A single photograph circulating online in late December 2025 has delivered rare visual confirmation of a development long assessed by Western intelligence agencies: an Iranian-manufactured Mohajer-6 unmanned aerial vehicle is now operating under the markings and apparent control of the Venezuelan Air Force. Captured at El Libertador Air Base, the image depicts the medium-altitude, long-endurance drone on a Venezuelan military runway alongside support vehicles—an unremarkable scene that nonetheless carries outsized geopolitical significance.
For U.S. officials and regional security planners, the image crystallises what Washington has described as Iran’s “aggressive and reckless proliferation of deadly weapons around the world,” a warning articulated by U.S. Treasury Under Secretary John K. Hurley and now echoed across strategic assessments stretching from the Indo-Pacific to the Atlantic. More than a symbolic transfer, the photograph confirms the operational integration of an Iranian armed UAV inside a Latin American air force located less than 2,200 kilometres from U.S. territory.
The confirmation arrives amid a renewed U.S. sanctions push targeting Iranian–Venezuelan military cooperation, reinforcing that the Mohajer-6 is no longer a speculative export or parade asset. It is a deployed system embedded within Venezuela’s evolving asymmetric defence architecture—an outcome that reshapes threat calculations across the Caribbean basin.
From Possession to Integration
The geopolitical weight of the image lies not merely in the drone’s presence, but in what it implies about capability and intent. The Mohajer-6 appears painted in Venezuelan service colours and positioned for routine ground handling rather than ceremonial display. The absence of extraordinary security measures suggests institutional familiarity with the platform, indicating trained crews, established maintenance cycles, and secure command-and-control arrangements within the Venezuelan Air Force.
Earlier open-source indicators—ranging from transponder anomalies to partial sightings—had hinted at Iranian drone activity over Venezuelan airspace. This photograph, however, collapses uncertainty. It validates years of intelligence assessments that Tehran’s drone-export strategy has expanded decisively into the Western Hemisphere, and that Caracas has moved beyond acquisition into sustained operational use.
For U.S. and allied planners, this marks a qualitative shift. An armed medium-altitude long-endurance UAV on the northern rim of South America compresses warning timelines, complicates intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) planning, and introduces new escalation dynamics into Caribbean and northern South American airspace.
A Two-Decade Convergence
The Mohajer-6 deployment is the cumulative outcome of nearly two decades of convergence between Tehran and Caracas. The relationship was initially forged through ideological alignment under the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and later hardened by sanctions-driven necessity under President Nicolás Maduro.
After a U.S. arms embargo was imposed on Venezuela in 2006, Caracas accelerated efforts to diversify military suppliers. Iran emerged as a willing partner capable of bypassing Western export controls while offering cost-effective asymmetric systems. Early transfers of Mohajer-2 surveillance drones—locally rebranded and assembled in Venezuela—laid the industrial and doctrinal groundwork for today’s more advanced UAV cooperation.
That trajectory was formalised under a 20-year strategic cooperation agreement signed in June 2022, covering defence, energy, and industrial collaboration. The agreement created legal and logistical pathways for sustained military-technology transfer despite U.S. and European sanctions. Iranian defence firms gained access to Venezuelan crude oil and refined products, while Caracas received drones, fast-attack craft, and missile-related technologies—an exchange that monetised sanctions circumvention on both sides.
For Tehran, Venezuela represents a rare opportunity to establish a friendly, militarised partner in what Washington has long considered its strategic backyard. For Caracas, Iranian systems offer an affordable means of regime security and strategic signalling without the financial burden of Western or Russian platforms.
Developed by Qods Aviation Industries, the Mohajer-6 is Iran’s most successful export-oriented armed UAV. Designed for intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, reconnaissance, and precision strike missions, it has become a centrepiece of Tehran’s unmanned warfare doctrine.
With a wingspan of roughly 10 metres, endurance exceeding 12 hours, and an operational radius of up to 500 kilometres using line-of-sight communications, the drone offers persistent coverage over maritime approaches, jungle borders, and disputed territories. It can carry guided munitions such as Qaem precision bombs or Almas anti-armour missiles, blurring the line between ISR asset and strike system.
