Tren de Aragua TdA
President Trump announced on 20 January 2025 begining the process of designating cartels, including the dangerous Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations and use the Alien Enemies Act to remove them.
The Tren de Aragua, or the “Aragua Train,” gained notoriety after its founding in 2012 by Hector Guerrero, alias “Niño Guerrero” or Warrior Kid, in the state of Aragua located in the north-central region of Venezuela. This criminal organization has become a national security priority in the countries where they have established their criminal activities. The band has expanded throughout Latin America and the United States. The Aragua Train has more than 2,700 members, and possibly as many as 5,000 members. It supposedly had its origin in the unions of workers who worked on the construction of a railway project that would connect the center-west of the country and that was never completed.
“I think that the Tren de Aragua is both a real and exaggerated threat,” Elizabeth Dickinson, a senior analyst for International Crisis Group in Colombia, told the Washington Post. Unlike a typical armed group, she said, the Tren de Aragua is more of an underground criminal organization that carries out specific jobs. It’s “not an overpowering threat,” she said. “At least at the moment.” Some smaller, unrelated gangs in some cities are using the Tren de Aragua name to stoke fear. There’s been a tendency by other criminal organizations to capitalize on existing xenophobia toward Venezuelan migrants and blame their own crimes on the Tren de Aragua “as a way to hide in the shadows,” Dickinson said.
It is the only local group that has managed to gain a foothold abroad. It stopped being a prison gang confined to the state of Aragua to become a transnational threat with a broad criminal portfolio. The organization also has a presence in other states of Venezuela, such as Carabobo, Sucre, Bolívar, Guárico, Trujillo and Miranda. The band also has a strong presence in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Chile. The rapid international expansion of this criminal organization is based on three fundamental factors: the economic deterioration experienced in Venezuela since 2013, the massive migration of Venezuelans, and failures in prison and security policies. The gang’s modus operandi includes extortion of small migrant businesses, particularly those unwilling to pay their imposed “tax.”
Operating initially from Tocorón prison in Venezuela, the gang made headlines after 11,000 police officers raided the prison in September 2023, uncovering a professional baseball field, swimming pools, children’s play equipment — even a small zoo, with monkeys and flamingos. They also found 200 women and children, living on the grounds. Critics asked how this gang managed to turn the prison into a luxury resort.
And concrete tunnels in and out, just like in the onetime Mexican prison home of the Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Hundreds of criminals escaped through tunnels, making it the biggest escape of prisoners ever in the country, according to a report in InsightCrime.org, a think tank and media organization dedicated to reporting and analyzing organized crime in the Americas.
Many gang members can be identified through their train symbol tattoos on their bodies, but over the last few years a lot of them stopped getting tattoos because they know they are more easily identified if they have a tattoo. The tattoos with which members of this gang apparently identify themselves included an AK-47 rifle, a crown and a skull with gas masks. Other tattoos include the Nike logo of NBA Hall of Famer Michael Jordan along with his uniform number, 23 — with the number referring to “23 de Enero,” or 23rd of January, a Venezuelan neighborhood that spawned a revolutionary group in the 1980s. Some “Tren de Aragua” members wear tattoos with the initials “HJ,” for “Hijos de Dios,” or Sons of God, which can be part of the gang’s lingo, or the phrase “Hasta la Muerte,” or Until Death, in body ink.
The Tren de Aragua has been installed in large cities in the US, including Miami, bringing with them all the horrors of Latin American criminals to US communities. Transnational criminal organizations based in Venezuela, such as El Tren de Aragua, have expanded their role in the illicit mining, trafficking, and commercialization of gold to increase their criminal profits.
The Aragua Train, the largest criminal organization in Venezuela, has extended its operations to the United States, as shown by several recent incidents that alert the country's authorities. An alleged gang member and Venezuelan immigrant, Yurwin Salazar, 23, faces a murder charge in the death last November of José Luis Sánchez Valera, a retired Venezuelan police officer who lived in South Florida,
Officials of the Human Smuggling and Trafficking Group of the Chicago office of the Department of Homeland Security report that members of the criminal group operate in the Chicago area at least from October 2023. In the documents, officers alert their internal units saying that "the gang has strong human trafficking operations in Latin America." Some members of the Aragua Train settled in the state of Florida and have opened evangelical churches, from where they send financial aid to social organizations in Aragua.
"This is an organized gang, a criminal enterprise that now operates in Chicago," explains Garry McCarthy, police chief in Willow Springs, a suburb of Cook County, in an interview with Telemundo Chicago. "Whether it's drug trafficking, smuggling, human trafficking for sexual exploitation, extortion and all those things that this gang is doing in South America," McCarthy says of the group's criminal activities.
Analysts use conceptualizations of organized crime as both an enterprise and a form of governance, borderland as a spatial category, and borders as institutions. Contrary to the common assumptions about transnational organized crime, criminal organizations not only blur or erode the border but rather enforce it to their own benefit. The Colombian-Venezuelan border is currently considered one of the most dangerous borderlands worldwide as turf wars, among a plethora of non–state armed actors, have promoted violence.
