Spain, “new market” for the Aragua Train, the Venezuelan “terrorist group” expelled by Trump

Gerso is the brother of Héctor Rustherford Guerrero Flores, alias the ‘Warrior Boy’leader of the Venezuelan criminal organization known as the Aragua Train. The Biden administration once described it as a “transnational criminal organization.” On March 15, Donald Trump went further by classifying her as “terrorist organization” and expel 238 of its members imprisoned in the US on deportation flights to El Salvador by Nayib Bukele.

A year ago, the arrest of the brother of the leader of the Aragua Train in Barcelona worried the security forces in Spain: whether he was just tourism, like many other wealthy compatriots who choose Spain as a place to disconnect, or whether he traveled to establish the European structure of the criminal gang based in the Catalan capital was then a mystery.

At that time, however, the discreet lifestyle without great luxuries that Gerso had in Barcelona, ​​already tipped the balance towards the latter. Throughout this year, the Aragua Train has been out of focus in Spain. But according to Julio Borges, an opposition politician living in Madrid, former president of the Venezuelan National Assembly and one of the main scourges of the organization in different world forums, there was a second arrest of a Venezuelan citizen in Madrid, also linked to the gang.

Furthermore, a year after the arrest of the brother of ‘Niño Guerrero’ in Barcelona, ​​extradited to Venezuela in July of last year, this newspaper has learned, from internal sources, that the National Police Follow the activity of members of the Aragua Train in Spain. If Gerso’s intention was to establish the organization’s operations in Barcelona, ​​12 months later it can be said that, in one way or another, he achieved it.

In recent years and according to police sources, Barcelona has become a base of operations for multiple criminal organizations international, ranging from the Dutch Mocro Maffia to the Mexican Sinaloa cartel through the Chinese triads. All these groups see Catalonia as a strategic place to coordinate their activities in the south of the European continent.

“All transnational criminal organizations They look for new markets and new incomesand the Aragua Train is no exception. After a rapid spread throughout the American continent, it is not surprising that they have established their presence in Europe through Spain,” says journalist Ronna Rísquez, the highest authority on knowledge of the band and author of The Aragua Train: The gang that revolutionized organized crime in Latin Americapublished in 2023.

The data that Borges provides, for his part, to this newspaper, are in line with confirming the presence of the group in Spain: “Only in 2023, the Spanish authorities identified 1,466 victims of crimes of trafficking and exploitation of human beings in its territory. “Most of them were Latin American women, and the Tren de Aragua is the main organization on the American continent in charge of this dark business.”

Chavista collusion

To know the scope and danger of the Aragua Train, it is necessary to go back to its origins and the circumstances in which it was born. In the Venezuelan prison of Tocorón, the ‘Warrior Boy’; Larry Amaury Álvarez Núñez, alias ‘Larry Changa’ y Yohan José Romero, alias ‘Johan Petrica’all convicted of blood crimes, decided to form a new criminal gang among the inmates.

In Venezuela, the phenomenon of ‘trains’ as criminal gangs dates back to a type of gang called ‘megaman’, a term that was used to refer to groups of more than 50 and 100 individuals. The ‘megaman’ evolve inside prisons into ‘cars’ and once their members leave prison, they become ‘trains’, because they no longer operate in one place, but have different ‘wagons’.

Through the new ‘train’, the three ringleaders managed to take control of the prison and the area in which it was located, in the heart of the Aragua region. “From the beginning of the 2000s, when it was born, until the Venezuelan state decided to dismantle Tocorón, In that prison there was a baseball field, a nightclub, bars with swimming poolsshops and even a zoo. The prisoners moved around on motorcycles and drugs were sold freely,” says Rísquez, the journalist.

With this, he intends to illustrate that the gang grew and increased its power with the connivance of prison authorities and, presumably, he also did so with that of the Chavista regime, although he has no evidence to prove it.

