Ángela Villón Bustamante awoke to a WhatsApp notification on her phone. Still drowsy, she was horrified by what she saw: a graphic video showing the murder of a trans woman she knew named Rubí Ferrer.
The killer shot Ferrer 31 times, recording the murder with her own phone before sending the footage to all her contacts, including Bustamante, a prominent activist in the Peruvian sex workers’ movement.
“I felt a pain in my chest, and my heart raced,” Bustamante said. “I cried out of helplessness and anger because we have been speaking out about this for a long time, and the police have done nothing.”
Police soon concluded that the murder had been carried out by a member of a local faction of Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization with roots in Venezuela which has expanded rapidly across Latin America in recent years.
The gang has become a severe public safety issue in at least three countries outside Venezuela: Peru, Chile and Colombia, with reports of its presence in Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Costa Rica.
It is also thought to have a presence in the United States, where Donald Trump has repeatedly – and falsely – claimed that the gang had taken control of entire apartment blocks in the Colorado city of Aurora.
At a rally at Madison Square Garden earlier this week, Trump claimed that if elected, he would invoke the wartime authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to “expedite removals of Tren de Aragua and other savage gangs like MS-13, which is equally vicious”.
However, experts on organized crime caution that while Tren de Aragua has been implicated in a string of gruesome crimes – including murder, kidnap, extortion, money laundering and contract killings – its reach and influence may be overstated, especially in the United States.
“We have no evidence that Tren de Aragua has set up a series of cells in the US, as it has been done in Colombia, Peru and Chile,” said Jeremy McDermott, co-director of InSight Crime, a thinktank and media organisation that covers organised crime in the Americas.
The gang takes its name for the Spanish word for train – Venezuelan slang for a prison gang – and the state of Aragua, south-west of Caracas, where the group first emerged inside the Tocorón prison in the early 2010s.
The gang started out charging protection money from other inmates before reaching out beyond the prison walls to extort businesses across Venezuela. Its regional expansion – first to neighbouring countries such as Colombia – came as Venezuela’s economic and political crisis forced about 8 million Venezuelans to flee their homeland.
Nowadays, the gang’s primary source of income is believed to come from human smuggling and trafficking. Venezuelan women are forced into sex work to pay off the exorbitant debts charged by the gang for helping them flee from Venezuela. Ferrer’s case in Peru was reportedly the result of a territorial dispute between Peruvian and Venezuelan sex workers in downtown Lima.
The group’s criminal portfolio also includes drug trafficking, kidnappings and extortion.
But it is not a centrally directed gang, said McDermott, who added that the group’s cohesion had weakened further since September 2023 – when 11,000 Venezuelan police and military personnel stormed the Tocorón prison.
Its main leader, Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero, known as Niño Guerrero, managed to escape, and the US Department of State is offering $5m (£3.75m) for information leading to his arrest or conviction.
But Tren de Aragua has still not reached the same level of scale and power as other established criminal organisations in the region, such as Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) or Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels.
“The PCC is one of the most powerful groups in Latin America. Tren de Aragua is not. Tren de Aragua is, as much as anything, a name that is being used by different Venezuelan criminal elements to present themselves as powerful players,” McDermott said.
Venezuelan journalist Ronna Rísquez, who wrote a book about Tren de Aragua, also said the scale of the group’s activities in the US had been exaggerated by “political interests associated with xenophobia and an intention to criminalise Venezuelan migration”.
Social media posts falsely claiming that a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex in Colorado were cited by Trump during the last US presidential debate, even after local authorities had publicly refuted the claims.
Rísquez drew a comparison to MS-13, the violent Salvadorian gang that drew extensive media coverage in the US during in the latter half of the 2010s. “While the gang posed a danger, it did not reach the level of being a terrorist group, and that exaggeration only served to empower it further,” she said.
However, Rísquez cautioned that no other group in Latin America has expanded so quickly into so many countries as Tren de Aragua, adding: “Its greatest danger isn’t associated with its power as a super-powerful transnational criminal group but rather with its potential to generate chaos, common crimes and violence.”
Those who often pay the price for such criminality are other Venezuelans with no links to crime of any kind, said Colombia’s human rights ombudsman, Iris Marín Ortiz.
In Colombia, which has received 2.85 million Venezuelan exiles, the gang’s actions have risen steadily since 2019, in turn stoking xenophobia against Venezuelans in general, Marín said.
“It’s easy to blame problems on a gang’s national origin,” she said.
“But the truth is, here in Colombia, drug trafficking, drug dealing, human trafficking, armed conflict and organised violence exist independently of the presence of migrants from Venezuela.”
