From a distance, Margarita Island looks like a Caribbean escape. Palm-lined beaches, duty-free shops, and resort towns sell the image of a tropical playground just off Venezuela’s northeastern coast. But U.S. officials say the Venezuelan outpost has become something else entirely: Hezbollah’s most important base of operations in the Western Hemisphere, strengthened by Iran’s growing footprint and the Maduro regime’s protection.

That threat, U.S. officials warn, reflects a broader security challenge emerging from the region. ‘The single most serious threat to the United States from the Western Hemisphere is from transnational terrorist criminal groups primarily focused on narcotrafficking,’ Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at an end-of-year press conference at the State Department on Friday.

‘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.’

Marshall Billingslea, the former assistant secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes in the U.S. Treasury Department, said Margarita Island now serves as Hezbollah’s key foothold in the Western Hemisphere.

‘From what I have seen and what I have been told, there is a wide range of activities that Hezbollah and to some extent Hamas are engaged in,’ Billingslea told Fox News Digital. ‘Margarita Island is really the center of gravity for their activities.’

In written testimony submitted to the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control for an Oct. 21 hearing, Billingslea traced the island’s transformation back more than two decades. Under Hugo Chávez, he wrote, Venezuela ‘opened its doors to Hezbollah, allowing the group to establish a major footprint, including a paramilitary training site, on Margarita Island.’

‘When Nicolás Maduro seized power,’ Billingslea added, ‘the breadth and depth of Hezbollah’s presence in Venezuela dramatically expanded, as did their ties to the narco-terrorist regime and the Cartel de los Soles.’

‘The relationship is very close with the Cartel de los Soles, and it has been so for many, many years,’ Billingslea said, referring to the network of senior Venezuelan officials accused by the United States of drug trafficking.

Billingslea said Hezbollah has embedded itself into Margarita Island’s economy, exploiting the island’s duty-free status and cross-border access to Colombia to generate revenue through smuggling and drug importation. He said the group operates a wide range of companies on the island and also maintains several training camps there.

His testimony also detailed how Venezuela’s state apparatus helped embed Hezbollah inside the country. He wrote that former senior official Tareck El Aissami, while overseeing Venezuela’s passport and naturalization agency, ‘was instrumental in furnishing passports and citizenship documents to Hezbollah operatives as well as a large number of people from Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.’ Between 2010 and 2019, Venezuelan authorities issued more than 10,400 passports to individuals from those countries, according to the testimony.

A May 27, 2020, Justice Department announcement alleged that Diosdado Cabello directed Venezuelan lawmaker Adel El Zabayar to travel to the Middle East to obtain weapons and recruit members of Hezbollah and Hamas for training at clandestine camps inside Venezuela. The filing also describes a subsequent weapons delivery at a hangar controlled by Maduro at the country’s main international airport.

Recent developments in the Middle East have only increased Margarita Island’s importance, Billingslea said. Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon has damaged the group’s military leadership and financial infrastructure, forcing it to rely more heavily on overseas networks.

‘Israeli successes against Hezbollah in Lebanon in particular, including their strikes on the financial infrastructure Al-Qard al-Hassan that operates in Lebanon, are going to have two effects,’ he said. ‘The first is that it is making the fundraising and the revenue generation that comes out of Latin America even more important to the terrorist group. Secondly, we have seen indications that Hezbollah actually has been relocating fighters from Lebanon, several hundred from Lebanon to Venezuela in particular.’

Asked whether that shift moves the threat closer to the United States, Billingslea said Hezbollah is now operating ‘close to the U.S. and further away from the Israelis.’

He said Iran’s role in Venezuela has deepened alongside Hezbollah’s. ‘There is a substantial Iranian footprint in Venezuela related to the trade of weapons and drones, in particular, for gold,’ he said. After suffering losses in the Middle East, he added, ‘the Iranians find themselves even more dependent on that supply of gold in exchange for drones and weapons.’

He said Washington faces a strategic choice. ‘I think the United States has positioned sufficient forces in the Caribbean at this time to take care of the Hezbollah threat,’ he said. ‘But obviously, when you have a terrorist group that has merged into the local population, highly precise intelligence is needed. I believe the Venezuelan opposition possesses a great deal of that intelligence, though it is not clear to me that the United States government is making the best use of that access.’

For Billingslea, the conclusion is cleaner — eliminating Venezuela’s narco-terrorist regime would significantly strengthen U.S. national security.

This post appeared first on FOX NEWS