Truths, lies, and myths about Tren de Aragua

The history of Tren de Aragua is shrouded in mystery and has been the subject of plenty of speculation. It is known that it was founded sometime in the last decade by two inmates who came to command more than just the warden of the Venezuelan prison where they were held: they accumulated so much power that they built a zoo, a casino, and a swimming pool inside the complex. Very few details are known about who they really were or how they managed to prevail over other gangs, and there are few clues as to their current whereabouts. However, there are a few incontestable facts. In 10 years, the criminal organization has expanded to almost every country in Latin America and has a presence in major cities in the United States. Its members have committed murders and constructed multimillion-dollar criminal enterprises involving drug trafficking, extortion, kidnappings, and human trafficking. They spread terror wherever they go, but their reach and importance have been exaggerated and used to criminalize other Venezuelans.

Experts maintain that Tren de Aragua in no way poses a national security issue for Washington, as Donald Trump claims. The Republican tycoon has seized on the myth to exaggerate the threat of Tren de Aragua and justify the policy of mass deportations he has undertaken since returning to the White House. Trump has compared the gang to the Sinaloa Cartel and even ISIS. It has provided one of the excuses he has used to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, which allows for the accelerated expulsion of immigrants, a mechanism used during World War II to imprison Japanese, Italians, and Germans in internment camps. And he has paid Nayib Bukele $20,000 for each of the 238 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, the maximum-security prison built by the Salvadoran president. There is not a single known case of a prisoner having left that jail, where there is no natural light or exercise yard, only a hallway with cells on either side. “Fusing a hardline approach to a criminal group of disputable clout with an excessively broad understanding of who its members might be, the Trump administration has in effect sought a pretext for speeding up mass summary deportations,” notes a report by the International Crisis Group, an international organization focused on conflict resolution.

Trump claims that Tren de Aragua plans to invade the United States, even though it doesn’t have a known army or sufficient firepower to take even a town. “It’s not a group that has the capacity to be an enemy, not of the United States, but of any country,” says Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan investigative journalist who has written the first book about the gang, El Tren de Aragua: la banda que revoluciona el crimen organizado en América Latina (Tren de Aragua: the gang revolutionizing organized crime in Latin America), by phone. “It doesn’t even have a solid or very organized structure,” she adds.

That doesn’t mean it’s not a dangerous organization, Rísquez warns. In a very short time, it has made its way into Mexico and Colombia, two countries with a very strong structural criminality that doesn’t tolerate the arrival of foreign competitors. In any case, Tren de Aragua is not easy to detect. Its membership has a fluid nature that allows them to adapt to any environment. They’re so stealthy that their very existence has been questioned for years. Unlike Mexican cartels, they don’t publish videos in which they behead their enemies. Some arrests in Chile and Peru have show the gang’s leaders to be discreet individuals who don’t have tattoos or flaunt the narco esthetic. “They are certainly to be feared. Now their existence is being used to stigmatize Venezuelans. But it’s not just Trump who has done this. Dina Boluarte in Peru has done it, too, or Claudia López when she was mayor of Bogotá. In Chile, there are many cases of xenophobia against the Venezuelan community. It’s not just a United States phenomenon,” the author explains.

The White House claims that Nicolás Maduro and key leaders of the Venezuelan regime are behind Tren de Aragua. Experts have not ruled out the possibility of some kind of negotiation between the criminal organization and the Chavista government in the past, but to date, there is no evidence directly linking the two. “That lacks any semblance of truth,” says Tarek William Saab, Venezuela’s attorney general, over the phone. Saab is responsible for much of the repression against the Venezuelan opposition and citizens protesting against Maduro’s electoral fraud. “Tren de Aragua was dismantled here. Its leaders are in prison, dead, or subject to arrest warrants,” continues Saab. In his view, this alleged connection “is a fabrication intended to attack the Venezuelan government [...] Cases of serious crimes attributed to Venezuelans are insignificant in the universe of crimes that occur in the United States,” adds the prosecutor.

The most high-profile crime linked to the organization is that of Venezuelan dissident Ronald Ojeda. The former army lieutenant was kidnapped from his apartment in Santiago, Chile, and later tortured and murdered in February 2024. He had been in exile since 2017, when he participated in a military rebellion against Chavismo. Chilean prosecutors point to Tren de Aragua as the perpetrator of the crime and high-ranking Venezuelan government officials as responsible for giving the order. Specifically, Diosdado Cabello, the regime’s second-in-command, has been named. The intermediary, according to the same investigation, was Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, alias “Niño Guerrero,” the gang’s top leader.

Only a blurry, black-and-white photo of Guerrero Flores exists. After serving two decades in prison, no one knows his current whereabouts. Colombian intelligence services suspect he moves between Colombia and Venezuela, across the vast border that separates the two countries. He is one of the most-wanted criminals in the world. Niño Guerrero could never have imagined that the man who occupies the Oval Office would compare him to other historic enemies of the United States, such as Osama Bin Laden or Pancho Villa. Even if only in his own imagination.

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