by Jerry Dunleavy
Venezuelan regime claims denying Tren de Aragua’s existence, amplified by state-funded media, clash with mounting evidence of the gang’s ties to Nicolas Maduro’s government, following U.S. actions against Tren de Aragua (TdA) and intelligence disputes. Opposition leaders and international figures allege Maduro’s direct control over the gang’s transnational criminal operations.
When blocking the Trump administration’s further efforts to deport Venezuelan gang members, Judge James Boasberg contended in a March 15 court hearing that “I don’t think the AEA provides a basis for removal under this proclamation” by Trump in part because he believed that “the terms nation and government do not apply to non-state actors like criminal gangs.”
The lawyers for the deported Venezuelans had argued to Boasberg earlier that day in court filings that “the Proclamation [by Trump] cannot plausibly assert that the Venezuelan government or the Maduro regime is itself perpetrating, attempting, or threatening an invasion or predatory incursions. Indeed, the Maduro regime disavows Tren de Aragua and is actively engaged in suppressing it.”
As evidence of this, they cited a January article by the Maduro regime-funded Telesur media outlet, which was titled, “Venezuela Dismantles Criminal Gang ‘Tren de Aragua’ in Security Operation.”
It has long been assessed that Telesur, funded by the Venezuelan government, exists to advance the interests of the far-left rulers of the country. The conservative Heritage Foundation assessed in 2005 that Telesur was “a new satellite TV network funded largely by Venezuela’s authoritarian president Hugo Chavez” and said that “rattling Venezuela’s democratic neighbors and legitimizing the region’s leftist terror movements seems to be its real mission.”
The Boston Globe wrote in 2005 that Chavez “has the oil wealth to influence public opinion well beyond his country’s borders.” The outlet wrote: “His government has given the network use of broadcast facilities and an estimated 70 percent of financing for a regional, 24-hour satellite news channel, Telesur, which began broadcasting Sunday. Supported by the leftist governments of Cuba, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, Telesur is being promoted as a Latin socialist answer to CNN.
“Telesur‘s critics have dubbed the channel TeleChavez, predicting it will be a mouthpiece for the president’s vision of a regional revolution, all the more worrying to some at a time when Chavez is accused of curbing media freedoms at home.”
The Justice Department argued in response to Boasberg’s ruling last month that “contrary to the Court’s initial suppositions, TdA qualifies as a foreign ‘government’ for purposes of the AEA, given its intricate connections with the Maduro regime and its own existence as a de facto governing entity in parts of Venezuela.” The DOJ court filings contended that “given how significantly TdA has become intertwined in the fabric of Venezuela’s structures, it functions as a governing entity in Venezuela” and that “through those ties, TdA has become indistinguishable from the Venezuelan government.”
The Venezuelan government swings wildly between claiming it has defeated TdA and that TdA never even existed to begin with. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil tried to claim in April 2024 that TdA was nothing but a “fiction created by the international media.”
Venezuela’s operational control of Tren de Aragua
Maria Corina Machado, a Venezuelan politician and a leader of the opposition against Maduro, said in a February interview reposted on X that Maduro sat atop the TdA gang: “Does anyone believe that Trump doesn’t know that Nicolas Maduro is the leader of the Aragua Train?”
Machado told Donald Trump Jr. on his Triggered podcast in late February that “the Cartel of the Suns is linked to the Tren de Aragua… But we all know that the head of the Tren de Aragua is Maduro. The regime created, promoted, and funded the Tren de Aragua.”
Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, also a Venezuelan politician and opposition leader who ran against Maduro in the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election, both endorsed Trump’s March executive order and Trump’s assessment of the links between TdA and the Maduro regime.
“Nicolas Maduro, the tyrant oppressing Venezuela, also leads the criminal organizations Tren de Aragua and the Cartel de los Soles,” Machado and Urrutia said in a joint statement, according to Apple and Google Translate. “The TdA’s rise in Venezuelan prisons, and its rapid expansion throughout the Americas, is explained by its ties to the autocratic and criminal regime headed by Maduro.”
The Maduro opponents called TdA “the regime’s enforcer” which “poses a serious threat to the entire hemisphere.”
It was reported by Bloomberg this month that Machado has been “advocating for the U.S. to designate Maduro as the head of Tren de Aragua.”
The Miami Herald reported in March that “a small team of Venezuelans and former U.S. officials with deep connections to police and intelligence in the South American country has been providing information to the Trump administration about the number and identities of members of Tren de Aragua and other Venezuelan gangs headed to or already in the United States.”
The outlet said that this group, which had met with high-ranking Trump officials, made a presentation to his team ahead of his Jan. 20 inauguration “detailing links between the feared Tren de Aragua gang and the Nicolás Maduro regime, and provided official documents obtained from Venezuelan police agencies identifying 1,800 gang members believed to have been sent into the United States.”