However, Rísquez recalls the dark history of the regime with armed groups outside the law, as a fact that would not make a suspicion unreasonable: “It is known that the Venezuelan Government has made pacts with the so-called ‘collectives’, which are parapolice groups that have been used for political repression or, in the words of the regime, for ‘operations for the liberation and protection of the people’, which are estimated to have resulted in more than 500 extrajudicial executions over the years.”

In addition to his privileges in the Tocorón prison and the regime’s relationship with organized crime, as a third leg that would underpin Chavismo’s ties with the Aragua Train is that between 70 and 80% of its weapons come from security forces and bodies Venezuelans.

“The Commission for the Disarmament of Venezueladetermined shortly after 2012 that between 70 and 80% of the gangs’ weapons and ammunition in the country’s prisons came from the Venezuelan Armed Forces. They were weapons for official use that had to be in the hands of officials,” says Rísquez.

For its part, the Government of Nicolas Maduro Not only has he denied any relationship with the criminal gang, but he has accused Julio Borges himself of being involved in a human trafficking network controlled by the Aragua Train, to which the politician responds forcefully that the birth and expansion of the criminal group “are linked to the power structure and criminal governance in Venezuela”.

“We not only talk about the circumstances under which the Aragua Train grew and developed, both in the Venezuelan prison system and in the midst of the migratory wave of Venezuelans throughout the region, but there are specific accusations against members of the Government. In particular, in the case of the murder of Lieutenant Ronald Ojeda in Chile, killed by a member of the Aragua Train, one of the witnesses pointed out Diosdado Cabello, Venezuelan Minister of the Interior, for his direct participation in the crime,” says Borges.

Edmundo González y Maria Corina Machadoopposition leaders, described this week in a statement that the Aragua Train is “the executing arm of the Maduro regime” and “a serious threat to the entire hemisphere.”

Immigration and trafficking

After establishing his criminal activities around the Tocorón prison, the humanitarian emergency that Venezuela suffered and led, since then, millions of Venezuelans to emigrate, It also affected the bands.

With a devalued currency and no lucrative activities to engage in in a country mired in crisis and poverty, the Aragua Train saw, first in the illegal mining in border areas, and then on migrants and smugglingbusiness avenues that necessarily involved international expansion.

“They became migrant and drug traffickers. It turned out to be a successful business: they extorted migrants and used them as drug mules. Women, on the other hand, were prostituted and they established trafficking networks wherever Venezuelans arrived,” says Rísquez.

After expanding through the immigration business, it is known that, today, the Aragua train has a confirmed presence in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico, United States and Spain. The scope of their operations and assets in each of these countries, however, is still difficult to quantify since the only news is about the dismantling of trafficking networks or the arrests of some of their members.

Today, according to Rísquez, the organization has nearly 3,000 members distributed in the aforementioned countries. The leadership resides in Venezuelaalthough several of its leaders have died and others, like the case of ‘Larry Changa’, are currently in prison.

The second hierarchical level of the Aragua Train is made up of lieutenants who run operations outside Venezuela and the critical mass of the organization is made up of marginalized young people, mostly from the Venezuelan prison environment.

Twenty criminal typologies are attributed to the members of the Aragua Train, such as kidnapping, murder, human trafficking, drug trafficking, illegal prostitution networks, border crossing control, arms sales and money laundering.

The Aragua Train’s relationship with illegal immigration networks throughout the American continent has focused the interest of several governments in the criminal group, such as Trump’s in the US. According to Cabello, the Minister of the Interior, this Friday, the Aragua Train is nothing more than a Trump administration’s “excuse” to carry out its anti-immigration policy.

Rísquez assures that the US case is not the only one: Gustavo Petro did it in Colombia and Gabriel Boric in Chile. “The Aragua Train is a kind of international scapegoat to attack Venezuelan migrants. This does not stop them from developing criminal activities wherever they arehaving become one of the most relevant bands in all of Latin America.”