The Tren de Aragua gang started in Venezuela’s prisons and is now spreading fear in the US

By JOSHUA GOODMAN

MIAMI (AP) — Former federal agent Was Tabor says his phone is being flooded with calls from police departments across the U.S. asking for advice on how to combat the growing threat of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

Tabor was in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas in 2012, when the gang was still new and Tabor had barely heard of it.

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Venezuela had long been a major transit zone for cocaine smuggled by Colombian guerrillas, with a leftist government that had close ties to some of America’s most notorious adversaries, from Iran to Russia. So the domestic street gang, while a concern for U.S. embassy staff in their daily movements around Venezuela’s dangerous capital, was not considered a major security risk to the United States.

Now, more than a decade later, the gang has become a threat even on American soil, exploding during the US presidential campaign with a series of kidnappings, extortions and other crimes in the Western Hemisphere linked to the mass exodus of Venezuelan migrants.

“What sets this group apart is the level of violence,” said Tabor, now retired from the DEA. “They’re aggressive, they’re hungry and they don’t know boundaries because they’ve been allowed to spread their wings without any confrontation from law enforcement.”

That is starting to change.

In July, the Biden administration sanctioned the gang, adding it to a list of transnational criminal organizations alongside El Salvador’s MS-13 and Italy’s mafia-like Camorra and offering $12 million in rewards for the capture of three leaders. This month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared Tren de Aragua a Tier 1 threat, ordering state police to crack down on the gang and paving the way for tougher penalties for members. Other states may soon follow suit.

Gang gains notoriety in the US

Focus on the gang took off after security camera footage surfaced on social media showing a group of heavily armed men brazenly entering an apartment in Aurora, a suburb of Denver, Colorado.

That prompted former President Donald Trump to vow to “liberate” Aurora from the Venezuelans who he said “took over the whole city.”

Police have called the reports exaggerated, but have admitted they are investigating ten gang members for their involvement in various crimes, including the murder in July.

Among them is a Venezuelan man arrested in another Denver suburb accused of helping someone steal a motorcycle and pointing an AR-15 at a tow truck driver who asked him to move his car. Another was suspected of stealing designer Gucci sunglasses in Boulder and has a multi-state criminal record, including for carjacking and vehicular assault.

Elsewhere, from the heart of the country to major cities like New York and Chicago, the gang is accused of sex trafficking, drug trafficking and police shootings, as well as the exploitation of migrants.

It is unclear how large the gang is and to what extent its actions are coordinated across state lines and with leaders believed to be located outside the US.

The Tren was born in a notorious prison

The Tren, which means “train” in Spanish, originated more than a decade ago in a notoriously lawless prison for hardened criminals in the central state of Aragua. But it has expanded in recent years as more than 8 million desperate Venezuelans flee economic turmoil under President Nicolás Maduro and migrate to other parts of Latin America or the United States.

One of its founders is Hector Guerrero, who was jailed years ago for killing a police officer, according to InSight Crime, a think tank that tracks organized crime in the Americas. Guerrero, better known by his alias El Nino, Spanish for “boy,” later escaped and was recaptured in 2013. He recently fled prison again as the Venezuelan government tried to regain control of the prison population, and is believed to be living in Colombia.

Authorities in countries including Chile, Peru and Colombia — all with large populations of Venezuelan migrants — have accused the group of being behind a string of violence in a region that has long had one of the highest murder rates in the world. Some of the more sensational crimes, which include the beheading and burying alive of victims, have spread panic through impoverished neighborhoods where the gang extorts money from local businesses and illegally charges residents for “protection.”

Republican lawmakers are making a problem out of the gang

There are now concerns that the group’s ruthless tactics are extending to the US, as members infiltrate the nearly 1 million Venezuelan migrants who have entered the US in recent years.

Eleven Republicans led by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland last week calling for a coordinated strategy by the Biden administration to combat the gang.

“The government’s weak enforcement of immigration laws allows gangs like Tren de Aragua to control routes and exploit migrants,” the letter said.

Venezuelan officials express their dismay

Meanwhile, officials in Venezuela have been following the attention to Tren de Aragua in the US and expressing dismay.

A year ago, the government of President Nicolas Maduro claimed to have dismantled the gang after regaining control of the prison where it was formed. In July, Foreign Minister Yván Gil declared that the Tren de Aragua was a “fiction created by the international media.”

More recently, Diosdado Cabello, a former ruling party leader, linked the criminal organization to an alleged plot backed by the US and the opposition to assassinate Maduro and some of his allies after the July 28 presidential election.

“The United States knows how to conduct destabilization operations,” Cabello said Friday as he announced the arrest of several people, including a U.S. citizen, for their alleged role in the foiled anti-Maduro plot. “Why don’t they stop them?”

AP reporters Colleen Slevin in Denver, Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, and Astrid Suarez in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to this report.