The U.S. government on Thursday sanctioned the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, declaring it a transnational criminal organization and offering a $12 million reward for the arrest of its leaders.
Washington accuses the former prison group of spreading criminal activities of kidnapping, extortion and human trafficking throughout Latin America.
As such, the Aragua train to the Salvadoran gang MS-13 and the Italian Camorra is on the list of transnational criminal organizations prohibited from doing business in 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 preys on 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.
Hours later, Venezuelan Interior Minister Rear Admiral Remigio Ceballos announced that the brother of the leader of the Aragua train, Hector Guerrero, nicknamed “El Niño Guerrero,” had arrived in the country on Thursday after being extradited by Spain.
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Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab was also charged with munitions, terrorism and financing of terrorism. He could face up to 30 years in prison, the maximum sentence in the South American country.
Guerrero was wanted under an Interpol red alert, which notifies police around the world about fugitives, until Spain’s national police announced his capture in Barcelona in mid-March and confirmed his return to Venezuela today.
The Aragua train originated in Venezuela’s chaotic prisons but has expanded in recent years with millions of desperate Venezuelan migrants fleeing President Nicolas Maduro’s government and settling elsewhere in Latin America or the United States.
Authorities in countries including Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, which have large populations of Venezuelan immigrants, blame the group for a series of violent crimes in a region that for years has had the highest homicide rate in the world.
Initially, it was dedicated to the exploitation of Venezuelan immigrants through loan sharking, human trafficking and the smuggling of goods to and from Venezuela.
But once the Venezuelan diaspora has settled permanently abroad, it joins and sometimes clashes with local criminal syndicates dedicated to drug trafficking, extortion of local businesses and contract killings.
The Finance Ministry says the group has partnered with groups including Primeiro Comando da Capital, a notorious Brazilian organized crime group also sanctioned by the United States.
Venezuelan officials, including Foreign Minister Ivan Gil, have said that repeated claims of the group’s criminal activities in other countries are “a fiction created by the international media.” The Venezuelan government says that even though its leaders escaped from the Tocoron prison, the Aragua train was dismantled last September after the military took over the Tocoron prison, where they had control, so it cannot be done on a large scale outside Venezuela.
Earlier this year, Chilean prosecutors accused the group of murdering a Venezuelan army officer who had taken refuge in that country after participating in a failed plot to overthrow Maduro.
“The Aragua gang is not a vertically integrated criminal organization, but rather a federation of different groups,” said Jeremy McDermott, co-director of InSight Crime in Colombia, which published a report this month on the group’s expansion.
“It has now become a franchise name for Venezuelan criminal organizations operating in the region, and coordination has weakened now that its prison base no longer exists,” 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 alias “El Niño,” later escaped and was later arrested again in 2013 and returned to Aragua prison, where the gang was then based.
He recently escaped from prison as Venezuelan authorities attempted to regain control of their 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 it believes Guerrero and Giovanni San Vicente, another U.S. bounty target, are in Colombia.
Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and co-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, warned that if left unchecked, the Aragua train could also begin terrorizing American cities.
Among the nearly 1 million Venezuelan migrants who have crossed into the United States in recent years are members of gangs involved in police shootings, human trafficking and other crimes, although there is no evidence that the group has established an organizational structure in the United States. It does not exist, according to McDermott.
“We are now seeing evidence that they have arrived in the United States. Every day we see reports from Chicago, South Florida and New York that these gang members are already here,” Rubio said during a Senate hearing in April.
In a statement released Thursday, the White House announced that the Department of Homeland Security has enhanced systems to better detect and identify known or suspected gang members, including members of the Aragua train.
