In the year 2010, Hugo Chávez was alive, and Nicolás Maduro served as the chancellor in his administration. The terminal cancer of one and the future dictatorship of the other were still unimagined, but in a faraway country, unsettling signs of an alliance were becoming evident that both sought for the self-proclaimed Bolivarian Revolution: their relationship with Hezbollah, the militia of the Shiite minority concentrated in southern Lebanon, which is sponsored by the ayatollah regime from Iran.
The history of this non-sanctified partnership is old, yet it has never been fully disclosed. The relevance of this story was evident during a special hearing held this week in the U.S. Senate in Washington regarding Hezbollah’s role in Latin America. In the session, several experts testified, agreeing that since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, Venezuela forged a famed cooperation with Iran and a more secretive one with Hezbollah; both were deepened by Nicolás Maduro starting in 2013. They described operations such as the facilitation of over 10,000 Venezuelan passports for supposed members of that and other radical Islamic groups, along with the establishment of zones in the state of Nueva Esparta— a northeastern Caribbean province of Venezuela—for training and creating structures for money laundering and financing for the Shiite militia.
However, the meeting failed to reveal a telling document, originating from within the Venezuelan state itself, which simply and genuinely outlined a concrete and previously unknown example of the close ties between Caracas and the militia.
This is a letter that should have remained buried in the dead files—perhaps intentionally forgotten—within the Casa Amarilla, the historical headquarters of the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry, located in the colonial center of Caracas. The document, drafted by the Venezuelan diplomatic service itself, was obtained, reviewed, and corroborated with sources by Armando.info, which received support from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). It refers to the capture in Lebanon of a group of Venezuelans along with “other Lebanese citizens” who were carrying 50 kilograms of cocaine, the sale of which would generate funds for Hezbollah.
The Lebanese press reported that in an operation dated September 2010, a total of 255 kilograms of cocaine (including the 50 kilograms carried by the Venezuelans) were seized. The finding of the shipment also led to the dismantling of a drug trafficking gang that regularly operated between Venezuela and Lebanon.
Journalists gathered the scant details that the Lebanese drug control office released about the raid: the names of those involved, but only identified by their initials, along with the route of the shipment, which would have originated in Venezuela and gone to Damascus, the Syrian capital—still under the control of the Baathist regime of the Al Assad family, allied with Moscow and Tehran, and thus with Caracas—and then reached southern Beirut overland.
But what was coded data in the reports from Lebanese police authorities gained clarity in the letter sent at that time by the Venezuelan ambassador in Lebanon until 2019, Zoed Karam Duaijin, to the deputy minister of foreign affairs for Asia, the Middle East, and Oceania of that time, Temir Porras.
For instance, the letter from the diplomat named the individuals involved and even included a verbatim quote from the Lebanese Drug Control Office, according to which one of the detainees, when interrogated, confessed that they “formed a band belonging to Hezbollah [sic], led by Mohamad Hassan Saleh,” who “managed to escape.”
Another detail that the public did not know at that time, but which Karam thoroughly informed in her letter to Porras, stated that, as noted, “according to the information provided by the Lebanese police, it is presumed that the drug is part of a shipment of 250 kg being sent from Venezuela via Conviasa Airlines, using the Caracas – Damascus flight, an operation allegedly backed by the complicity of certain authorities at the airports of both countries, to later transport it to Lebanese territory.”
Three needles in a haystack
The Venezuelans detained at that time, according to the diplomatic dispatch, were Emiro Mariano Augusto Crespo Navarro and Fayez Hassam Saleh. The letter specifies their passport numbers and Venezuelan identification cards. It also mentions Crespo Navarro’s confession where he claimed that “his mission was to collect part of the money generated from the drug amounting to 8 million dollars and to bring it back to our country through an office involved in the illegal currency exchange operating in Caracas.”
This office, the testimony continues, was overseen by a Mexican national allegedly linked to Mexican drug cartels operating in Venezuela.
The letter concludes by asserting that the Venezuelan diplomatic mission then offered the routine consular assistance “to the detainee”—singular, which meant that one of the two Venezuelans was excluded—and to his family, who had traveled from Venezuela to visit him. It also warns about the potential damage that an unwanted news leak could cause. “As we know,” it reads, “the media does not overlook the slightest detail of a negative incident involving a Venezuelan and links it with malice and wickedness to our government.”
