Venezuela’s “Foreign Legion” in South Korea
Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro speaks during a rally on April 13, 2024 (Source | StringerAL, courtesy of Shutterstock)
North Korea has had ties with Venezuela since 1965, but in the last two decades since the coming to power of dictator Hugo Chavez and under the rule of his handpicked successor Nicolás Maduro, the relationship has developed into a close alliance.
This is a story with a long history that goes back to the 1960s and the 1980s, when Pyongyang was in contact with and reportedly provided funds and arms to communist rebels in Venezuela, just as it aided communist insurgents in several other Latin American nations.
The two Venezuelan Marxists most well-known for their links to North Korea were perhaps Ali Lameda and Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. Lameda went there in the 1960s to work for the regime as a translator of its propaganda publications. He was eventually sent to the gulag after being accused of making unflattering comments about dictator Kim Il-sung. He languished for seven hellish years of torture and deprivation in the North’s dungeons before being deported.
Sanchez had a different story. Better known as “Carlos the Jackal,” he had a privileged upbringing and became infamous, not for any written propaganda, but rather for the “propaganda of the deed.” He had a murderous career as an international terrorist from the early 1970s through his capture in the early 1990s.
Although variously working with and being supported by the Soviet KGB, several communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Western European terrorist groups, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Cuba, most of his terrorist attacks were committed as a member and on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). During his blood-soaked career, his PFLP backers were closely tied to the North Korean regime, which trained and provided them with arms, and welcomed its leaders in Pyongyang. PFLP founder and longtime leader George Habash stated that, “Our real enemy is not Israel and Zionism only; it is American imperialism.” a view clearly endorsed and repeated in the slogans of Marxist and jihadist anti-Israel protesters on U.S. university campuses.
In 2015, North Korea re-opened its embassy in Venezuela, which had been closed since the 1990s. In 2019, the Maduro regime opened Venezuela’s first embassy in the North, and the two rogue states signed a military cooperation agreement.
When North Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister visited the United Nations to speak at its General Assembly in September of 2025, the only foreign ministers with whom he reportedly met were those from the fellow dictatorships of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Eritrea. Venezuela and North Korea are also reportedly collaborating on efforts to evade international sanctions, and there have been reports of a covert military, intelligence, and cyberwarfare relationship between the two regimes, including the possible presence of North Korean special forces in Venezuela.
In addition to its close ties to and political alliance with the Pyongyang regime, Venezuela also has ties with the ROK and maintains an embassy in Seoul.
Unknown to the South Korean public, but hopefully under scrutiny by South Korean intelligence and immigration officials, is the presence in Seoul of what may be termed a kind of “foreign legion” of the Maduro regime. This Korean support network for the Venezuelan dictatorship takes the form of a far-left extremist group known as the International Strategy Center (“ISC”), which was founded in Seoul in 2010. This is a Marxist-Leninist group which is also sympathetic to North Korea and China, and stridently anti-U.S. and anti-Israel. It has promoted conspiracy theories denying the North’s sinking in 2010 of the ROK warship Cheonan and defended the North’s nuclear weapons tests as conducive to peace.
The ISC has also been closely allied with pro-North groups in the U.S., such as Nodutdol and the Korea Policy Institute, and was a “supporting organization” involved in the People’s Summit for Korea in New York this summer, an openly pro-North event at which the Pyongyang regime was effusively praised and calls were made for the final “liberation” of the ROK and the destruction of the U.S.
One of the speakers at that conference was Carlos Ron, who until recently served as the Maduro regime’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. Pro-North Korean activist Dae-han Song, one of the longtime key leaders of the ISC, essentially serves as its liaison with pro-North and other extremist groups outside of Korea. Now based in the ROK, Song previously lived in the U.S. where he participated in one of Nodutdol’s “solidarity” delegations to North Korea arranged in collaboration with agents based at the North’s Mission to the United Nations in New York. In addition to his involvement with Nodutdol in the U.S., Song is also an “associate” of the Korea Policy Institute, and he has collaborated with the Tricontinental Institute and Breakthrough News, two Marxist-Leninist entities which are under investigation by the U.S. Congress for their alleged links to the Chinese Communist Party.
The ISC is somewhat unique in that it is one of only a few radical groups in Korea which is composed of Koreans, Korean Americans, and a significant number of expatriates living and working in Korea as English teachers, academics, and in other fields. The only other extremist groups in the ROK which include as many or more foreign radical supporters than ISC are the fanatically communist and anti-Israel group Workers Solidarity, and various other anti-Israel groups such as BDS Korea, and People in Solidarity with Palestine.
