Donald Trump announced that the leader of the Venezuelan cartel Tren de Aragua was eliminated on his orders. It is considered one of the most dangerous criminal groups in Latin America.
US President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the United States had carried out a fatal strike on Héctor Rustenford Guerrero Flores, the leader of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua cartel, on his orders. The head of the White House announced this on social networks, TASR reports, according to a report by the AFP agency.
The “swift and deadly” strike by US forces was “closely coordinated with our friends in Venezuela, with whom we work very well,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform, apparently referring to the interim leadership of President Delca Rodríguez.
An attack on the Venezuelan cartel
“As a result, the Tren de Aragua terrorists no longer have a safe haven in Venezuela or anywhere else,” he wrote, without specifying where the attack took place.
Last year, the United States designated the Tren de Aragua group, which also operates in Colombia, Peru and Chile, as a terrorist organization.
Trump and his administration officials have repeatedly accused the gang of being a source of violence and illegal drug trafficking in some American cities. The president has been repeating for months – despite the conclusions of the declassified reports of the US intelligence services – that the Tren de Aragua gang cooperated with the now former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, AP reminds.
Origin and expansion of the cartel
Tren de Aragua was created more than ten years ago in a prison with hardened criminals in the Venezuelan state of Aragua. The gang has grown in recent years as millions of Venezuelans have emigrated to other Latin American countries or the US. The exact number of members of this group is unknown. Countries with large populations of Venezuelan migrants, including Peru and Colombia, blame the cartel for the rise in violence in the region.
However, unlike other criminal organizations from Colombia, Central America and Brazil, Tren de Aragua is not involved in large-scale smuggling of cocaine across international borders, according to InSight Crime, a think tank that tracks crime in Latin America.
