EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Authorities in Chihuahua, Mexico, two years ago began documenting the arrival of members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua to the U.S.-Mexico border.
But it wasn’t until investigators developed a working relationship with colleagues in southern Mexico, El Salvador, Chile and Colombia that they had a clear picture of how TDA operates in the region.
Now they know Tren de Aragua gang members sneak into Chiapas and Quintana Roo from Guatemala and form alliances with Mexican gangs as they make their way north to border cities like Juarez.
“They developed a co-dependence with organized criminal groups,” said Chihuahua Public Safety Secretary Gilberto Loya. “We detected this here when we began to have a large number of migrant kidnappings and extortion – from people who came in the caravans and migrants who arrived by themselves to Juarez.”
Migrants freed from captivity often told Chihuahua investigators their families in South America received calls not from Mexican criminals, but from individuals with accents like their own.
“The local groups began utilizing them to carry out the extortion. We also began to see them adapt with the local cartels to carry out kidnapping and sex trafficking,” Loya said at an online briefing with reporters on Monday.
Texas, Chihuahua’s neighbor north of the Rio Grande, also has expressed concerns about Tren de Aragua operating within its borders. On Sept. 16, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a proclamation declaring Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization. Abbott also directed state law enforcement to create a database to track gang members’ activity throughout Texas.
Police officials elsewhere in Mexico and in South American countries have been telling Chihuahua investigators they’ve had similar experiences with the Venezuelan gang.
“They are (partnering) with the Mara Salvatrucha outside of El Salvador, Barrio 18-Revolucionarios […] Los Bravos del Gota a Gota of Colombia linked to Tren de Aragua in Central Mexico, but we don’t discount they could start coming this way,” Loya said. “(Tren de Aragua) already has operations with people in Peru, in Colombia and, here in Chihuahua, we have them linked to a gang that operates primarily in Juarez.”
Loya did not name the Juarez cartel partnering with Tren de Aragua to “not give them publicity.”
In Juarez, three cartels – gangs that control other gangs and operate across international borders – claim control of every inch of a border stretching from Presidio, Texas, to Santa Teresa, New Mexico. They are La Linea, La Empresa and the Sinaloa cartel.
Earlier this month, the Colombia-based El Tiempo newspaper reported that Tren de Aragua began to evolve from a group of ex-cons to a transnational criminal organization around the time migrant surges and caravans to the United States began multiplying in 2018.
TDA has since established a presence in Colombia, Peru and Chile and is involved in migrant smuggling, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, murder for hire and extortion. The gang may have coalesced in Venezuela’s prison system, but its members were originally railroad workers from the province of Aragua, El Tiempo reported.
Mexico City’s El Sol de Mexico portal reported in July that Tren de Aragua is involved in sex trafficking in Mexico City and provides an array of “services” to migrants headed to border cities like Juarez. The latter range from helping them get on buses headed north without interference from Mexican authorities, selling cell phone minutes and procuring them places to sleep in border cities.
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