The Biden administration on Thursday sanctioned Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua as a transnational criminal organization and offered a $12 million reward for the arrest of its leaders.
The group is accused of committing kidnappings, extortion and other violent crimes against migrants in Latin America and the United States.
“The Tren de Aragua represents a deadly criminal threat throughout the region,” the U.S. Treasury Department said, adding that it often targets vulnerable populations, such as migrant women and girls, for sex trafficking.
“When victims escape this exploitation, members of the Tren de Aragua often kill them and declare their death a threat to others,” the statement added.
Tren de Aragua has its origins more than a decade ago in a lawless prison in the central state of Aragua that housed a number of hardened criminals. But it has expanded in recent years as millions of disaffected Venezuelans have fled President Nicolás Maduro’s government and migrated to other parts of Latin America or the United States.
Authorities in countries including Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, which have large Venezuelan immigrant populations, have blamed the group for a series of violent crimes in a region that has long had the highest homicide rate in the world.
Initially, their focus was on the exploitation of Venezuelan immigrants through loan sharking, human trafficking and smuggling in and out of Venezuela.
But as the Venezuelan diaspora settles permanently abroad, it joins and sometimes clashes with domestic criminal syndicates involved in drug trafficking, extortion of local businesses and murder for hire.
Among the groups the Finance Ministry said it has ties to is Primeiro Comando da Capital, a notorious Brazilian organized crime group that has also been sanctioned by the United States.
Earlier this year, Chilean prosecutors accused the group, whose name means “row” in Spanish, of murdering a Venezuelan army officer who took refuge there after taking part in a failed plot to overthrow Maduro.
“Tren de Aragua is not a vertically integrated criminal organization, but rather a federation of different groups,” said Jeremy McDermott, co-director of Colombia-based InSight Crime, which published a report this month on the group’s expansion.
“It has now become a franchise name for Venezuelan criminal structures operating in the region, and coordination has weakened so much that it is no longer their prison base,” McDermott said.
According to InSight Crime, the group is led by Hector Guerrero, who was jailed years ago for murdering a police officer. Guerrero, known by his nickname El Niño, later escaped and was later arrested again in 2013 and returned to Aragua prison, where the criminal enterprise was then based.
He recently escaped from prison as Venezuelan authorities attempted to reassert control over the prison population.
His current whereabouts are unknown, but the U.S. State Department, which has offered up to $12 million to arrest him and two other gang leaders, said Guerrero and Giovanni San Vicente, another U.S. bounty target, are believed to be living in Colombia.
Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and co-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, warned that if left unchecked, the Tren de Aragua could begin terrorizing American cities as well.
McDermott said that among the nearly 1 million Venezuelan migrants who have crossed into the United States in recent years are gang members suspected of shooting at police, human trafficking and other crimes, although there is no evidence that the group has established an organizational structure in the United States.
“We are now seeing evidence that they have entered the United States. Every day we see reports from Chicago, South Florida and New York that these gang members are here,” Rubio said in a statement. Senate hearing in April.
The White House, in A. A statement Thursday said the Department of Homeland Security had conducted a thorough investigation. better investigate and identify known or suspected gang members, including members of the Tren de Aragua.
Goodman writes for the Associated Press.
