US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the US military carried out a deadly strike in the Caribbean against an alleged drug boat tied to the cartel Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan group he has long accused of drug trafficking, murder and other acts of violence in the Western Hemisphere.
Eleven people were killed in the strike in “international waters,” according to the US president, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the strike took place in the “southern Caribbean” against “a drug vessel which had departed from Venezuela.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has targeted the gang.
On January 20, he signed an executive order that called for Tren de Aragua and the Salvadoran MS-13 gang to be designated foreign terrorist organizations. Later, the administration added six Mexican drug cartels to the list.
In March, his administration sparked controversy with its move to deport more than 200 people, some of whom it alleged were members of Tren de Aragua, to an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador, even though officials provided scant evidence of gang involvement and many of the deportees denied being linked to the group.
Tentacles spread far beyond Venezuela
The criminal gang originated in a Venezuela prison and has slowly spread both north and south in recent years. It now operates in the United States.
The full scale of its operations is unknown. While the gang has principally focused on human trafficking and other crimes targeting migrants, it has also been linked to extortion, kidnapping, money laundering and drug smuggling, according to the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
For years, Tren de Aragua – also known as “TdA” – not only terrorized Venezuela but also countries such as Bolivia, Colombia, Chile and Peru.
Retired Gen. Óscar Naranjo, a former vice president of Colombia and chief of the Colombian National Police, has called the gang “the most disruptive criminal organization operating nowadays in Latin America, a true challenge for the region,” CNN has reported.
In Colombia, Tren de Aragua and a guerrilla group known as the National Liberation Army “operate sex trafficking networks in the border town of Villa del Rosario” and Norte de Santander, according to a US State Department 2023 Trafficking in Persons Report about Colombia.
The criminal groups exploit Venezuelan migrants and displaced Colombians in sex trafficking, taking advantage of economic vulnerabilities and subjecting them to “debt bondage,” the report stated. Police in the region reported the organization has victimized thousands through extortion, drug and human trafficking, kidnapping and murder.
OFAC said Tren de Aragua members often kill victims who try to escape and “publicize their deaths as a threat to others.”
“As Tren de Aragua has expanded, it has opportunistically infiltrated local criminal economies in South America, established transnational financial operations, laundered funds through cryptocurrency, and formed ties with the US-sanctioned Primeiro Comando da Capital, a notorious organized crime group in Brazil,” according to OFAC.
A challenge for law enforcement officials is the difficulty knowing how many members of Tren de Aragua are already in the US. Some Venezuelan immigrants in Florida and other states have told CNN they are already beginning to see the same type of criminal activity they fled in Venezuela.
Insight Crime, a think tank dedicated to organized crime, said in October that Tren de Aragua’s “reputation appears to have grown more quickly than its actual presence in the United States.”
“Additionally, there is no evidence, thus far, of cells in the United States cooperating with one another or with other criminal groups,” according to Insight Crime. “Authorities have also not revealed any proof of criminals receiving specific instructions from the organization’s leadership or sending money to Venezuela or other foreign countries.”
Gang has railway union and prison origins
