US sanctions a Venezuela gang for spreading criminal activity across Latin America

MIAMI– The Biden administration on Thursday sanctioned a Venezuelan gang allegedly behind wave of kidnappings and extortions and other violent crimes linked to migrants that have spread throughout Latin America and the United States.

The United States also offered a $12 million reward for the arrest of three leaders of the Tren de Aragua, which now joins El Salvador’s MS-13 gang and Italy’s mafia-style Camorra on a list of transnational criminal organizations. those prohibited from doing business in the United States

“The Aragua Train represents a deadly criminal threat throughout the region,” the US Treasury Department said in a statement, adding that it often preys on vulnerable populations, such as migrant women and girls, for sex trafficking.

“When victims try to escape this exploitation, members of the Tren de Aragua often kill them and publicize their deaths as a threat to others,” the statement added.

The Aragua Train has its origins more than a decade ago, in an infamous and anarchic prison in the central state of Aragua, where several hardened criminals were held. But it has expanded in recent years as millions of desperate Venezuelans fled. The government of President Nicolás Maduro and emigrated to other parts of Latin America or the United States.

Authorities in countries such as Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, with large populations of Venezuelan immigrants, have accused the group of being behind a wave of violent crime in a region that has long had some of the highest murder rates in the world.

Initially their goal was to exploit Venezuelan immigrants through usury, human trafficking, and smuggling of goods to and from Venezuela.

But as the Venezuelan diaspora has settled more permanently abroad, it has joined (and sometimes clashed) with local criminal syndicates dedicated to drug trafficking, extortion of local businesses and contract killings.

Among the groups the Treasury Department said the gang has associated with is Primeiro Comando da Capital, a notorious Brazilian organized crime group that has also been sanctioned by the United States.

Earlier this year, Chilean prosecutors blamed the gang, whose name means “train” in Spanish, for the murder of a Venezuelan army officer who had sought refuge in that country after participating in a failed plot to overthrow Maduro.

“The Tren de Aragua is not a vertically integrated criminal structure, but rather a federation of different gangs,” said Jeremy McDermott, co-director of Colombia-based InSight Crime, which this month published a report on the gang’s expansion.

“It has now become a franchise name for Venezuelan criminal structures operating in the region, with coherence weakened now that its prison base no longer exists,” McDermott said.

The group is led by Héctor Guerrero, who was imprisoned years ago for killing a police officer, according to InSight Crime. Guerrero, better known by his alias El Niño, later escaped and was later recaptured in 2013, returning to the Aragua prison where the criminal enterprise was then based.

He fled prison again more recently, as Venezuelan authorities attempted to reassert control over their prison population.

His current whereabouts are unknown, but the U.S. State Department, which has offered up to $12 million for his arrest and that of two other gang leaders, said it believes Guerrero and Giovanny San Vicente, another target of the reward American, they are alive. In colombia.

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida and co-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, warned that if left unchecked, the Aragua Train could also begin to terrorize American cities.

Among the nearly 1 million Venezuelan immigrants who have crossed into the United States in recent years are suspected gang members linked to police shootings, human trafficking and other crimes, although there is no evidence the gang has established an organizational structure in the United States. McDermott said.

“Now we are seeing evidence that they have reached the United States. Every day we see reports from Chicago, South Florida and New York that these gang members are here,” Rubio said at a news conference. Senate hearing in April.

The White House, in a Thursday’s statement said the Department of Homeland Security has implemented enhanced controls. to better screen and identify known or suspected gang members, including members of the Tren de Aragua.

Maduro’s government has accused its opponents of exaggerating the reach of the Aragua Train to tarnish its reputation and said authorities dismantled the group last year when security forces regained control of the prison that had served as a center of activities. illicit.

Hours after the United States sanctioned the gang, the government announced that a brother of the gang leader, who was arrested in Barcelona earlier this year, arrived home in compliance with an extradition request from Venezuela to Spain.

Attorney General Tarek William Saab said Gerso Guerrero, who was arrested earlier this year in Barcelona, ​​faces up to 30 years in prison (the maximum in Venezuela) on multiple criminal charges including extortion, money laundering, trafficking weapons and terrorism.

___

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean on