Cognipresent
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From the mid-1950s to the present day, Israeli weapons, trainers, intelligence officers, and now surveillance technology have flowed into Latin America with a consistency that survived changes of government in Jerusalem, ideological reversals in the region, and repeated waves of international condemnation. The story is not one of occasional opportunism. It is a decades-long structural relationship rooted in an economic imperative peculiar to Israel—and in a Cold War division of labor that made the Jewish state a useful proxy where direct American involvement had become politically radioactive.
This is an attempt to trace that history across both Central and South America, from Somoza’s Nicaragua to the spyware scandals of the 2020s.
The Structural Imperative
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Central America: Filling the Gaps Washington Left
The Central American chapter is the most notorious, because it coincided with the region’s bloodiest counterinsurgency decades and because it repeatedly filled voids created by American human rights legislation.
Nicaragua
Israel’s relationship with the Somoza dynasty stretched back to the founding generation. From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, Israel sold the Somoza regime large quantities of arms. According to figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, between 1974 and 1978 Israel accounted for roughly 98 percent of the Somoza government’s military equipment. When the United States finally cut off arms shipments to Nicaragua in September 1978, amid the regime’s disintegration, Israel became the major—if not the exclusive—source of the dictatorship’s weapons in its final agony.
After the Sandinista revolution toppled Somoza, the relationship migrated to the other side of the war. Through the 1980s Israel became a significant covert backer of the Contra insurgency, shipping arms through the Guatemalan and Salvadoran militaries and providing trainers for newly recruited Contra fighters in their camps in Honduras and Costa Rica. This was the thread that eventually tied Central America to the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Israeli figures—among them David Kimche, described as Israel’s top Contra specialist, and the veteran arms dealer Yaacov Nimrodi—occupied central roles in the machinery connecting Iranian weapons sales to Contra financing.
Guatemala
Guatemala is the gravest case. Israel sold its first weapons there in the mid-1970s, beginning with the Arava transport aircraft, and by the late 1970s had become the country’s principal arms supplier. The inventory expanded to RBY armored personnel carriers, patrol boats, light cannon, grenade launchers, machine guns, and—most consequentially—some 15,000 Galil assault rifles that armed the Guatemalan military during its campaigns in the highlands.
When the Carter administration cut off American military aid in 1977 over Guatemala’s human rights record, Israel stepped up its shipments to compensate. A program of Israeli military training and advisers began in 1977–78. The darkest dimension was Israeli involvement in the rural “pacification” program. In 1982, Israeli advisers helped develop and conduct the scorched-earth campaign that General Efraín Ríos Montt unleashed on the highland Maya population—part of a genocide that ultimately claimed on the order of 200,000 lives, most of them indigenous. The military-technical assistance and the atrocity were not separable phenomena; the same expertise that “modernized” the counterinsurgency organized its machinery of extermination.
El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica
The pattern repeated across the isthmus. El Salvador’s purchases began early—an order for eighteen Dassault Ouragan jets in 1973—and deepened under the Reagan administration. During El Salvador’s counterinsurgency wars between 1980 and 1992, which killed more than 75,000 civilians, Israel supplied a large share of the state’s arms, by some estimates around 83 percent, including napalm.
Honduras, the logistical hub of the anti-Sandinista war, received Israeli fighter jets on top of small arms, artillery, ammunition, and reconnaissance and transport aircraft. Even Costa Rica, a country with no standing army, received Israeli arms and police training. By around 1980 Israel had become the single largest arms supplier to Central America as a whole, and the Mossad station in Tegucigalpa—reportedly run by a deputy chief of the service, a marker of the region’s importance—coordinated the most sensitive operations, including Contra training.
South America: The Larger Market
If Central America generated the headlines, South America generated the revenue. The relationships there were larger in dollar terms, longer in some cases, and entangled with some of the continent’s most brutal dictatorships.
Argentina
Israel’s dealings with the Argentine junta (1976–1983) carry a bitter irony that observers have never let pass: the regime was openly antisemitic and specifically targeted Argentina’s Jewish population for imprisonment, torture, and disappearance, even as Israel armed it. Around 30,000 people were murdered or disappeared under the dictatorship, and testimony from the later trials of the generals recorded torturers invoking Nazi symbols and inspiration. Both the first Rabin government and the Begin government collaborated with Buenos Aires. In one of the era’s grim contradictions, Israeli officials sold weapons to the junta while quietly helping some Argentine Jews escape the very regime being armed.
The relationship reached its most consequential point during the 1982 Falklands War. Declassified British files and the research of the Argentine journalist Hernán Dobry established that Israel armed the junta both before and during the conflict—selling reconditioned Nesher (Dagger) fighter jets derived from the Mirage 5, along with Skyhawk aircraft, spare parts, air-to-air missiles, radar warning systems, and long-range fuel tanks routed in part through Peru. The extra fuel capacity extended Argentine aircraft loiter time over the islands; the weapons were used to bomb British warships. Estimates of Israeli arms exports to Argentina in this period run from several hundred million dollars to roughly one billion. British officials at the time understood exactly what was happening and judged themselves powerless to stop it. Menachem Begin, according to Dobry’s account, was moved partly by a personal antipathy toward Britain rooted in the Mandate era, and the Israelis treated the arms flow as leverage against London’s own weapons sales to Israel’s Arab adversaries.
