Its leader, “El Niño Guerrero,” built an empire in prison and remains unaccounted for.
The Aragua Train is now considered Venezuela’s most powerful criminal gang, with branches in other parts of Latin America and echoes even in the United States. For the Donald Trump administration, it is a terrorist organization and, since Monday, a military target, as evidenced by the attack on a suspected drug vessel that left eleven dead.
The organization’s origins date back two decades, coinciding with the construction of the section of the Venezuelan Railway that ran through the states of Aragua and Carabobo. The extortionate activity of some union members involved in the construction led to broader abuses and a criminal network that already had its own identity by the time the railway work was completed in 2011, according to National Police reports.
Héctor Rustherford Guerrero Flores, known by the alias “Niño Guerrero,” began directing the group’s operations from the Aragua Penitentiary Center in Torocón, a sort of lawless city from which he faced no impediment to continuing to control the group’s affairs. The government’s unofficial policy of giving control of some prisons to criminal bosses—the “pranes”—allowed the prison to eventually have a zoo, a swimming pool, a playground, a restaurant, and a nightclub, according to Insight Crime.
The Aragua Train began to expand to other areas of Venezuela thanks to alliances with smaller groups and also expanded its hit list of crimes, which now included cases of extortion, kidnapping, human trafficking, migrant smuggling, smuggling, illegal mining, theft, and drug trafficking, initially retail.
In 2018, the cartel took advantage of the security vacuum on the Colombia-Venezuela border to attempt to establish itself in a gray area between the Venezuelan state of Táchira and the Colombian department of Norte de Santander, even at the cost of clashing with criminal groups from the neighboring country. This border had always been a particularly porous area in legal terms, with “trochas” (trails) frequently used for smuggling and the passage of migrants.
The Venezuelan migration exodus also served as a channel for the expansion of the Tren de Aragua (Aragua Train) to other countries in the region, and members of the group began to settle in Colombia, Peru, and Chile.
UNITED STATES INCREASES PRESSURE
The gang’s leader, detained since 2013, escaped from Torocón prison in September 2023, before authorities launched an operation to regain control of the facility. His whereabouts remain unknown, and the United States government is offering a reward of up to $5 million (€4.3 million) for information leading to his arrest or conviction.
Washington, in fact, has had the Aragua Train in its sights for years. The previous administration, led by Joe Biden, already classified this group as a transnational criminal organization, but the current administration, under Trump, has increased the pressure by labeling it a terrorist organization.
Trump has singled out Nicolás Maduro’s government as responsible for the cartel’s activities and has escalated the issue with an attack in Caribbean waters against a vessel from Venezuela that was allegedly carrying a drug shipment. “I hope this serves as a warning to anyone considering bringing drugs into the United States,” the US president warned.
