The government of the Dominican Republic formally declared Hezbollah a terrorist organization. A decision that on paper appears administrative, but one that carries for me the full weight of everything it cost to reach that moment: years of investigation, months of coordinated pressure against me, attacks that in any other country in the region simply did not occur with that intensity.

And that, precisely that, is what matters most to me for the world to understand.

Because I was not the only journalist in Latin America who investigated Hezbollah networks. There were others. In Colombia, in Argentina, in Brazil. And not one of them had a fabricated accusation made against them. Not one of them had a coordinated media operation, involving the government, an intelligence service, and establishment journalists, assembled to destroy their reputation. Not one of them was subjected to what was attempted against me.

That difference was not deja vu. It is the clearest evidence that in the Dominican Republic there is something larger, more deeply rooted, and more dangerous than in any other node in the region. The Thread of Ariadne.

When the reaction is disproportionate, the secret is enormous.

When the news broke, many people did not grasp its true weight. For the average Dominican, Hezbollah is a word that means nothing, an abstract threat from the Middle East with no connection to rice and beans, let alone beaches and resorts.

But I know exactly what that declaration means and what it cost.

It means that the government, historically caught between the pressure of the most influential Lebanese community in the region and the interests of the United States, had to make clear which side it was on. It had to choose. And the way it chose, through a formal declaration with real legal and diplomatic consequences, signals that accumulated pressure had reached a point where there was no longer any option to keep looking the other way.

Knowing everything the government conspired to do against Kapulett, we can deduce that making that decision was not easy.

I pushed toward that point. Not alone. I was not the only factor. But I was the one who turned out to be the most uncomfortable for those who wanted that point to never arrive.

WHAT I SAW FROM MIAMI

I work with open sources. OSINT, as it is called in the language of intelligence: Open Source Intelligence. I do not need informants in the shadows or classified documents. I need to know how to read what is already published, connect what no one wanted to connect, and have the discipline to follow the thread wherever it leads, even if the thread leads to uncomfortable places.

From Miami, where Marco Rubio was born, with access to public databases, United States Treasury Department sanctions, declassified military reports, and journalistic investigations published in several languages, I was building a map that no one in the Dominican Republic had wanted to draw.

The map showed this: a tanker sanctioned for ties to Hezbollah departing from the port of Azua, Dominican Republic, bound for Venezuela. A network of lawyers and Dominican-Haitian companies operating with a level of sophistication that surpassed what the FBI had publicly documented.

Cocaine shipments with routes connecting the Colombian Catatumbo region, where specialized analysts have documented the operational presence of structures linked to Hezbollah, with Dominican ports and European destinations. Belgium, specifically, which appears in Israeli intelligence reports as one of Hezbollah’s distribution nodes in Europe.

Source, El Testigo: https://eltestigo.com/tanquero-vinculado-a-hezbollah-sancionado-por-ee-uu-arriba-a-venezuela-tras-zarpar-desde-rd

OFAC Designation: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0322

The seizure of 9.5 tons at the Multimodal Caucedo port on December 5, 2024, the largest drug bust in Dominican history, was not the starting point of my investigation. It was the confirmation of a pattern I had been documenting for years.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro publicly stated that the drugs originated from the Catatumbo.

Source: https://x.com/petrogustavo/status/1873424367520264699?s=46

When Hezbollah loses money, its peripheral networks activate. In October 2024, Israel expanded its operations to target the organization’s financial arm. That same month, Voice of America reported that Hezbollah was running out of funds.

Source: https://www.vozdeamerica.com/a/exclusiva-hezbulá-quedan-sin-dinero-/7819593.html

It was no coincidence that two months later, 9.5 tons of cocaine appeared at a Dominican port bound for Belgium. It was a consequence. Networks do not disappear under financial pressure: they accelerate.

Why the Dominican Republic? There are documented Hezbollah networks in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia, and Venezuela. Analysts, journalists, and researchers in those countries have published reports, named names, connected the dots. And the response they received from local powers was, at worst, silence.

I was not given silence.

A fabricated accusation was made against me. A false scheme was constructed in which I and other independent journalists were presented as a criminal gang. They claimed YouTube had sanctioned me for improper use of material. That lie was so crude it could be refuted with a single click.

That same year, UNESCO warned about the growing use of false financial accusations as a tool to silence journalists worldwide. Of the 120 cases it documented between 2005 and 2024, 60 percent occurred between 2019 and 2023.

Source: https://www.unesco.org/es/articles/aumento-alarmante-de-leyes-financieras-abusivas-para-silenciar-periodistas-unesco

The severity of what was done to me led agencies of the United States to provide me with protection. That is not a detail I mention for dramatic effect. I mention it because it speaks to the scale of what I faced and to who was behind it.

