Is Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization determined to invade the United States or a criminal force expended used as an excuse to target the Venezuelan regime? These two extremely different descriptions of Tren from Aragua are presented respectively by the United States and Venezuela.
President Donald Trump used Tren of Aragua during his successful campaign for the American presidency in 2024, citing the Venezuelan gang as an example of foreign criminal organizations threatening the United States. He used Tren of Aragua to strengthen his call for mass deportations.
* This article is the first in a Nine game survey“Tren de Aragua: done against fiction”, ” The analysis of the truth about the gang, as well as its evolution, its current operations and how it could change in the future. Read the complete survey here.
After taking office in January, he did not waste time declaring the Venezuelan gang, among others, foreign terrorist organizationAnd “an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security, foreign policy and the economy of the United States”.
He followed in March by invoking the law on extraterrestrial enemies of 1798, an authority rarely used, to accelerate the expulsion of immigrants who, according to him, were members of Tren de Aragua. He insisted that the Venezuelan gang “perpetrated, tried and threatened an invasion of predatory foray against the territory of the United States”.
Then in July, the US Treasury Department sanctioned The management of Tren de Aragua, managed by Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, alias “Niño Guerrero”, for whom a reward of $ 5 million is offered, and Yohan Jose Romero, alias “Johan Petrica”, with a bonus of $ 4 million. The declaration insisted that Tren de Aragua “continues to develop”.
In August, the Reward for information Leading to the capture of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, was collected at $ 50 million unprecedented. US prosecutor Pam Bondi justified This premium record by insisting that “Maduro uses foreign terrorist organizations like Tren de Aragua, the Sinaloa cartel and the Suns cartel, to introduce drugs and deadly violence in our country.”
The claims concerning Tren of Aragua out of Venezuela could not be more different.
In July this year, Maduro declared During a police ceremony, Venezuela “finished Tren of Aragua”.
Last year, the Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs Yván Gil said that Tren of Aragua there were no more.
“We have shown that the Tren of Aragua is a fiction created by the international media to create an nonexistent label,” he said.
See also:: Tren de Aragua: from the gang of the prison to the transnational criminal enterprise
These comments were out of the back of statements Made by the Venezuelan attorney general, Tarek William Saab, who said: “Tren de Aragua was too publicized and gave a power that never existed in reality … They built a myth around Tren of Aragua … A matrix who seeks to register it in the state of Venezuela.”
By going through the politicization of the problem, what do we know with certainty about Tren de Aragua?
He was born as a prison gang in Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua. The prisons of Venezuela, once among the most violent in the world, have caused a series of criminal companies led by bosses of the prison known as “Pranes”. Pran is an acronym for “PRESO REMATADO, ASESINO NATO”, “ This translates into “Durnized Prisoner, Born Killer”. These gangs are called “pranato”, which have spread to the penitentiary system, encouraged by the Ministry of Popular Power for the Penitentiary Service (Minister of Poder Popular Para El Servicio Penitenciario) in 2011, which sought to impose order in prisons by putting power on Pranes.
Tocorón prison saw the rise of a pranato led by Niño GuerreroJohan Petrica and Larry Amaury Álvarez, alias “Larry Changa. “”
But these criminals were not satisfied to govern the criminal fief of the prison. They wanted to develop. The second stage of the evolution of Tren of Aragua was to spread outside the walls of the prison and to create a “megabanda” or a supergang, in the state of Aragua. Then, while the prisoners affiliated to Tren of Aragua left prison after having served their convictions (or by escaping as in the case of Larry Changa) various criminal structures with links with Tren de Aragua began to appear through Venezuela. When Johan Petrica left Tocorón, he went south in the state of Bolívar and was involved in gold extraction, taking up a local criminal mining gang called the Las Claritas Sandendato.
The nature of Tren of Aragua has evolved once again in the middle of the economic collapse of Venezuela, which sparked an exodus. To date, nearly eight million Venezuelans have fled the country in what has become one of the largest refugee crises in the world, competing with that of Syria. A small percentage of those who fled Venezuela were criminals, who like their compatriots, were looking for better opportunities, some of whom, like Larry Changa, who were members of Tren de Aragua and had time in Tocorón.
First, these criminals attacked their Venezuelan compatriots while they were traveling through South America in search of work, then settled with them in countries like Colombia, Peru and Chile, establishing smuggling and human trafficking networks, engaging in extortion and drug trafficking on a small scale. When the migration models changed in 2022, the Venezuelans heading in greater numbers for the United States, the Venezuelan criminals accompanied them.
It was not an expansion that was planned by Tocorón. It happened organically. Almost none of the gangs abroad was called Tren from Aragua. However, Niño Guerrero, Johan Petrica and Larry Changa quickly achieved the criminal potential of this expansion, and coordination began between different criminal elements. And when Tren of Aragua affiliated the gangs abroad, like the gallegos in Peru or Larry Changa in Chile, needed more labor, or to connect with human smuggling networks in Colombia and Ecuador, they hold their hands for reinforcements or contacts from Niño Guerrero in Tocorón.
This movement abroad transformed Tren of Aragua into a transnational criminal group, as recognized by the Biden administration in 2024. But at that time, Tren de Aragua suffered a massive change lost its central center and its sanctuary.
