the Venezuelan mafia that extends across the world

Last Thursday, the New York prosecutor’s office presented the accusation against its leader, Hector Rutherford Guerrero Floresknown as “Niño Guerrero,” who was “the mastermind behind the evolution of the Tren de Aragua from a Venezuelan prison gang to a transnational terrorist organization that committed countless acts of violence, extortion and drug trafficking across North America, South America and Europe,” according to the federal prosecutor. Jay Clayton.

The indictment directly links Niño Guerrero to the Suns cartel, the drug trafficking network that Washington attributes to top military commanders and officials close to Nicolas Maduro. According to American authorities, there is a criminal symbiosis in which the Soles cartel guarantees impunity and access to strategic corridors, while the Aragua train acts like an armed arm which provides logistics, security and territorial control for shipping cocaine to the rest of the world.

Its criminal tentacles have crossed the Atlantic. Last month, Spanish national police dismantled a cell on European soil, arresting 13 members of the gang, in provinces including Barcelona, ​​Madrid and Valenciawho were engaged in the production and sale of medicines. These arrests are a consequence of investigations opened after the capture in Barcelona, ​​in mid-2024, of Niño Guerrero’s own brother. This arrest was carried out as part of an international arrest warrant for terrorism and human trafficking.

Criminal incubator

The Aragua Train could not have seen the light of day without the connivance of Chavismo and, although its name is generally linked to the union of a railway line from Odebrecht which – like so many promises of the Bolivarian revolution – remained unfinished, its true etymology seems to respond to an internal logic of the underworld. In Venezuelan prison slang, the gangs are known as “carros” (cars), the concept of “train” is used to illustrate a higher and broader criminal structurecomposed of the union of several criminal “wagons”.

The Tocorón prison, where the Aragua Train was born and raised, more than a punishment and reintegration center, functioned for years as a real crime social club. The venue was equipped with a swimming pool, an equestrian center, a zoo with exotic animals and even a nightclub where large parties were organized with international guest artists. There, control lay not with the authorities – who, as in other Venezuelan penitentiary centers, were prohibited from entering – but with the prisoners themselves, who acted as sentinels of their own fortress, administering a parallel state with its own laws and taxes.

As documented by the NGO Transparencia Venezuela, in its embryonic state, this criminal army – estimated to have numbered 4,000 members – was fueled by the institutional weakness and direct complicity of the State which, far from fighting it, found in Niño Guerrero a tactical ally for social control.

Industrializing tragedy

When the country collapsed, the criminal gang industrialized the tragedy. Taking advantage of the massive exodus of more than nine million Venezuelans, the organization took advantage of the crisis not to sell handkerchiefs but to establish a network of “coyotes” on a continental scale.

According to the NGO’s reports, they have been operating since 2018 using structures similar to those of travel agencies that offer transfer packages to the United States, crossing the Darién jungle, or to the south of the continent, with rates ranging fromthe 1,000 and the 10,000 dollars. However, this logistics not only seeks to profit from the transfer, but also from the recruitment of victims for human trafficking for the purposes of sexual and economic exploitation, persecuting the diaspora wherever they settle to extort them. Their compatriots are therefore the main targets.

Upon arriving at their destination, the migrants discover that your initial debt has multiplied arbitrarily and terrorism rates are classified by nationality. To repay costly debts, victims are forced to sexual exploitation or forced labor under constant threat of death, not only to themselves, but also to their loved ones left unprotected in Venezuela.

Those who refuse to pay are tortured, shot and dismembered, and the entire act is recorded and broadcast on social media to serve as a warning to the rest of the victims.

crime map

The group’s ability to adapt and metastasize has been dizzying. According to the NGO, the Aragua Train has managed to expand its operations to at least eleven countries, consolidating a network that covers Colombia, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Mexico, the United States, Trinidad and Tobago and Spain.

In each territory, their “modus operandi” mutates depending on local conditions, demonstrating an unusual flexibility of organized crime. While in Brazil they have opted for discreet alliances and pragmatic subordination with powerful factions such as the First Capital Command (PCC), in Colombia and Peru they have unleashed open and bloody wars for control of micro-trafficking centers. This operational flexibility allowed them to survive police coups and regenerate quickly, taking advantage of the porosity of Latin American borders and the legal vulnerability of migrant populations throughout the region.

Political repression

The most worrying thing about this recent expansion is not only the criminal profit, but also the way the gang appears to have become the armed arm of political repression capable of crossing borders. It is a message of dissent; Leaving Venezuela does not guarantee safety if you are a regime target.

One of the most striking and shocking cases of this large-scale repression is that of Lieutenant Ronald Ojeda in Chile, which occurred in February 2024. Ojeda, a former political prisoner housed in Santiago de Chile, was taken from his home in his underwear by a commando who claimed to be part of the Chilean investigative police.

His body appeared a few days later under a cement slab, inside a suitcase. The Chilean prosecutor’s office, after a thorough investigation, concluded that it was a political crime orchestrated from Venezuela. The outgoing president of Chile himself, Gabriel Boricpublicly assured that “one of the suspects in the assassination is the dictator’s own regime.” Nicolas Maduro“.

A similar pattern, although with a less fatal outcome, was repeated in Bogotá last October. Luis Pechepolitical consultant, and Yendri Velázquezfamous human rights activist and defender of LGBT rights, was the victim of an attack by hitmen in the Colombian capital. Both, exiles and critics of Chavismo, survived a burst of gunfire. As in the case of Ojeda, this attack confirms the thesis of “transnational repression”.

The Allied State

Despite the legal offensive in the United States and the arrests in Spain, the total dismantling of the Aragua train is hampered by a lack of cooperation from Venezuela.

The impunity of the maximum leader confirms suspicions of official protection. Since the military intervention of Tocorón prison in September 2023, the fate of Hector Guerrero It’s an official mystery, but an open secret. He fled with his leaders a few days before the operation, apparently alerted by the government itself. Journalists and analysts agree that he could take refuge in the San Vicente neighborhood of Aragua, one of the so-called “peace zones.” In these territories, the Chavista regime deliberately ceded control to criminal gangs, preventing police entry under the pretext of reducing violence. In this way, it gives them a sanctuary from which Tren de Aragua continues to run his multinational.

The diet of Nicolas Maduro chose to deny everything as part of state policy. In April 2024, your Chancellor, Yvan Gilwent so far as to call the group a “fiction created by the international media”, rejecting its transnational operation. And as long as the refuge in Venezuela continues to be guaranteed by the complicity of the State, the total dismantling of its cells in the United States, Chile or Spain will remain an incomplete task.