Whether that letter reached its recipient, the ex-deputy minister Porras, remains a question. Several attempts were made to contact him for this story, but as of the time of publication, no response had been obtained. However, the validity of the letter was corroborated by another source close to the Venezuelan embassy in Lebanon.
Armando.info traced the ID numbers noted in the letter as corresponding to Emiro Augusto Mariano Crespo Navarro and Fayez Hassam Saleh and confirmed the existence of these individuals, the exact correlation between their names and identification numbers, and also managed to obtain their birth dates.
Emiro Crespo is a citizen from Lara state who, at least until 2007, lived in the capital of that region, Barquisimeto, where he was a student at the Liceo Lisandro Alvarado, one of the most traditional and significant schools in the city. The Lebanese press indicated that this individual allegedly holds dual nationality, Venezuela-Spain, but this information could not be verified.
He is currently 51 years old, yet there is no record available about his whereabouts or any trace from the date of his arrest in Lebanon.
Fayez Hassam Saleh was also mentioned in a different article from Lebanese press as F.S. Although born in Lebanon, his Venezuelan ID number begins with the letter V, assigned to people born in Venezuela or naturalized. In his case, this second option seems the most logical since, according to ambassador Karam’s letter to Temir Porras, Saleh arrived in Venezuela in 2004. He is currently 54 years old.
Regarding Fayez Hassam Saleh, the Lebanese press notably mentioned that he had a history of drug trafficking, including prior arrests in Switzerland and Brazil. In that latter South American country, there is a trace of him years after the operation in Lebanon; his personal record in the Brazilian registry matches exactly his name and Venezuelan nationality with that of a man who founded a mattress store in 2015 in São Paulo.
Armando.info made several phone calls to the mattress store and to the number of Fayez Hassam Saleh registered in his tax information document (Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas, CPF), but received no answer from the former; meanwhile, the latter simply indicated that it was disconnected. The rest of Fayez Hassam Saleh’s digital trail is limited to a lawsuit made against him for “moral damages” filed by a Brazilian citizen. Although in 2021, courts in São Paulo announced that they would summon him via public citation for being “missing,” another legal notice in February of this year indicated that Saleh lost the lawsuit and ordered various credit cards and flight miles programs to release accumulated credits to pay the claim.
A third name mentioned in the letter, Mohamad Hassan Saleh, the individual who supposedly “fled” at the time of the operation, has a Venezuelan ID number but preceded by the letter E, allocated to foreigners residing in the country. He is now 55 years old. Without any updated digital footprint, Lebanese press pointed out in 2010 that he was the brother of Fayez Hassan Saleh, already mentioned. He also had a history of drug trafficking and “used to visit Venezuela,” according to the information published in Lebanon.
Another line (but of coke) for Conviasa
The Lebanese press only mentioned that the seized drugs from these individuals, 50 kilograms, were transported overland from Damascus to Beirut. However, the note sent by ex-ambassador Karam to Porras highlighted that the detainees claimed that the entire shipment “of 250 kilograms” of cocaine had been transported on a flight from the Venezuelan flagship airline, the state-owned Conviasa, on its controversial Caracas – Damascus route.
This statement represents one of the most concrete mentions of the Venezuelan state airline, which shortly thereafter was formally exposed as a means of transporting suspicious goods to the volatile region of the Middle East.
In 2013, in a similar hearing to last week’s in the U.S. Senate, former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Roger Noriega, publicly mentioned Conviasa as part of the cooperative scheme between Venezuela and its dangerous friends in the Middle East. “The state airline of Venezuela, Conviasa, provides Iran, Hezbollah, and associated drug traffickers with a covert means to transport personnel, arms, contraband, and other materials in and out of this hemisphere,” he stated.
Conviasa’s flights to the Middle East were inaugurated with great pomp in February 2007 by the Hugo Chávez government, marking the crystallization of its alliance with the Iranian government at the time, then led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The route operated, with ups and downs, first as Caracas – Tehran, and later, for a time, Caracas – Tehran – Damascus. As agreed upon by both governments, the operation of the route was to rotate, meaning six months operated by Conviasa and six months by Iran Air, both state-owned.
