What is the Venezuelan gang directed by Trump?

In September 2023, the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, sent 11,000 soldiers to assault the bump prison in the northern state of Aragua. But they were not sent to calm a riot.

The troops were recovering the prison control of a powerful gang that had made it a kind of resort, complete with zoo, restaurants, disco, betting store and pool.

But the gang chief, Héctor Guerrero Flores, escaped.

Now the Train of Aragua organization is in the sight of the impulse of President Donald Trump to eliminate foreign criminals in the United States as part of his promise to deliver massive deportations of illegal immigrants.

This is what we know on Aragua train.

Aragua Train was originally a prison gang that Héctor Guerrero Flores became a “transnational criminal organization,” according to the United States Department of State, which offers a $ 5 million reward for information that could lead to its arrest.

Guerrero Flores, 41, was inside and out of bump for more than a decade.

He escaped in 2012 by a guard and was then collected in 2013. Upon his return, he transformed the prison into an leisure complex.

And expanded the influence of the gang far beyond the doors of the prison, taking advantage of the control of the gold mines in the state of Bolívar, the drug corridors on the Caribbean coast and the clandestine border crossings between Venezuela and Colombia, according to the State Department of the United States.

The name of the gang is translated as “Train of Aragua”, and may have come from a trade union of rail workers.

Luis Izquiel, professor of Criminology at the Central University of Venezuela, told the BBC that the union controlled a section of the railroad that Cruba Aragua and extorted contractors and sell work in work sites.

Aragua Train has expanded under the leadership of Guerrero Flores to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile and diversified from extorting migrants to sexual trafficking, contract murder and kidnapping.

According to most of the stories, Train de Aragua spread from Venezuela when the country entered a humanitarian and economic emergency in 2014 that caused the crime to be less profitable, and now it is believed that it has nodes in eight other countries, including the United States.

Ronna Rísquez, a journalist who has written the final book about the group, estimated last year that the organization has 5,000 members and annual profits of between $ 10 million and $ 15 million.

Others have estimated their membership in approximately half of that figure.

A prosecutor in Chile has called for a “brutal organization” that uses murder and torture to achieve its objectives.

Although it is smaller or less rich than other criminal groups in Latin America, Aragua Train is often compared to the Ultra Violent MS-13 gang of El Salvador.

The members of the Train of Aragua have been accused of dressing as Chilean police officers and then kidnap the military officer of the Venezuelan opposition Ronald Ojeda, whose body was found buried in Santiago, Chile, in March 2024.

The United States Treasury, under the then President Joe Biden, sanctioned Tren de Aragua last summer, saying that the gang was involved in the sexual trap on the border of the United States.

On Saturday, Trump invoked the performance of the alien enemies of the 18th century while accused of a “perpetrate, try and threaten an invasion of the predatory raid against the territory of the United States.”

He said the gang was involved in the “irregular war” against the United States in the direction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

Shortly after taking office in January, Trump has also declared a foreign terrorist organization to Aragua, placing the group in the same category as the Islamic State and Boko Haram, the Islamist militants of Nigeria.

In Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois, they alleged that Aragua’s train members were arrested in recent months and accused of crimes ranging from murders to kidnapping.

Last summer, NBC News reported that the department of Patria estimated that 600 Venezuelan migrants in the US.

As of 2023, there were 770,000 Venezuelans living in the United States, which represents a little less than 2% of all immigrants in the county, according to the Institute of Migration Policy.

Most had received a status protected by the United States government.

Customs reports and border protection found 313,500 Venezuelan migrants on the border in 2024.