Lev Tahor’s Latin American Footprint: Mobility, State Fragility, and Geopolitical Risk
- Laura Tatiana Pérez Molina
- Dec 7, 2025
- 4 min read
Lev Tahor, a group that presents itself as persecuted for its ultra-orthodox Jewish beliefs and traditions, claims to move from country to country in search of refuge. But look closer, and the reality is quite different. Accused of child exploitation, kidnapping, forced marriages, and coercive sexual practices, the group was recently found attempting to settle in the Colombian countryside. How does a self-described religious community travel all the way from Israel and ends up there? What geopolitical implications are possible to identify from this phenomenon? We’ll talk about transnational non-state actors, weak borders, institutional vacuums, and using latin american countries’ state fragility to hold operations.
Lev Tahor emerged in the 1980s under the leadership of Shlomo Helbrans, an Israeli-born rabbi who created an ultra-orthodox community that is characterized by strict religious obedience, gender segregation, and total control over members’ daily lives and even finances. After initial investigations in Israel due to concerns about the group’s internal conduct, the group relocated to the United States and later to Canada. Here, allegations of child abuse, forced marriages, identity fraud and kidnapping placed them under heavy investigation. Because of the pressure, Lev Tahor developed a survival strategy: mobility.
When investigations advanced in Quebec, they fled to Ontario, when U.S. federal authorities intervened after cases in which children were smuggled across borders in disguise, they crossed into Mexico. When Mexican authorities later detained members for irregular documentation, the group moved once again into remote regions of Guatemala. There, Guatemalan police raids found children suffering from untreated illnesses, evidence of forced marriages, and a network of internal discipline that isolated members from outsiders, but even with these findings, the group still manages to persist until today.
The group created a stronghold in Guatemala’s western highlands. Here state presence is limited and many communities operate under their own informal governance systems. The group was able to have a quasi-autonomous enclave for almost 10 years. There they enforced their internal rules with little intervention, took advantage of judicial inconsistencies by for instance filing amparos in small rural courts where judges often lack context or coordination with national authorities.They also leveraged conflicting rulings between family and criminal courts to delay processes and framed state intervention as religious persecution. When Guatemalan authorities finally carried out raids Lev Tahor demonstrated its capacity to disperse and reorganize. Arrests in Guatemala did not dismantle the group, they just started a new relocation cycle. Some members attempted to reach Bolivia, others returned to Mexico, and most recently Colombia.
In November 2025, Colombian immigration authorities conducted an operation in Yarumal, Antioquia, where they identified 26 members of Lev Tahor, including 17 minors, five of them had active Interpol yellow notices for possible disappearance or trafficking. These families had entered Colombia from New York despite the international alerts about their linked crimes. They were apparently attempting to establish a new colony in the country.
The group shows a deep assessment of risks and opportunities and Latin America offers a combination of structural advantages for an organization like Lev Tahor. The first is weak institutional capacity in specific rural regions. The state barely reaches certain regions so groups can operate according to their own rules with limited interference. The second advantage is legal weakness. A lack of coordinated policy: child-marriage regulations differ, definitions of religious freedom vary.This allows them to choose jurisdictions, delay proceedings, and exploit normative differences between neighboring states. The third advantage is geography: jungles, mountains, remote settlements, and porous borders provide ideal conditions for rapid relocation, concealment, and the maintenance of internal isolation.
Now, going beyond the humanitarian concerns, it becomes a geopolitical case specially with attempts to seek political asylum in Iran. The group sent formal letters to Iranian authorities expressing loyalty to the regime and proposing to establish an anti-Zionist Jewish community under its protection. For Tehran, it would have served as a propaganda asset: a Jewish sect denouncing Israel while seeking refuge in the Islamic Republic. For Lev Tahor, Iran represented the only state openly hostile to Israel and one where strict religious practices would not be considered aberrant. Although the request was ultimately unsuccessful, it revealed something very important. Even small, marginal groups can attempt to insert themselves into the power competition realm if doing so enhances their survival. It transformed Lev Tahor into a potential instrument within broader geopolitical narratives and reach.
The group’s presence in Latin America also generates security risks. Moving minors without documentation and logistically coordinating their re-settlements makes highly likely, or almost inevitable their interaction with illicit networks such as human smugglers, document forgers, and intermediaries who facilitate irregular mobility. These relationships may not be ideological, but they are functional, and that still represents a risk.
What makes Lev Tahor geopolitically significant is not its size, it’s actually a community of only a few hundred people, but it's their ability to expose structural vulnerabilities in Latin America. It highlights shortcomings in cross-border regulation mechanisms, weaknesses in judicial cooperation, and the existence of vast administrative voids where non-state actors could govern de facto. It also demonstrates how marginal groups can unexpectedly intersect with global geopolitical tensions and become symbolically valuable to external powers.
SOURCES
Comments