The Bolivarian government of Venezuela decided to close the border in an alleged national security maneuver against Colombian paramilitaries and smuggling gangs in 2015. Border enforcement by the Venezuelan state contributed to further channeling the flows of people and goods through illegal paths controlled by non–state armed groups. These groups, in turn, seized the opportunity to strengthen their power to regulate cross-border activities.
In 2021 a report was received by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that instructed agents to look for violent criminals from Venezuela entering the United States. The report allegedly indicated that the Venezuelan regime, under the control of Nicolás Maduro Moros, was releasing violent criminals from prison early, including inmates convicted of “murder, rape, and extortion.” Over a year later, Venezuelan aliens are now wreaking havoc in cities across the United States.
US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) spoke exclusively 22 February 2024 with Mario Vallejo of Univision Miami about the presence of the Aragua Train in the US: "It's very easy to understand. You enter the border and say, 'I am here asking for asylum,' they release you, and they let you enter the United States. They give you a paper that allows you to work and they give you a paper where they allow you to get on planes in USA and travel wherever you want. Many of the criminals affiliated with the Tren de Aragua end up in big cities. For example, in New York, at this time it is known that there is an organization that has dedicated itself to robbing tourists, people who are walking down the street. Some are from Colombia, others from Venezuela, and others from other parts of the world."" When you are admitting millions of people a year, among those people, there will always be delinquents, criminals. You have to think about this too: If you are Maduro, who would be the people you would like to expel from the country? I think it is very logical to think that he is purposely expelling criminals, gang members, people that they want to remove from their own country, just as Fidel did in the year 80.
“Obviously here it cannot be said that the vast majority of people who come do not come to commit crimes, they come because they are fleeing one thing or another, but among them there are going to be gang members. So, it is a very dangerous thing. The cities are not prepared for this, no one is. “It is impossible to prepare for 6,000 people a day entering the U.S. No country in the world can prepare for something like that.”
Tren de Aragua exploits victims – primarily Venezuelan women and children – in trafficking in Peru. According to an investigative report released in 2023, El Tren de Aragua – Venezuela’s most powerful criminal gang – and the National Liberation Army (ELN) operate sex trafficking networks in the border town of Villa del Rosario in the Norte de Santander department. These groups exploit Venezuelan migrants and internally displaced Colombians in sex trafficking and take advantage of economic vulnerabilities and subject them to debt bondage. According to sources, members of El Tren de Aragua gained the trust of their victims by housing them in pagadiarios in Colombia, providing them food, allowing them to incur daily debts, and, when they are unable to pay, exploiting them in sex trafficking. They allegedly marked women and girls behind their ears to prove ownership. El Tren de Aragua reportedly used the local transportation hub in Cúcuta to transfer victims of trafficking to other countries in the region, including Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru. In addition, they had “agents” who facilitated their operations in Bogota, Cali, Medellín, Pereira, and border cities. Several illegal armed groups, including ELN, Segunda Marquetalia, FARC-EP, and Clan del Golfo, are known to operate in areas where vulnerable people may be exploited in human trafficking and other illicit activities. Women, children, and adolescents who demilitarized and separated from illegal armed groups are vulnerable to trafficking.
“The policies of Secretary Mayorkas and the Biden Administration have encouraged criminals from all over the world, including Venezuelan nationals, to invade our country, resulting in robberies, assaults, and deaths of American citizens,” said Congressman Troy E. Nehls (R-TX-22). 29 February 2024. “Our nation’s foreign adversaries know that our country is weak, and they are taking advantage of our wide-open borders. It is past time Secretary Mayorkas and Joe Biden take action to deter violent criminals from crossing our border and deport every single illegal alien they have released into our country, states, and communities, especially the criminals from Venezuela. Make no mistake, the blood of every single American who has died due to crimes committed by illegal aliens is on the hands of Secretary Mayorkas, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden Administration.”
In one of the large operations carried out by the police in 2023 to dismantle the gang in Chile, it became clear that the organization functions as a company. Members of the band bought a modern bus that left from Tarapacá to Coquimbo, in the northern area. Inside the vehicle were 28 irregular migrants and 141 kilos of drugs. The police managed to arrest 11 members of the mega-gang and the prosecution discovered that it had a facade of a company, with a corporate name, that owned buses. From the outside, they appear to operate legitimately, but the buses, for example, smuggled migrants and transported drugs.
The mega-band set off the alarms of Chilean security after the Public Ministry revealed that it was behind the kidnapping and murder of former Venezuelan military officer Ronald Ojeda in Santiago. The prosecutor in charge of the case, Héctor Barros, confirmed the link between the Aragua Train and the crime of the 32-year-old former lieutenant, who died from mechanical positional asphyxiation and without gunshot wounds. In March 2024, the police found his body in a suitcase buried 1.4 meters under cement in a neighborhood in the municipality of Maipú, in the western area of Santiago.
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