That kind of response does not exist in any other country in the region when someone investigates Hezbollah networks. And that disproportionality is the most solid evidence that in the Dominican Republic, the cells are not a peripheral presence. They are something with roots, local protection, and actors with enough power to mobilize the State in their defense.

When the secret is small, no one bothers to come after you. When the secret is large, what happens is what happened to me.

I invented nothing. I connected what already existed in public records and that no one had joined together.

The analysis titled The Nexus of Extremism and Trafficking, published by the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU, 2013) and authored by retired Brigadier General Russell D. Howard, documented that in 2009, in Curacao, 17 individuals were arrested as part of a drug trafficking network with financial connections to Hezbollah, part of whose proceeds were allegedly laundered through assets acquired in Caribbean countries, with the Dominican Republic included in the analysis.

Source: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-D-PURL-gpo81104/pdf/GOVPUB-D-PURL-gpo81104.pdf

In 2018, the Listin Diario reported that the then Dominican consul in Hamburg, Angelita Pena, revealed that the CIA contacted her after the September 11 attacks because Mohamed Atta had visited Puerto Plata three weeks before the attacks. The CIA determined that several of the terrorists’ tickets had been sent to them from within the country itself. Pena stated verbatim:

“We received notification that the lead terrorist of the group, Mohamed Atta, had held a Dominican visa to enter the country.”

Source: https://listindiario.com/la-republica/2018/09/14/533114/puerto-plata-fue-un-punto-de-reunion-de-terroristas-del-9-11.html

The Dominican Republic did not appear on intelligence radars in 2024. For decades, official documents had identified it as a zone of interest within networks connecting the Caribbean to Middle Eastern actors. No one simply wanted to read those documents aloud from inside the country.

I read them from outside. And I said so.

Spanish Colonel Vicente Reig Basset, an analyst specializing in terrorism, has publicly noted that the Caribbean has been used as a corridor for illicit activities where criminal networks and Hezbollah sympathizers have coincided operationally, and that the Dominican Republic itself appears in those analyses.

Source: https://delta13news.com/hezbollah-y-hamas-en-america-redes-financiacion-y-estrategias-ocultas-en-el-continente/

In February 2026, retired General Damian Arias Matos warned in an interview with Altanto TV that organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and ISIS may have used the Dominican Republic as an entry point into United States territory.

Source: https://youtu.be/nXu_LWpm2v0?si=2eGRKdD-us2h0Erc

A high-ranking Dominican military officer saying exactly what I had been documenting from Miami for years. That is not coincidence. That is the moment when the facts can no longer be contained.

When, in the middle of all those investigations, the government conspired to silence me, it committed the classic mistake of those who have something to hide: reacting disproportionately.

That was the most eloquent signal I could have received.

Because the agencies that have their eyes on the Caribbean, and there are several, do not measure the severity of a problem by what governments declare. They measure it by how governments react when someone exposes them. And the reaction of the Dominican power structure to my investigations was not that of a government with nothing to hide.

It was that of a government with sectors willing to defy the laws of the United States in order to silence a journalist in Miami.

That justifies many things. It justifies the CIA’s presence at San Isidro. It justifies the US Army. It justifies Washington’s appointment of Leah Campos as ambassador, a former CIA officer, not a career diplomat, but an intelligence operative.

Rubio handled the diplomacy. Hegseth the force. Noem identified financing networks. Kristi Noem arrived on a surprise visit as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas. Daniel Salter, director of the DEA, followed the money. And Holsey coordinated operations from the Southern Command. Together they covered the full spectrum of a State intervention.

That is not a diplomatic delegation. It is a war room distributed across time. And it happened in the Dominican Republic, not in Venezuela, not in Colombia, not in Mexico.

Hegseth said it unintentionally when he declared on Dominican soil: “We must confront narcoterrorists with strong and swift action. It is the only language they understand.” They were not investigating. They already had the map. I was part of building it.

The formal declaration of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization in the Dominican Republic is a point of no return.

It means the Dominican State is now legally committed to pursuing Hezbollah’s financial networks, its logistical operators, and its local facilitators. It means the actors who for years operated comfortably in that territory know the rules have changed. And it means that the decision to silence me, rather than extinguishing the fire, only accelerated it.

Because the disproportionate reaction I lived through did not destroy the investigation. It validated it. It gave it international credibility. It put it on radars that might otherwise not have seen it so soon.

Today the United States faces a threat in Latin America comparable to that of the Cold War. The incursion of Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah into the region is not foreign policy rhetoric: it is an active operation with logistical nodes, financial routes, and identified local actors.

The greatest danger for Washington at this moment is not Venezuela. It is losing control of the Dominican Republic, a country with a privileged geographic position, a banking system with documented vulnerabilities, and a Lebanese diaspora integrated at the highest levels of its economy and politics.

