Venezuela pleaded with Iran for long-range drones just months before U.S. strike on the country

Months before his capture by U.S. forces, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro pleaded with several nations for more advanced, long-range drones to defend his country amid U.S. pressure. Then, America reportedly struck an airbase at the center of Iran’s drone cooperation with Caracas during its surprise operation to apprehend Maduro on Saturday. 

The strike by the United States follows months of effort by the Maduro regime to secure military support from China, Russia, and Iran and possibly others amid withering pressure from President Donald Trump over Maduro’s rule, which the administration billed as a source of regional instability and narcoterrorism. 

Pleaded with China, Iran in October

In October, Venezuelan officials sent a letter to one of its primary backers, China, seeking their assistance to bolster its military capabilities. Internal U.S. government documents also reportedly show Venezuelan efforts to secure longer-range Iranian drones.  

It is not clear how Iran responded to the request from Caracas, but the reported U.S. strikes on Venezuela’s El Libertador Air Base, the facility at the center of Iran’s longstanding joint drone program with Venezuela, indicates that the Trump administration views Iran’s presence in the country as an unacceptable threat.

“Iran has been very active in Venezuela,” Fred Fleitz, former CIA analyst and National Security Council Chief of Staff in Trump’s first term, told Just the News. 

“It has attracted all the bad actors from the world, and you know, the Chinese and the Russians. They have no qualms about who they'll do business with. They knew this was a narco-dictator. They knew what this country was doing was hurting the United States. They didn't care. They did it because they wanted to undermine the United States,” he said in an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. 

In the early morning hours of Jan. 3, the United States conducted several strikes against Venezuelan military targets to pave the way for a daring law enforcement operation to detain Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bring them to the United States for trial on drug charges. According to military news website Task and Purpose, the raid was conducted by the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, as well as members of Delta Force, and U.S. Cyber Command.

Maduro sought drones that could attack as far away as Guantánamo Bay

Venezuelan residents reported blasts near the El Libertador Air Base, which the U.S. Treasury Department had identified only days earlier as a hub of Iranian drone assembly in the country.

The Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control announced on Dec. 30 new sanctions targeting ten individuals and entities between Venezuela and Iran, including the Venezuela-based Empresa Aeronautica Nacional SA (EANSA) which the department said plays a role in assembling Iranian Mohajer drones in the country at Libertador. 

Internal U.S. government documents reportedly show that Maduro’s government reached out to Iran in recent months seeking new, long-range drones that could threaten key American military installations in the Caribbean, including Guantanamo Bay and Puerto Rico. 

Venezuela’s Transport Minister Ramón Celestino Velásquez spent the months leading up to Trump’s intervention seeking new shipments of military equipment and drones from Iran, including “passive detection equipment,” “GPS scramblers” and “almost certainly drones with 1,000 km [600 mile] range,” according to the documents, reported by The Washington Post. 

There is no indication whether Iran fulfilled any of these requests before the American strike last weekend. 

But, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s comments after the successful raid indicated that the administration viewed Venezuela’s close cooperation with Iran as a key justification for ousting Maduro. Rubio said this weekend America would no longer tolerate any country in its hemisphere closely cooperating with Iran or its terrorist proxy groups. 

Iran and Venezuela inked 20-year deal in 2022

“In the 21st century, under the Trump Administration, we are not going to have a country like Venezuela in our own hemisphere, in the sphere of control and the crossroads — for Hezbollah, for Iran, and for every other malign influence in the world,” Rubio said in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation. “That’s just not going to exist.”

Shortly after being confirmed by the Senate early in President Trump’s term, Rubio penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal outlining the first contours of the new administration’s foreign policy approach. In it, Rubio described “an Americas First” foreign policy focused on “paying closer attention to our own neighborhood.” 

Venezuela’s collaboration with Iran on drone technology dates back to June 2012 when Maduro’s predecessor, President Hugo Chávez, announced that his country was building drones with foreign support, including from Iran. The drones, Chávez said at the time, were purely defensive and that the U.S. assessed were primarily for “internal defense,” likely surveillance, according to a Reuters report that year. At the time, some in Washington expressed concern that Iranian involvement could broaden Tehran’s footprint in the Western Hemisphere. 

The strategic partnership reached new heights in June 2022, when Iran and Venezuela inked a 20-year cooperation agreement covering expansive fields such as energy, economic cooperation, and defense. The pact—which came as both nations faced intense U.S. sanctions—explicitly included defense components alongside its oil and economic development components.

Longstanding ties between Venezuela and Hezbollah

Iran also has ties to Venezuela through one of its key proxy groups, Lebanese Hezbollah, a paramilitary terrorist organization and political party in Lebanon, Just the News previously reported. 

Hezbollah has engaged in so-called “Narco-terrorism” since its founding in the early 1980s and has been welcomed in Venezuela, where it is reportedly involved in drug trafficking, especially cocaine, in the country.

Under Maduro, and his predecessor Hugo Chávez, Hezbollah reportedly established a presence within the country, maintaining cells that still engage in drug trafficking, money laundering, and illicit smuggling. Both the 2018 and 2019 Country Reports on Terrorism from the U.S. State Department noted that there are Hezbollah sympathizers in the country. 

Examples show Hezbollah’s presence in the country has endured for years, over successive administrations. In 2008, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned two Venezuela-based supporters of Hezbollah, Ghazi Nasr al Din and Fawzi Kan'an, and accused them of using travel companies to provide funds to the terrorist organization.

In 2020, federal prosecutors charged Adel El Zabayar, an alleged associate of Venezuelan President Maduro, for participating in a narco-trafficking conspiracy and weapons offenses. El Zabayar, who the U.S. government alleged was part of Venezuela’s secretive Cártel de Los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns. 

The cartel is said to have coordinated cocaine and weapon trafficking between Maduro’s government and Hezbollah. He also allegedly worked to secure Hezbollah’s assistance in carrying out attacks on the United States.