as unofficial agents of the Iranian revolution is not new. The first such cleric to reach Latin America was Mohsen Rabbani, who in 1983 came to Argentina to lead the Al-Tawhid mosque and serve as a halal meat inspector in Buenos Aires. Both tasks appeared innocuous enough, but Rabbani was intimately involved in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in the Argentine capital that killed eighty-five people and injured over three hundred.
Rabbani was not alone. Shortly after his arrival to Buenos Aires, another cleric, Sheikh Taleb Hussein al-Khazraji, made his way to Brazil. Both Rabbani and Khazraji were cited by the slain Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman in his 2013 report on Iran’s Latin American networks. According to Nisman, “Interpol [Brasília] informed that Khazraji was an employee of the Iranian government and. . . was engaged in recruiting highly politicized believers to get them close to Teheran.” An integral part of their task was to dramatically expand Iran’s support base both among local Shia immigrants and through missionary work.
They succeeded. Though Rabbani left Latin America due to mounting suspicions over his involvement in the Jewish center bombing, he continues to run his recruitment program from Iran’s center of religious learning in Qom. Khazraji remains entrenched in the Shia community of São Paulo, Brazil, where he pursues his clerical tasks and the production of promotional literature in Portuguese.
The dual role of Shia clerics as religious and political emissaries of the Islamic revolution was underscored in 2010, when the U.S. Treasury identified another religious minister as Hezbollah’s representative in Latin America. According to the Treasury, Bilal Mohsen Wehbe “relayed information and direction between Hizballah leaders in Lebanon and Hizballah elements in South America,” and oversaw its counterintelligence activity in the “triple frontier” of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. Wehbe continues his missionary activity in Brazil undisturbed.