No country under the control of China, Iran, Russia, and those networks is better off than the Dominican Republic today. And the region cannot sustain another country like Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua, or Colombia.

If the Dominican government does not show clear signs of being on the right side, what awaits it is not diplomatic pressure. It is chaos.

I warned of this before it became obvious. I paid for it with a persecution unprecedented in the history of Dominican journalism. And finally, what had to happen happened.

The Dominican Republic declared Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

But there is something I want to say before ending this article:

When the Dominican president of Lebanese origin declared Haitian gangs a terrorist group, he did so under his own name, propaganda was made of the fact that it was his personal decision, and the National Counter-Terrorism Council and the National Counter-Terrorism Directorate were instructed to act.

In the case of the Hezbollah declaration, he did not show his face, and rather than ordering the National Counter-Terrorism Council and the National Counter-Terrorism Directorate to take action, he chose not to.

Source: https://presidencia.gob.do/noticias/presidente-abinader-declara-las-bandas-criminales-haitianas-como-organizaciones

Do not say afterward that Kapulett did not warn you.

The memorandum of understanding signed between the Dominican Republic and the United States under the framework of what has been called the Shield of the Americas stands as one of the most ambiguous and politically revealing diplomatic moves of the Luis Abinader administration. 

However, the question that should guide the analysis does not revolve solely around the content of the agreement, but around its political architecture:

Was the memorandum deliberately structured to generate internal rejection, dilute responsibilities, and project toward Washington a distorted image of the Dominican government’s actual limitations?

Circumstantial evidence, the subsequent behavior of the actors involved, and the discursive inconsistencies of the Executive itself suggest that it was. What occurred does not appear to be the result of diplomatic improvisation. It appears to be the result of a carefully executed political calculation.

The first suspicious element is not what the memorandum says, but the way in which it was constructed. The document amalgamates three entirely distinct matters under a single political framework: the temporary use of Dominican airports by the United States, the designation of Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as terrorist organizations, and the reception of persons deported from United States territory.

From a technical and diplomatic perspective, the combination lacks functional coherence. These issues do not belong to the same operational domain, do not follow the same legal logic, and do not require the same political vehicle. From a narrative engineering perspective, however, the structure has a precise internal logic.

By fusing issues of disparate symbolic weight, the government created a mechanism for automatic rejection. The ceding of airport facilities to the United States, a historically sensitive issue given Dominican political nationalism, was blended with international terrorism and deportations, deliberately producing a perception of loss of sovereignty. The outcome was statistically predictable: public outrage, media noise, social pressure. Yet precisely there the central suspicion emerges: that rejection did not necessarily harm the government. It could benefit it.

Because a politically unviable memorandum allowed the Executive to subsequently claim internal difficulties, reinterpret commitments, or dismantle them without bearing the direct cost before Washington. The political toxicity of the document was not an accident; it was the instrument.

Coordinated media campaigns rarely announce themselves as such. They are identified by observing alignments, incentives, and narrative synchronicities.

In this case, several commentators linked to media structures highly dependent on state advertising adopted a particularly aggressive line against the memorandum, especially against any component associated with strategic cooperation with the United States. The case of Julio Martinez Pozo is especially illustrative, not only because of the intensity of his opposition, but because of the structural context in which he operates.

The contradiction is difficult to explain: media outlets sustained partly through state advertising investment, figures close to political power, and simultaneously a narrative functionally aligned with the government’s need to produce internal rejection. The question is not whether there was a right to criticize the agreement; there clearly was. The relevant question is different: why did media sectors historically aligned with governmental stability push with such vigor a narrative that, on the surface, weakened an initiative promoted by the Executive itself?

The most coherent answer consistent with the observed facts is that this rejection was part of the original political design. The goal was not to defend the agreement; the goal was to render it politically unusable.

One of the implicit arguments of the Dominican government has been that the designation of Iran-linked groups required some form of multilateral or bilateral special framework, meaning that unilateral sovereign action was legally insufficient or politically unviable.

That argument faces a comparative obstacle that cannot be ignored.

The government of Javier Milei moved forward with terrorist designation measures linked to Iranian actors through a sovereign decision of the Argentine Executive, without any equivalent memorandum. That decision was adopted through domestic legal instruments, without formal bilateral conditionality.

The Argentine precedent dismantles the narrative of legal inevitability. If other States can act through internal instruments, the Dominican Republic could have done the same. And when a government possesses the legal capacity to act but chooses not to use it, the debate ceases to be technical and becomes unavoidably political.

The most forceful contradiction comes from the Dominican government’s own recent track record.