Aside from the ISC, some other major pro-Maduro groups in the ROK are Workers Solidarity, the Korea Alliance for Progressive Movement, and the People’s Democracy Party, but these other extreme-left groups are not nearly as focused on support for the Venezuelan dictatorship, and they are not as closely tied to the Maduro regime, as is the ISC. Unlike the ISC and the pro-Hamas groups, these other pro-Maduro groups do not include significant numbers of foreign expats.
By its own account, ISC sent two delegations to Venezuela in 2012, and late that year held a “solidarity” event with the Venezuelan Embassy in Seoul. Another such event at the Venezuelan Embassy was held in 2013. ISC made another trip to Venezuela in 2014 and apparently held an event with the Venezuelan Embassy in Canada during a stopover on their way to Venezuela. After returning to Korea, ISC held yet another event with the Venezuelan Embassy in Seoul in 2014, and also that year ISC members held several pro-Maduro regime events in cities across the ROK. In 2015, ISC held at least six joint events with the Venezuelan Embassy, met with visiting officials of and delegations from the Maduro regime, and sent another ISC delegation to Venezuela. ISC sent yet another delegation to Venezuela in 2016, held further pro-Maduro events, and met officials of the Maduro regime visiting Seoul.
Of course, these were only the “official” ISC visits to Venezuela, and only those events with the Venezuelan Embassy and meetings with visiting Venezuelan officials which they have seen fit to disclose during the five-year period from 2012 through 2016. ISC members were at the Venezuelan Embassy in Seoul so often, they have probably memorized the code numbers to unlock the door to its bathroom! They have been to Venezuela more often than pro-North Korean activist and Women Cross DMZ founder Christine Ahn has been to North Korea! However, the late pro-North Korean activist Kil-nam Roh reportedly visited North Korea about 75 times, so the members of ISC still have a long way to go before the number of their visits to Venezuela reach that remarkable milestone.
Diplomats of the Maduro regime in Seoul apparently believe that they have a role to play in Korea’s domestic politics, in support of extreme-left, anti-U.S., and pro-North Korean forces in the ROK. As an egregious example of this, on September 13, 2025, Isabel Di Carlo Quero, the regime’s acting ambassador in Seoul, seemingly oblivious to her status as a foreign diplomatic representative, was a featured speaker at one of the “hate America” protest rally which the extreme-left Candlelight Action group has been holding for the past few years.
It will be recalled that Kim Min-woong, the ultra-radical co-leader of Candlelight Action and elder brother of Prime Minister Kim Min-seok, despises the U.S., defends North Korea, and justifies the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023. As the Maduro regime shares those vile positions, it is perhaps only natural that a Venezuelan diplomat would be invited to speak at an event of a political group such Candlelight Action, in contravention of standard diplomatic protocol.
It appears that the Maduro dictatorship has been engaged in an extensive influence operation targeting the ROK with the assistance of the Korean and expat members of the ISC in Seoul. The non-Korean members of the ISC also serve to link the broader extreme-left in Korea with other radical and Marxist groups in other nations. Given its significant non-Korean membership and its ties to the Venezuelan regime, ISC may be seen as Maduro’s “foreign legion” in Korea. If ISC were a U.S. based organization, and thereby subject to the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, it would surely have attracted the attention of American authorities who would be justified in suspecting that it was acting as an unregistered agent of the Venezuelan regime.
Insofar as Venezuela under dictators Chavez and now Maduro has essentially become a country run by a narco-terrorist cartel, it also seems reasonable that the ROK’s intelligence and immigration authorities might want subject the ISC to increased scrutiny in light of its close connections to the Maduro regime and its frequent visits to Venezuela.
Lawrence Peck is a correspondent for NK Insider based in Seoul and Los Angeles. Having intensively researched and closely monitored the activities of pro-North Korea and other extremist groups and activists in the U.S. for over 25 years, he has been recognized in the U.S. and Korea as one of the leading American authorities on such topics, and has lectured, written extensively and been interviewed on such topics in the U.S. and Korea. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Juris Doctor degree from Loyola Law School of Los Angeles. He previously worked in Korea for several of the largest Korean business groups in the fields of intellectual property licensing and international business development. He also serves as an advisor to the North Korea Freedom Coalition of the U.S. Lawrence may be reached at the email address: lawrence.nkinsider@gmail.com
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