Articles of Distraction

[Angrboda]

A decade earlier, a team of Venezuelan police officers, out on a routine patrol along a beach in the state of Aragua, spotted a luxury yacht floating placidly off the coast. When they boarded the vessel, one of the officers later told the Venezuelan journalist Ronna Rísquez, a passenger identified himself as Héctor Guerrero Flores. The officers knew him by his nom de guerre: El Niño Guerrero, the head of the prison gang Tren de Aragua. He was supposed to be in pretrial detention in Tocorón, a prison thirty miles away, for multiple alleged crimes, including attempted murder. Guerrero produced a document from the ministry of prisons that granted him permission to travel. When the officers called their bosses, the order they received was unequivocal: “Withdraw.”

At the time, many of Venezuela’s prisons were governed from the inside by an inmate known as a pran—which, according to some sources, is an acronym that roughly translates to “natural-born killer.” The gang that forms around him is called a carro, or car. It operates outside the prison through affiliated groups, controlling territory and generating revenue through extortion and drug sales. According to Andrés Antillano, a professor of criminology at the Central University of Venezuela, these cars, strung together in the service of the pran, make up a tren, or train. There are several such operations across the country, each bearing the name of the state or region where it operates.

Tren de Aragua, which was founded by Guerrero and four close associates, first came to the attention of Venezuelan law enforcement around 2014. Aragua, an industrial state with a large military presence, offered a number of geographic and material advantages to a burgeoning criminal enterprise. Money flowed to Tren de Aragua from gold mines that it controlled and from taxes that its members imposed on local businesses. In other states across the country, convicts were funnelled into a range of different facilities, but in Aragua the system was more centralized, and the main prison was Tocorón. As a result, the gang was able to rapidly grow its ranks: virtually everyone sentenced for criminal activity would, at some point, need to submit to the authority of its pran.

By 2017, a sharp drop in oil prices, coupled with catastrophic government mismanagement, had led to extreme inflation and an economic collapse in Venezuela. There were food shortages and power outages; a bottle of ketchup might cost nine dollars, while the monthly minimum wage was six dollars. More than seven million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past decade, an exodus that has reshaped life and politics across Latin America.

For criminal organizations, mass migration created a new business model. Tren de Aragua, Rísquez writes, managed “to follow those who emigrated, by land, to other countries in Latin America, mixing in with them and applying their strategies to impose control in each place they reached.” Starting in 2018, authorities in Peru, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil reported incidents involving Tren de Aragua. The gang’s operations were expanding to include the trafficking of migrants and prostitution. A few years later, the body of a former Venezuelan military officer and opposition figure was found in a suitcase in Santiago. Chilean prosecutors accused Tren de Aragua of carrying out the hit.

But, for the most part, the gang’s influence outside Venezuela amounted to disparate groups operating under the Tren de Aragua banner, either as minor partners in smuggling or drug-dealing rings or as something more akin to franchisees—independently run local organizations that used the name of the broader brand. One of the enduring principles of gangland public relations is that there’s no such thing as bad press; in fact, the more people talk about a criminal group, the easier it becomes to intimidate potential victims. “Tren de Aragua is phantasmagorical,” Antillano told me. “It’s everywhere. It has no face, no clear expression. It can be molded.”

In 2022, when record numbers of Venezuelans began making the overland journey to Central America and the United States, Tren de Aragua was reported to be active on the outskirts of the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle linking Colombia and Panama. That October, the Department of Homeland Security got its first tip about Tren de Aragua, from an investigation in Lima, Peru. “We were seeing criminal activity following the Venezuelan diaspora,” a former high-ranking D.H.S. official told me. It would be a year before government intelligence suggested that the gang was present in the U.S. Another former D.H.S. official told me that the department ultimately estimated that there were about a thousand potential members in the country. “Even then,” he said, “the connections to the gang were weak or spurious.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/...-the-state