Chile
After the United States Congress imposed an arms embargo on Pinochet’s Chile in 1976, Israel became a principal supplier to the regime—a role documented in American diplomatic cables. A US Embassy cable from April 1980 acknowledged Israel as a major arms supplier to Pinochet, furnishing missiles, tanks, and aircraft; a 1984 cable had a senior American official describing Israel as still one of the junta’s main weapons sources, precisely because Israeli sales fell outside the American embargo and thereby blunted its intended effect. A 1988 CIA assessment concluded that Israel’s military collaboration with Santiago was wide-reaching and unlikely to be sacrificed even under a Labor government.
The testimony of Chilean exiles gives the arrangement a human texture. Lily Traubman, who fled to Israel and later petitioned for disclosure of the relationship, recalled that the weapons carried by the Chilean police and army were Israeli, and that Pinochet at one point threatened to cancel a major arms deal if he were not received in Israel. Israel also conducted public-relations work on Pinochet’s behalf in Washington. That the regime had granted asylum to the Nazi war criminal Walter Rauff—inventor of the mobile gas van—and that one of its torture centers operated inside the German colony of Colonia Dignidad did not disturb the commercial relationship.
Brazil
Israel supplied the Brazilian military dictatorship that seized power in the 1964 coup against João Goulart, providing weapons and training, and the two states even cooperated on nuclear energy development. Israeli embassy cables of the period praised the generals and disparaged the Brazilian left and student protest.
Brazil is also the clearest illustration of how the relationship matured from arms sales into deep industrial integration. Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms company, built two Brazilian subsidiaries—AEL Sistemas and Ares—and by 2010 Brazil ranked among the largest importers of Israeli weapons. Israeli drones patrolled the massive 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics and were used to monitor—and by some accounts suppress—protests. Israeli surveillance systems were embedded in Brazil’s SISFRON border-monitoring program. Under Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned as an open admirer of Israel and whose sons posed in Mossad and IDF apparel, the two governments discussed the sale of drones equipped with real-time facial recognition explicitly cleared for domestic policing, and signed a cluster of military, security, and aviation cooperation agreements in 2021.
The recent turn is instructive. Under Lula, and against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, Brazil suspended a major Elbit artillery deal (the Atmos 2000 howitzer program) and in 2025 floated the possibility of restricting military exports to Israel—yet had not, as of late 2025, unwound the underlying agreements or withdrawn from the Mercosur–Israel free trade framework. The gap between rhetoric and structure is precisely the point: decades of integration are not easily reversed by a change of tone.
Bolivia
In the 1970s and 1980s Israel sold arms to the military regimes in Bolivia, whose security apparatus included the Nazi fugitive Klaus Barbie—the “Butcher of Lyon”—as an adviser on repression directed against the indigenous population. The through-line connecting Rauff in Chile and Barbie in Bolivia to Israeli arms shipments is one of the more uncomfortable footnotes of the entire history, and it recurs often enough to resist dismissal as coincidence.
Colombia
Colombia produced the era’s most lurid episode, one that blurred the line between state policy and private enterprise. In the 1980s the former Israeli lieutenant colonel Yair Klein, through his company Spearhead Ltd., brought Israeli veterans to Colombia to train paramilitary forces. Klein maintained he had arrived to train peasants defending themselves against guerrillas, with the blessing of the Colombian Defense Ministry, ostensibly to protect the banana industry in the Urabá region. What his camps actually produced was instruction in massacres, car bombs, and high-profile assassination for private armies working for the Medellín cartel figures Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha—forces that later hardened into the AUC death squads responsible for some of Colombia’s worst atrocities.
Klein was tied to the 1989 “Guns for Antigua” affair, in which Israeli-made arms—Galil rifles and Uzi submachine guns—were routed through Antigua and ended up in cartel hands; nearly half the shipment was recovered on Rodríguez Gacha’s ranch after his death. An Israeli court convicted Klein in 1991 of illegally exporting military expertise and equipment, fining him and handing down a suspended sentence. A Colombian court convicted him in absentia in 2001 and sentenced him to ten years, and Interpol later sought him and other Israelis on charges of training death squads. Israel never extradited him. The Klein saga is significant less for one man’s culpability than for what it revealed about a permissive ecosystem in which former officers, surplus Israeli weapons, and official ambiguity about their activities combined to lethal effect.
Peru
Israel’s defense ties with Peru span decades. Under Alberto Fujimori and his intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos—the regime’s shadow operator—Israeli arms dealers moved through the procurement channels that turned state secrecy into private fortune, including deals surrounding the purchase of MiG-29 and Su-25 aircraft. The relationship continued into the democratic era: Rafael’s Spike anti-tank missiles and Israeli drones entered the Peruvian arsenal, and in 2009 Peru signed a roughly $9 million contract with Global CST, a firm run by the former IDF general Israel Ziv, to train elite units against the Shining Path insurgency.
The contemporary chapter is still being written. In 2025, Peru’s state-owned munitions company FAME entered a strategic partnership with Elbit Systems—signed as the Peruvian government pushed through an amnesty for security forces implicated in the atrocities of the country’s internal conflict, a juxtaposition that critics argued signaled deepening complicity rather than reform.
Ecuador
Ecuador rounds out the South American picture as a steady, lower-profile customer, its armed forces drawing on Israel among a long list of foreign suppliers over the decades—a reminder that beneath the dramatic cases lay a broad baseline of routine commerce that rarely made headlines.
The Surveillance Era
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The NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware is the emblem. Mexico became the single largest Pegasus market in the world: of the roughly 50,000 phone numbers identified in the Pegasus Project leak, about 15,000 were Mexican, and successive administrations reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars deploying the tool against journalists, activists, and opposition figures—one journalist’s number selected for targeting only weeks before his murder.
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The Most Revolutionary Act 