The United States and Argentina will cooperate with each other on efforts to drain the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah of its funding operations in Latin America.

“With respect to Hezbollah, we also did speak today in our discussions about all of the reasons why we must jointly go after these trans-criminal organizations – narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, smuggling, money laundering – because we see the connections to terrorist financing organizations as well,” said US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at a press availability held with Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie.

Tillerson, who was visiting Argentina as part of a wider trip throughout Latin America, touched upon the relevance of Hezbollah’s terror financing operations, to Argentina and the region.

“We did specifically discuss the presence of Lebanese Hezbollah in this hemisphere, which is raising funds obviously to support their terrorist activities, so it is something that we jointly agree we need to attack and eliminate.”

The existence of a Hezbollah network in Latin America is no new phenomenon and certainly not for Argentina. Argentinian and international investigators have tied Iran and its proxy Hezbollah to two terror attacks, which struck the country over twenty years ago. both together of which left scores dead. In 1992, 29 people were killed in a car bomb explosion at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. Two years later, 85 people were killed in a bombing at the city’s AMIA Jewish community center.

Foreign Minister Faurie stressed that Argentina has every intention to prevent terror groups like Hezbollah from destroying the “zone of peace” that currently exists in Latin America.

“As regards the actions of terrorist groups in the region, we are very closely watching developments because one of the significant features of Latin America and South America nowadays is that it’s a zone of peace, and this zone of peace should not be jeopardized by the actions of external groups, whether they use the region to search for financing, whether they seek to act within our regions,” he stressed.

“As Secretary Tillerson said, we need to intensify every possible exchange, not only in terms of dialogue but also in terms of information on the actions of these groups which take advantage of transnational crime to foster their interests, which Argentina certainly does not agree with.”