March 25, 2025
Until the designation as a “transnational criminal organization” by the US in 2024, the course of the now-disbanded group was narrated by a network of US think tanks, media and funds that constructed a discourse against the Bolivarian Revolution. This construction currently serves to justify sanctions, carry out mass deportations and feed the false idea of a failed state in Venezuela.
In July 2024, when the US Treasury Department included Tren de Aragua on its list of transnational criminal organizations, it equated it with cartels such as Sinaloa or Jalisco Nueva Generación, which have a presence in more than 100 countries and have more than 45,000 members, associates and facilitators.
Among the arguments of the US office, this Venezuelan prison gang — already dismantled — was described as the head of an international network. However, these arguments were less related to the group’s criminal reality than to a sophisticated narrative construction machine, financed from Washington and amplified by international media.
El Tren de Aragua, which emerged in the 2010s as a criminal structure within Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, expanded its radius of action. Described as a multi-criminal gang, this group was involved in various crimes: extortion, internal control of the prison and some drug trafficking.
In view of the existence and expansion of this criminal group, in 2019 the Venezuelan authorities launched investigations into the Aragua Train, which initially operated in Aragua state and then expanded to other regions of the country.
Since then, the Venezuelan state has carried out a two-phase attack against this gang: the first phase involved locating its leaders and dismantling the organization, resulting in the arrest of 28 members and the issuance of arrest warrants for another 46 individuals; and the second phase, triggered after the capture of the Tocorón prison in the Cacique Guaicaipuro Liberation Operation, focused on dismantling the gang’s financial network and was repeated in other prisons such as Yaracuy and Trujillo, as well as Tocuyito.
In the latter operation, raids were carried out, vehicles and property were seized, and 16 people involved were arrested, with 14 in judicial proceedings. In total, there are 44 detainees and 102 with arrest warrants for their involvement with the Aragua Train.
However, by then the international narrative had already turned the Aragua Train into an alleged transnational group, with operational cells in different countries around the world in charge of an alleged trafficking network that stretched from Chile to the United States, transforming it into a “threat” to the great American power.
These claims, however, lack any real basis: they are mere speculations turned into “facts” through a web of financing and narrative and media development linked to the State Department.
Documents and traces of financing show how think tanks, NGOs and media aligned with US foreign policy wove the legend of an organization capable of controlling migratory routes from Chile to the US.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organization funded by the US Congress, allocated some 2.3 million dollars between 2020 and 2024 to projects on “organized crime in Venezuela,” according to its public reports. Among the beneficiaries was the Victims Monitor, a media coalition that includes El Pitazo, RunRun.es, and Tal Cual. This coalition drove much of the initial coverage of the Aragua Train.
In this ecosystem, certain journalists became go-to sources. Ronna Rísquez, author of the book Tren de Aragua (2023), trained at Columbia University and a declared opponent, was awarded a grant by the Gabo Foundation — associated with USAID — and her investigations were cited by the US Treasury to justify sanctions.
Today, although she herself recognizes that there is no evidence that the group operates in the US, her work continues to be referenced in the international media. Similar cases are those of César Batiz and Joseph Poliszuk, Venezuelan journalists in Miami whose reports — funded by the NED — are amplified by CNN Español and El Nuevo Herald.
For its part, USAID financed InSight Crime, a specialized media outlet that published at least 17 articles in 2023 linking the group to the government of Nicolás Maduro, without presenting conclusive evidence. This version was denied even by US intelligence agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), which agreed that the Aragua Train operates independently, with no links to the Venezuelan government. Only the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) partially disagreed, based on information considered unreliable by other agencies.
Open Society Foundations, meanwhile, supported workshops for journalists in Colombia and Peru where the idea of a “regional expansion” of the Aragua Train was promoted.
The modus operandi of this machinery follows a recognizable pattern: think tanks produce reports with alarmist language (“The Aragua Train is the new MS-13”); local media financed by the same NGOs disseminate them and win awards from related foundations; major international media outlets republish the content without independent verification; and finally, US officials use it to justify policy measures.
A specific example occurred in October 2023, when InSight Crime claimed that the Aragua Train “controlled the smuggling of migrants across the southern US border.” Days later, Republican senators used the report to call for additional sanctions against Venezuela. The connection between media production and political action is direct: one only has to recognize the mechanism to see its causal relationship.
This operation was denounced by the Venezuelan president, who even pointed out that the very creation and deployment of criminal gangs such as the now defunct Tren de Aragua are promoted and organized by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from Colombia, to carry out terrorist activities in Venezuela.
Today, the narrative of the “Aragua Train” feeds the kidnapping and deportation — to maximum security prisons suspected of being torture centers — of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants in the US.
While in 2024 the US deported 1,200 people on the grounds of “links to organized crime,” so far this year there have been mass deportations to Guantanamo and the Salvadoran CECOT, without due process and, in most cases, against Venezuelans with no criminal record.
In turn, in countries such as Chile, Peru and Ecuador, governments passed more restrictive immigration laws citing the “threat of the Aragua Train”. The national media insists on blaming this group – now defunct – for the growing crime rate, triggered by the levels of inequality typical of neoliberal regimes. Thus, in addition to criminalization, there is a stigmatization of the Venezuelan population, which is exposed to discriminatory acts.
The unanswered question is why an already defunct gang is being treated as an internationally deployed structure, as if it were one of the few global criminal organizations. The answer seems to lie less in regional security and more in the need to justify sanctions and interventions and to perpetuate the false image of Venezuela as a failed state.
The real winners are the think tanks that secure funding, the media that harvest clicks and the politicians — Republicans and Democrats — who feed their anti-migrant rhetoric. The losers: Venezuelan migrants, doubly victimized: first by sanctions against their country, then by a narrative that criminalizes them.
Source: Cuba en Resumen