On Maduro’s ‘terror island,’ Hezbollah operatives move in as tourists drift out

Former U.S. Treasury official Marshall Billingslea warns that Hezbollah operates training camps and smuggling networks from Venezuela's Margarita Island hub.

Efrat Lachter is an investigative reporter and war correspondent. Her work has taken her to 40 countries, including Ukraine, Russia, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and Afghanistan. She is a recipient of the 2024 Knight-Wallace Fellowship for Journalism. Lachter can be followed on X @efratlachter.

"Margarita Island might be of significance to the U.S. because of its location and the security dynamics around it," Melissa Ford Maldonado, director of the Western Hemisphere Initiative at the America First Policy Institute, told Fox News Digital. "It is close to Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada, in an oil-rich part of the Caribbean along key maritime routes, and it has long had a reputation for being a major drug-trafficking hub, possibly because it’s off the mainland and there’s not a lot of law enforcement there."

The island’s isolation, she said, has made it attractive to "irregular armed groups, foreign intelligence actors and criminal networks that use it as a departure point for boats carrying illicit shipments out of Venezuela."