Tren de Aragua; The Rising Venezuelan Mafia

South American gangsters expand into the U.S.A.

When eleven thousand troops stormed Venezuela’s Tocorón prison in September, they didn’t find a lock-up but more like a corporate headquarters and theme park for the mafia known as “El Tren de Aragua.” The gangsters had built a swimming pool, kids play-area, food court, baseball field, bar, disco, betting shop and even a zoo while hundreds of their wives, children and girlfriends would stay in with them. It was scandalous even by the standards of Latin America’s gang-controlled prisons. The inmates also enjoyed a mountain of 16,000 grams of cocaine and a war-worthy arsenal of rifles, grenades and rocket launchers.

Missing, however, was El Tren’s boss Héctor Guerrero, known as “El Niño Guerrero” (Warrior Boy) along with hundreds of gang members. The Venezuelan government released a video of a network of tunnels, which supposedly stretched a stunning five kilometers and led to a dock with canoes by a lake. But there were accusations the government had made a pact with El Tren to let soldiers and police take the prison without bloodshed and the gangsters escape - which President Nicolás Maduro fervently denied.

Either way, the Tocorón scandal shows El Tren is no lowly street gang but a powerful organized crime syndicate, which emerged in Venezuela and spread across the continent. The South American nation boasts the world’s largest proven oil reserves yet has suffered widespread malnutrition under Maduro’s Socialist Party government provoking an exodus of more than 7 million people in the last decade. El Tren has capitalized on the catastrophe, establishing bases among Venezuelan refugees in neighboring countries. And this year, the gangsters set off alarm bells in the United States.

In January, a video went viral of a group of Venezuelan men beating police officers in Times Square, New York. Two of the suspects - Kelvin Servita Arocha, 19, and Wilson Juarez Aguilarte, 21 - are Tren members according to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Another alleged Tren member is a suspect in a murder and kidnapping in Doral, Florida (nicknamed “Doralzuela” for the large Venezuelan community) and another in selling drugs in Chicago. The New York Police Department and federal agencies have put out alerts identifying El Tren’s tattoos and slang.

Historically, gangs such as the MS-13 and Latin Kings were founded on U.S. corners and spread south through deportations, wreaking havoc in countries like El Salvador. El Tren is throwing this on its head, founded in South America and coming north over the Rio Grande. Their arrival strikes a note in the polarized debate over “The Border,” with agents encountering a record 2.5 million migrants and asylum seekers crossing last year and Venezuelans among the top groups.

The links between immigration and the crime wars are complex. Many seeking asylum are themselves fleeing gangs and cartels, who are often linked to corrupt Latin American governments. Cartels run human smuggling and kidnap voyagers through Mexico en masse. Most migrants and refugees who make it keep their head down and work, with studies showing they commit crime at lower rates than most Americans. Yet the spread of mafias like El Tren into the United States is still real and concerning.

In a recorded phone call revised by prison investigators, a woman in Florida was talking to a Venezuelan inmate about El Tren. “Kidnapping, robbing, that is what they do,” she said. “They do it there. They are going to do it here.”

Origin Story

Crime families often have curious origin stories and mutate to become very different beasts. The MS-13 started as a gaggle of teenage rockers in eighties Los Angeles but grew into a transnational force across Central America. The Red Commando began as a fusion of bank robbers and political prisoners under Brazil’s dictatorship and morphed into a crew that sold drugs and ruled favela slums.

El Tren del Aragua was born under the rule of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez when he was a rock star of the international left and used booming oil prices to fund massive construction projects. Among these ventures were a series of train lines including one that went through the central state of Aragua. A mafia emerged among trade unionists to shake down building contractors. Some of them ended up in prisons, especially Tocorón.

“In the popular argot, they started saying, ‘Those are the train [tren in Spanish] people, those are the people of the train of Aragua,’ ” says Jorge Benezra, a journalist in Venezuela with a tremendous body of work on organized crime.

Behind bars, the Tren became the mob that ran the penitentiary, extorting other inmates and controlling contraband. Such gangs have risen in crowded and decaying prisons across Latin America, from Ecuador to Honduras to Brazil. Guards often work with these gangs as they give them bribes and keep a certain order, limiting rapes and robberies. It leads to surreal scenes like in the photo of Benezra below interviewing a boss, or pran, in jail with his rifle.

“Inside the prison, I saw AK-47s, M-16s, grenades,” Benezra says. “They dress however they like. Families can go in for 15, 30 days or even more, without anyone saying anything. They are the ones who really run the internal security. They charge a ‘vaccine’ [extortion payment] to prisoners who want better conditions.”

Through controlling prisons, gangs then control the streets. Criminals know they could end up inside so pay dues to the bosses as a form of insurance. The prisons provide a site where leaders can meet and send orders to their barrios and towns. Rather than taking the gangsters away from crime, penitentiaries become their headquarters.

A native of Aragua, boss Niño Guerrero was convicted of crimes including drug trafficking and the murder of a police officer. He escaped multiple times and was caught once with Venezuelan model and actress Jimena Araya, pictured on her Instagram below. He’s still at large.

Expansion and Evolution

For several years, El Tren was just one of many mobs controlling prisons and subordinate street gangs in Venezuela. But as the exodus picked up during the late 2010s, it became foremost in growing beyond its borders.

Journalist Ronna Rísquez, author of a book about El Tren, describes how they are in eight Latin American countries, including Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Chile. “They haven’t totally taken over these countries but they are present and involved in criminal activities there,” Rísquez told Peru’s RPP radio. “And they have made alliances with local criminal groups.” In Ecuador, they work with gangs connected to the Sinaloa Cartel, she says, in Brazil with the PCC mob and in Colombia with ELN guerrillas. They are accused of unleashing murders across the continent.

El Tren doesn’t focus on just one criminal racket but adapts to anything that can make it money. In Venezuela, they have taken over mining in the south and make profits from the high price of gold. A large number of Venezuelan women who fled the country have gone into sex work and El Tren controls and exploits them. A woman told Peruvian TV they would forcibly keep the babies of sex workers to make them stay on the streets.

As El Tren has gained a fearsome reputation, copy cats have also appeared doing shake downs and other crimes in its name, Benezra says. A mythology has risen around them, boosted by media coverage, and it’s hard to figure how big they really are.

Alleged El Tren members have been arrested in the United States since at least December and alerts have been put out by law enforcement this year. Agents look for tattoos including images of trains, gas masks, AK-47s, the phrase “Real hasta la muerte,” (Real until death / Money until death) and “Hijos de Jesus” (Sons of Jesus).

Venezuelans have been fleeing their homeland and its self-proclaimed socialist government to claim asylum for over two decades. But while the first wave were wealthy refugees who could fly to Miami with their assets, the new arrivals are poorer and crossing the Rio Grande. This is reminiscent of the first wave of wealthier Cubans who fled Castro in the 1960s and the poorer “Marielitos” who came over on rafts in 1980 - as depicted in the movie Scarface.

El Tren’s spread has coincided with changes at home. Venezuela’s murder rate reached a peak in about 2015 when murders topped 90 per 100,000 by some counts, over triple the rate of Mexico. However, the number of killings in Venezuela was down by three quarters last year, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory. Benezra says the decline is thanks to gang members fleeing the country.

“There is a sensation of improved security,” Benezra says. “It’s not because of effective public policies but the emigration. Criminals left for other territories.”

Benezra says that Latin American criminals usually change their modus operandi when they go to the United States and are more low profile as the police are stronger. But he warns they could still be dangerous “With the arrival of crime groups like El Tren de Aragua, American society should be worried about what could happen in the next ten years.”

Copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOutMedia 2024