On February 27, 2025, the Luis Abinader administration declared Haitian criminal gangs terrorist organizations and activated national counter-terrorism mechanisms. It did so without any memorandum, without a United Nations resolution, without any special bilateral negotiation, and without invoking any legal limitation whatsoever.

That precedent eliminates virtually any argument of institutional impossibility in the case of Hezbollah and Iran. The difference between the two situations does not lie in the legal tools available, which are essentially the same. The difference lies in the political will to activate them.

And that asymmetry, more than any other consideration, is what makes this debate uncomfortable.

There is an element that public debate systematically avoids, even though it illuminates many of the hesitations observed: the cultural and symbolic dimension of the issue within certain sectors of the Lebanese diaspora.

For large segments of the Arab world, including parts of the Latin American diaspora, Hezbollah is not perceived exclusively through the Western lens of a terrorist organization. It is also read, in many contexts, as a regional resistance actor against Israel and other external powers. This does not necessarily imply operational support for its armed activities; it does imply genuine political sensitivity.

Within that context, any official designation carries symbolic costs that transcend the legal domain. And in that framework, the official invitation extended to Gebran Bassil, a figure politically associated with Hezbollah’s alliance network in Lebanon, further deepened questions about the Dominican government’s true strategic position.

In diplomacy, gestures are not ornamental. Certain gestures are, in themselves, foreign policy decisions.

The Dominican Republic possesses structural characteristics that make it an attractive territory for financial, logistical, and international influence operations: high circulation of dollars, intense air and maritime traffic, historical weaknesses in financial oversight, and a strategic geographic location between Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States.

For years, various reports, journalistic investigations, and OSINT analyses have pointed to the presence of networks linked to state and non-state actors operating in the Caribbean region. In that context, questions about possible support structures, financing, or facilitation related to actors close to Iran cannot automatically be dismissed as conspiratorial speculation. Nor can they be categorically affirmed without conclusive judicial evidence.

The relevant point is different: Washington’s strategic concern regarding the Caribbean does not arise in a vacuum. It arises from documented historical precedents tied to illicit financing, sanctions evasion, and transnational influence networks. And when the signals emitted by a government are contradictory, the doubts of allies are not dispelled; they deepen.

Paradoxically, the most important aspect of the memorandum was the least discussed.

The reception of deportees from the United States did represent a matter of profound national impact: migration implications, social costs, public security effects, institutional reintegration capacity, and long-term diplomatic consequences. That component genuinely required serious public debate, legislative transparency, and rigorous technical analysis.

Yet it was buried under the controversy generated around international terrorism and airport sovereignty. From a political standpoint, that displacement of the debate was extremely convenient: the structurally most costly issue was buried beneath the emotional noise with the greatest media impact.

The architecture of the memorandum, in this sense, also functioned as an architecture of distraction.

The comparison between both cases, the Haitian gangs and Hezbollah-Iran, is too eloquent to ignore.

With the Haitian gangs: firm language, immediate activation, visible presidential leadership, and total political ownership of the measure. With Hezbollah and Iran: discursive ambiguity, dependence on multilateral bodies, appeals to the necessity of memorandums, and systematic transfer of responsibility toward external frameworks.

The difference does not appear to be legal. It appears to be political. And possibly cultural as well. That would explain why the government projects absolute resolve in certain scenarios and an almost paralyzing caution in others that, from the standpoint of available legal tools, are functionally equivalent.

The strategic relationship between the Dominican Republic and the United States constitutes one of the central pillars of Dominican economic stability. Tourism, remittances, trade, investment, and security cooperation depend to a significant degree on that relationship. That is why any attempt to play on two boards simultaneously is especially delicate: reassuring Washington while preserving internal equilibria and political sensitivities tied to other international actors.

Regional history demonstrates that vacuums of strategic clarity rarely remain vacant. Other actors always attempt to fill them. And when the signals emitted by a government are contradictory, the doubts of allies are not managed through declarations; they are managed through actions sustained over time.

The Shield of the Americas memorandum appears less like a conventional diplomatic instrument and more like a political construction designed to manage perceptions, distribute responsibilities, and create room for maneuver against commitments the government was not prepared to fully assume.

The observed sequence suggests a deliberate pattern: mixing unrelated issues to provoke internal rejection, diluting political costs through the toxicity of the document itself, and maintaining future flexibility with respect to sensitive commitments. Under that interpretation, the objective was never exclusively to sign the agreement; the objective was to build a narrative that would justify any subsequent retreat.

And if that hypothesis is correct, then the initial question acquires a gravity that exceeds domestic analysis:

Did Washington receive an accurate representation of the Dominican government’s true political intentions?

Because in international politics, memorandums can be signed on paper. But the real negotiations always take place in the terrain of intentions. And when intentions are opaque, the trust between allies erodes in a way that no subsequent document can easily repair.