Although Iran Air operated the route during the first half, from March to September 2007, Conviasa took control immediately and did not relinquish it until October 2010, according to several official documents accessed by Armando.info. “Given this situation, Iran Air informed Conviasa of its decision to terminate, starting December 22, 2009, the Memorandum of Understanding for the establishment of a code-sharing agreement,” states one of these papers, reflecting the Iranian side’s displeasure. In view of this misunderstanding that resulted in the route’s cancellation, Tehran repeatedly proposed that Mahan Air take over, something that would only materialize in 2019. Nevertheless, the service never had regularity.
Conviasa attempted to relaunch flights on that route in 2020 and again in 2023, with services that always raised suspicions.
A very loose end
The data regarding the connection between the self-proclaimed Bolivarian Revolution and Hezbollah comes from the Venezuelan government’s diplomatic missions in Lebanon and Syria from 2007 to 2009. Highlighting these allegations, the ultimate proof was typically the appointment by the Venezuelan government of citizen Ghazi Atef Nassereddine as a diplomatic official.
Every official assigned to a diplomatic mission must be duly accredited and approved for such functions by the government of the host country, but Nassereddine was rejected by the Lebanese government to represent Venezuela, precisely because he was of Lebanese nationality by birth, rather than Venezuelan. The ambassador stationed in Beirut at that time, the same Zoed Karam, informed the then-chancellor Nicolás Maduro of the rejection in June 2007, explaining, in defense of the Beirut authorities, that “this decision complies with relevant Lebanese legislation… and is not related to any other motives given the excellent bilateral relations existing between both nations.”
However, Karam also admitted at that time, in a more informal communication to then-chancellor Maduro, that she did not get along well with Nassereddine. This did not stop her from appreciating Hezbollah favorably. In other writings for Maduro, the ambassador highlighted some of the militia’s notables, such as Hezbollah having the status of a legitimate political party in Lebanon, which had secured several seats in the Lebanese parliament, and it enjoying an image of a legitimate “resistance” group in the Arab world, rather than a terrorist group. She underscored her analysis of the “contradictory” view of the United States government.
More than contradictory, the U.S. position is radically different. In fact, this Nassereddine, who passed for a Venezuelan diplomat, has been on Washington’s radar since at least 2008 when the Department of the Treasury first identified him as a Hezbollah collaborator in the name of the Venezuelan government, particularly when he served as Minister-Counselor at the Venezuelan diplomatic mission in Syria, just before being sent to hold the same position in Lebanon, which was subsequently rejected.
In a press release published in June 2008, the United States mentioned him directly as a “Hezbollah sympathizer based in Venezuela” and referred to him by his birth name, Ghazi Nasr al Din, later listing 10 other ways he had adopted his name, including Ghazi Atef Nassereddine, with which he holds Venezuelan documents, ID, and passport.
“Nasr al Din has advised Hezbollah donors in their fundraising efforts and has provided specific information about bank accounts where deposits would go directly to Hezbollah. Ghazi Nasr al Din has met with senior officials of Hezbollah in Lebanon to discuss operational matters, besides facilitating the transport of Hezbollah members to and from Venezuela. In late January 2006, Nasr al Din facilitated the travel of two Hezbollah representatives from the Lebanese parliament to Caracas to request donations for Hezbollah and announce the opening of a community center and an office sponsored by Hezbollah in Venezuela,” stated the Treasury Department back then.
Shortly thereafter, in 2010, Nassereddine was added to the so-called Clinton List of designated foreigners, a list of hundreds of people whom the U.S. government has singled out for their suspected involvement in activities related to drug trafficking, terrorism, and human rights violations, against whom financial sanctions are imposed, such as the freezing of bank accounts and other assets.
In his testimony this week before the U.S. Senate, the former Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism Financing in Donald Trump’s first administration, Marshall Billingslea, recalled Nassereddine’s role and warned in harsh terms that practically nothing has changed since those initial suspicions of cooperation: “Venezuela remains a safe and willing refuge for what continues to be the most dangerous and lethal foreign terrorist organization to the United States, Hezbollah.”
*This report was made with support from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)