At an estimated unit cost of between US$2 million and US$5 million, the Mohajer-6 is particularly attractive to sanctioned states seeking credible deterrence without unsustainable procurement budgets. Its combat use in multiple theatres—including Iranian operations in Iraq and Syria and Russian employment in Ukraine—has validated its robustness under real-world conditions.
For Venezuela, the platform fills longstanding capability gaps. Persistent ISR over the Caribbean Sea, the Colombian border, and the disputed Essequibo region with Guyana has historically been limited. Armed UAVs also introduce a new escalation ladder, enabling selective force projection with plausible deniability—a hallmark of Iranian asymmetric doctrine.
The December 2025 photograph emerged against a backdrop of increased Venezuelan military exercises and heightened U.S. naval activity in the Caribbean. Whether intentional or incidental, the timing suggests a signalling effect. From a strategic communications perspective, the image functions as both confirmation and deterrence, informing adversaries that Venezuela now possesses a credible unmanned strike capability.
Visual cues in the image—terrain, infrastructure, and support equipment—have helped validate its authenticity and location, dispelling earlier scepticism that Venezuelan drone claims were exaggerated. More importantly, they indicate that the Mohajer-6 has progressed beyond testing into an operationally sustained role.
Analysts note that the scene mirrors Iran’s established methodology elsewhere: normalising unmanned systems through routine basing to reduce political sensitivity while entrenching military utility. In that sense, the photograph is not merely documentation but strategic evidence of embedded capability.
U.S. reaction has been swift and financially targeted. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has designated Venezuelan and Iranian entities linked to drone procurement and assembly. Announcing the measures, Under Secretary Hurley said Washington would “continue to take swift action to deprive those who enable Iran’s military-industrial complex access to the U.S. financial system.”
The sanctions aim to disrupt supply chains, payment mechanisms, and logistics underpinning Mohajer-6 transfers, targeting assets and transactions collectively valued at more than US$100 million. They also threaten secondary sanctions to deter third-country intermediaries from facilitating Iranian–Venezuelan defence cooperation.
This approach reflects Washington’s broader shift toward financial warfare as a primary tool for countering military proliferation, recognising that kinetic options against drone diffusion carry high escalation risks. By raising transaction costs rather than seeking outright interdiction, the U.S. hopes to degrade the scale and tempo of Iran’s UAV exports.
Yet Iran’s resilience under sanctions suggests limits to this strategy. Informal financing, barter arrangements, and state-to-state exchanges have repeatedly blunted the long-term coercive impact of financial isolation. The Mohajer-6 already operating in Venezuela may therefore stand as evidence that sanctions can slow, but not reverse, strategically meaningful deployments.
The operational deployment of the Mohajer-6 alters the regional security equation. Combined with Iranian-supplied fast-attack craft and missile technologies, Venezuelan drones contribute to a nascent anti-access/area-denial bubble across key Caribbean maritime corridors.
As one defence assessment notes, such capabilities do not transform Venezuela into a peer adversary of the United States. Instead, they create localised ISR and anti-ship zones where miscalculations or accidents could escalate rapidly.
From Tehran’s perspective, exporting drones to Venezuela mirrors its Middle Eastern playbook: distribute affordable, lethal technology to allies to stretch U.S. attention across multiple theatres. For Caracas, the payoff is regime security, border control, and symbolic defiance at manageable cost.
The longer-term risk lies in precedent. Normalisation of armed UAV operations in Latin America could encourage similar acquisitions by other sanctioned or anti-U.S. states, gradually eroding long-standing assumptions of uncontested U.S. aerial and maritime awareness in the Caribbean.
In that sense, the photograph of a Mohajer-6 on a Venezuelan runway is less a snapshot than a signal. It marks the arrival of Iranian unmanned warfare doctrine in the Western Hemisphere—quietly deployed, persistently present, and strategically consequential.
