Aragua Train establishes itself as a transnational group , from Chile to Canada

report SRA 2025 / [ pdf version ].

√ The assassination in Chile of former Venezuelan lieutenant Ronald Ojeda in February 2024, may have been commissioned by Chavista Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.

√ There is a confluence of interests between the Aragua Train and the Maduro regime, although only some "functional links" between the two have been detected.

√ The recruitment of non-Venezuelans, the franchising of local groups and the failure of Caracas to provide criminal records makes it difficult to gauge the reality of the group.

In the final stretch of the US presidential election campaign, in the months of September and October 2024, no other criminal group had in the political messages and debates the prominence of the Aragua Train, frequently mentioned by Donald Trump as the epitome of the evils of uncontrolled immigration. Spread throughout Latin America and also present in the United States, taking advantage of the growing Venezuelan diaspora, the brutality of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) in its actions has put it on a par with the main transnational organized crime groups in the region in a short period of time.

agreement his campaign promise, on his first day in the White House Trump signed an executive order designating the TdA, along with El Salvador's Mara Salvatrucha, as a foreign terrorist organization. A month later, the State department added the six largest Mexican drug cartels to that list. The designation domestically empowers U.S. authorities to attack these groups outside their own borders, although there would be serious diplomatic and international law complications with neighboring countries if this were to occur.

In addition to the early confinement of alleged TdA members in Guantanamo, U.S. authorities sent 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador on March 16, for internment in the maximum security prison built by Nayib Bukele in his fight against the maras. The sending of most of these prisoners (in many cases without evidence of belonging to a criminal organization and apparently without previous problems with Justice) in a controversial application of an 18th century law against enemies in a status war put the Trump Administration in conflict with the courts.

Origin in Tocorón prison

The TdA was born around 2004 in the Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua. Between 2015 and 2018, it became the largest criminal gang in the country. With the Venezuelan diaspora, which as of 2018 totals almost 8 million people, the TdA has spread throughout the region - especially to Chile, Peru, Colombia and the United States - constituting a transnational network with its own cells, also incorporating non-Venezuelans and selling franchises to local elements or groups.

A recent research by Douglas Farah and Pablo Zeballos, highlights how the TdA has grown as the 'exoskeleton' of Venezuelan migration: migrating with their fellow nationals, TdA members soon vandalized some of the departure routes, as well as the migrants' environment in their places of transit or arrival. They exploit "the legal and economic vulnerabilities of diaspora communities"; many are young men who see criminal activity as "a way to achieve economic independence and protection from other gangs or host country institutions," says the research. Extreme violence is used to intimidate communities and also to attract local groups willing to identify themselves as part of the TdA in exchange submit part of their illicit profits. The group is manager of homicides, human trafficking, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, sexual exploitation of minors and extortion.

core topic murder in Chile

The kidnapping on February 21, 2024 in Santiago de Chile of Ronald Ojeda, a lieutenant who had deserted from the Venezuelan army, was a wake-up call about the transnational capabilities already developed by the TdA, as well as its possible links with Chavismo. A few days later Ojeda's body was found inside a suitcase, dismembered and buried under five feet of concrete. The allegations of the Chilean government about a possible direct participation of the regime of Nicolás Maduro in the assassination (which, therefore, would constitute a criminal action of the government of one country in a sovereign space of another) have been later documented by the prosecutors, who have witness statements and other evidence pointing to Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela's Interior Minister, as the person who allegedly ordered the operation to the leader of the TdA (Héctor Guerrero, known as 'Niño Guerrero', who would have ordered the work to the faction of Los Piratas).

This court case and the work of the Public Prosecutor's Office in northern Chile, in the area of Arica, where the TdA was soon installed, have made it possible to gather information on the composition and modus operandi of the organization, which has a hierarchical structure in strategic decisions, but flat in terms of the execution of operations. In any case, the lack of partnership of the Venezuelan authorities - especially notorious is their lack of dialogue with the United States - in offering data on their nationals, such as criminal records, makes it difficult to identify the members of the TdA; to determine their extent, the regime of franchises used or the fact that there are criminals who claim to belong to the group just to seek notoriety is not financial aid either.

In any case, as the aforementioned report states, some 350 members associated with the TdA have been identified in Chile, many of them already in custody or serving sentences. Among the cases being processed, Chile has order the extradition of Larry Álvarez Núñez, alias Larry Changa, co-founder of the TdA in Tocorón and detained in Colombia; it is also planning the extradition of some members of Los Piratas, detained in Colombia, Costa Rica and the United States. The gang's activities have been detected in most of the American countries; the US has signed a agreement with Canada to deal with the criminals.

Connection with Maduro

The Degree to which the TdA is linked to Venezuela's Bolivarian leadership has been the subject of discussion. Although the destabilization that the group 's criminality generates in neighboring societies may contribute to the interests of the government in Caracas, with the information that exists at the moment, it should be affirmed that these are probably tenuous relationships of convenience, which acquire a specific commitment in specific operations.

The relationship has been noted by the Trump Administration when arguing for the application of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for the expulsion of alleged TdA members. "Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded increasing control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA. The result a hybrid criminal state perpetrating a predatory invasion and incursion into the United States, which poses a substantial danger to this country," the White House executive order asserted.

Experts like Farah and Zeballos speak only of "some functional links. Beyond some assignments, such as the Ojeda assassination, it would be a conjunction of common interests, since "the role of the TdA for the Maduro regime is best understood as part of a series of asymmetric, low-cost and low-risk tactics that the regime employs to destabilize the democratic governance" of other countries. On the one hand, Maduro would be using mass migration as an asymmetric weapon (as Erdogan's Turkey would have done with Syrian refugees to increase its negotiating pressure on the EU), and on the other, he would benefit from the criminality of the ToA to wear down the economic and social fabric of institutionally more stable countries and thus feed populist discourses and authoritarian solutions that would come to 'normalize' the exceptionality that Venezuela is today. At the same time, terrorizing dissidents outside Venezuelan borders or even dissuading those who plan to emigrate from fear of being subjected to extortion or human trafficking by groups such as the ToD also works to Maduro's advantage.

state sponsorship

A further linkage is estimated by Joseph Humire in an analysis written for the Heritage Foundation, where he refers to the TdA as a "state-sponsored criminal organization born out of Venezuelan government policies, which mix the state with criminal networks". Among the links, Humire quotation a chat that was intercepted to the so-called "narcosobrinos" (the two nephews of Maduro involved in drug trafficking arrested in 2015 by the US, released by the Biden Administration despite the 18-year prison sentence), in which the impression was already then given of using elements of the ToD as hitmen. Humire also warns that one of the suspects in Ojeda's murder, Walter Rodríguez Pérez, previously worked as a bodyguard for Tareck el Aissami when he was Minister of the Interior. It also highlights possible links, at least historically, of Iris Varela, now vice president of the National Assembly and for almost a decade minister of prisons, under whose mandate the TdA grew in the Tocorón prison.

In any case, although Humire uses the expression "state-sponsored" to define the TdA, he does not establish a regular coordination between this organization and the Venezuelan government; the connections seem rather occasional. Nor does it properly endorse the terrorist group label , although by saying that it is "terrorizing" urban and suburban communities in the United States, this Heritage Foundation report has served to push the Trump Administration toward designating the TdA as a foreign terrorist organization. And it is true that some of the ToD's crimes in the United States, where its presence had not been documented until 2021 (its activity has now been recorded in some twenty states), have come as a shock to public opinion because of their brutality.

* An expanded version of a text previously published by the author in the newspaper ABC, March 4, 2025.