Iran is using Venezuela as a launching point in the Western Hemisphere to embed its drone pipeline closer to U.S. territory, the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS) warned this week.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned a group of individuals and entities for their role in the weapons trade between Iran and Venezuela on grounds that it constitutes a threat to U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere.
The broader list of sanctioned individuals include Empresa Aeronautica Nacional SA (EANSA) and its chairman, Jose Jesus Urdaneta Gonzalez. EANSA is a Venezuelan company that maintains and oversees the assembly of Iran’s Qods Aviation Industries’ (QAI) Mohajer-series UAVs in Venezuela. OFAC detailed that EANSA’s operations contributed to QAI’s sale of millions of dollars’ worth of Mohajer-6 drones to Venezuela, with Urdatena serving as a coordinator between Venezuelan and Iranian military officials for the production of the Iranian drones in Venezuela.
OFAC noted that the sanctions are in line with the terms of President Donald Trump’s February 2025 National Security Memorandum directing the U.S. government to impose maximum pressure on Iran’s Islamic regime, deny it all paths to a nuclear weapon, and countering its malign influence.
This week, SFS released a new report titled, “Venezuela as Bridgehead: Treasury Sanctions Expose Iran’s Drone Capability Moving Closer to the United States,” in which the organization applauded the administration of President Donald Trump for the sanctions as it targets the chain of transfer and support of drone capabilities between both anti-U.S. regimes. SFS emphasized the significance of the measure as it marks the first time that the U.S. government has acknowledged that Iran has been using Venezuela as a proxy to wage war against the U.S. in the hemisphere — something that, SFS stressed, is an argument “spearheaded” by the organization over the past five years.
“The announcement is not just ‘economic pressure;’ it signals that the Tehran–Caracas relationship now operates as an industrial and logistical architecture with assembly, maintenance, negotiation, payments, and, above all, military capacity installed in the Western Hemisphere,” SFS said.
OFAC detailed in its announcement that Venezuela and Iran maintain active drone cooperation since 2006 for the Mohajer series of drones produced by Iran’s QAI and renamed in Venezuela as the ANSU series. The ANSU-100, OFAC explained, is capable of launching Iranian-designed Qaem guided bombs.
In addition to EANSA and Urdaneta, Tuesday’s round of sanctions targeted a group of Iran-based individuals for their efforts to procure chemicals used for ballistic missiles for Parchin Chemical Industries (PCI), an element of Iran’s Defense Industries Organization.
SFS explained in its report that the sanctions align its documented strategic diagnosis that “Iran’s posture in Latin America is deliberate, cumulative, and conflict-oriented, and Venezuela remains the central axis of that projection.” SFS referred to a June 2025 report in which it described how Venezuela is “the central axis of this projection in the hemisphere.”
“The report described how strategic alliances, proxy networks, and criminal convergence create a western platform for operations and sanctions evasion and already accurately pointed to the deployment of military capabilities that the U.S. Treasury is now turning into sanctions,” SFS said.
SFS explained that this week’s Iranian drone-related announcements are a “long-term chapter” that began during the rule of late socialist dictator Hugo Chávez, when Venezuela ceased to be “merely an ideological ally” of Iran and began to function as the Islamic regime’s “operational hemispheric platform.”
“Several analyses document that it was under Chávez that Tehran gained regional depth through Caracas — which opened channels, expanded Iran’s diplomatic presence, and served as a ‘shepherd’ for Iran’s advance in the Western Hemisphere,” SFS’s report read.
The report continued:
Formally, the partnership took the form of a multiplicity of “bilateral agreements” and memoranda, often presented as economic, industrial, and technological cooperation — a volume of instruments that, over time, created political and administrative cover for the flow of people, equipment, and resources. It was in this context that the Caracas–(via) Damascus–Tehran air corridor, nicknamed “aeroterror” in security circles, gained notoriety.
At the same time, SFS detailed, both regimes saw advancements in documentary and identity cooperation through the issuance and sale of passports and visas by Venezuelan state structures.
SFS encouraged the Trump administration to “go further” by “expanding the list of individuals and entities working in both countries and broadening it to China and Russia which are also working with Iran to prop up the Maduro regime and weaken the U.S. in the region.”
“This historical interpretation fits precisely with the paradigm that SFS has been developing for years within the VRIC Transregional Threats Program, which maps how Venezuela, Russia, Iran, and China operate through hybrid warfare, criminal convergence, and geostrategic pressure on critical routes and infrastructure,” SFS said.
The organization described OFAC’s sanctions as “necessary” but stressed that it should not be the “end point.” To that end, it presented a list of suggestions, which include — but are not limited to — the blocking of dual-use components, maritime and air routes, commercial facilitates, the reorganization of deterrence, robust customs controls, and frame Iran-Venezuela as not an “anomaly,” but as a “model” that has been pursued elsewhere in the region through political alignment, institutional capture, and the use of “cooperation” as cover for capability transfer.
“The central lesson is that Tehran’s presence is not only ideological. It is infrastructural, and increasingly kinetic,” SFS concluded.
Read the full article here