Gary Berntsen — a former CIA station chief whose book “Jawbreaker” describes himself as “the CIA’s key commander coordinating the fight against the Taliban forces around Kabul” in 2001 — reportedly told the Herald that 300 of the Venezuelan gang members sent to the U.S. had received paramilitary training inside of Venezuela.
“The Venezuelan regime has assumed operational control of these guys [Tren de Aragua] and has trained 300 of them; they have given them paramilitary training, training them to fire weapons, on how to conduct sabotage, how to use crypto,” Berntsen told the outlet. “They have given them all like a four- to six-week course. They put these 300 guys through that course and that they were deploying them into the United States to 20 locations, to 20 separate states.”
Berntsen told American Greatness last month that the CIA didn’t have access to this information because the agency was not allowed to review it during the Biden era. “The CIA doesn’t have the information because they refused to look at it,” Berntsen said. “We tried to brief them about this three years ago, but they were directed by the Biden Administration to ignore it. And now those officials are trying to undermine President Trump.”
The CIA did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News.
The InSight Crime investigative outlet released a report on the “Rise of the Criminal Hybrid State in Venezuela” in 2023, saying “Tren de Aragua has also received favors from the government of Nicolas Maduro […] And besides Tren de Aragua, groups with different social and political goals, including colectivos, have also established similar hybrid governance systems due to collaboration with government institutions.”
The outlet said that one man whose son was detained in the TdA-controlled prison of Tocoron told them that the gang “maintains control of their communities and enforces the government’s will, much like colectivos, militant civilian groups that suppress political opposition.” A member of TdA reportedly told the outlet that “no one has any idea of the full parallel world that this represents” and that “there is a lot of government involvement.”
Jose Gustavo Arocha, a former lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan military, told Fox News in December that Maduro was responsible for the TdA’s flourishing.
“We have to understand also something of the Tren de Aragua, the TdA. It’s a state-sponsored Maduro regime organization,” Arocha said. “The real boss of the Tren de Aragua is in Caracas, Venezuela. It is the Maduro regime, because they created TdA, and they use the TdA as a blackmail [tool] for any situation.”
Arocha said the Maduro regime’s Directorate of Military Counterintelligence was deploying TdA as an asymmetrical warfare tool — meaning the use of unconventional tactics — to provide itself some “plausible deniability.”
Ivan Duque, the former president of Colombia, said in January, “It’s as simple as this: The Aragua Train is a criminal organization serving the Cartel of the Suns in Venezuela, that is, Maduro’s narco-dictatorial regime. The Aragua Train killed [Venezuelan dissident Ronald] Ojeda in Chile, and everything points to Miraflores [the head office of the president of Venezuela]. Similarly, the Aragua Train is advancing criminal activities in the U.S. Simply put, Maduro’s narco-dictatorial regime is exporting violence, crime, and drug trafficking.”
Former ICE Supervisory Special Agent Victor Avila also told The Daily Mail in March that TdA gang members “are directly connected to the Maduro regime in Venezuela — no question about it. … As a matter of fact, they’re tied to Cartel de Los Soles, which Maduro is the head of. That in itself is enough to qualify them… I don’t like to call them a ‘gang’ because they’re a highly sophisticated network that goes all the way up to the Maduro regime.”
Franqui Flores and Efrain Antonio Campo Flores — Maduro’s nephews by marriage — were convicted in 2016 and sentenced to 18 years in 2017 for “conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.” They were later released by President Joe Biden in a prisoner exchange with Venezuela.
It was reported by Univision in 2017 that the DOJ seized secret communications from the Maduro nephews, and that “these WhatsApp conversations revealed how they discussed dismemberments (‘picados’), their relationship with Venezuelan criminal gangs like ‘El Tren de Aragua,’ the order to execute people, and the precise moment to do so.”
The Heritage Foundation said in 2024 that “the conversations suggested that the TdA functions as enforcers or hitmen (sicarios) for the interests of the Maduro regime.”
Former Venezuelan VP designated a narcotics trafficker
Tareck El Aissami, a former top member of the Maduro regime, became the vice president of Venezuela under Maduro in January 2017. Trump’s executive order last month stated that “TdA grew significantly while Tareck El Aissami served as governor of Aragua between 2012 and 2017” and that “El Aissami is currently a United States fugitive facing charges arising from his violations of United States sanctions triggered by his Department of the Treasury designation.”
The Trump Treasury Department in 2017 named El Aissami a “Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act for playing a significant role in international narcotics trafficking.”
Prosecutors for the Southern District of New York in 2019 charged El Aissami with criminal violations of the Kingpin Act. The State Department in 2020 also added a $10 million reward for his arrest.
The Maduro regime allegedly arrested El Aissami in April 2024 over claims of corruption.
The DOJ said in court filings last month that “TdA’s growth itself can be attributed to promotion via the actions of former Governor of Aragua Tareck El Aissami, who was later appointed Vice President in the Maduro regime.”
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Jerry Dunleavy is the chief investigative correspondent at Just the News.
