Event mapping, criminal actor profiles, and the best of InSight Crime’s content in Venezuela
Tren de Aragua has quickly become one of the most infamous crime groups in Latin America and the Caribbean. Governments across the region have deemed it a top security priority. The United States has labeled the group a terrorist organization and accused it of mounting an invasion.
A border dispute between Venezuela and Guyana is turning violent after attacks on Guyanese security forces. Could the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro be using criminal gangs to provoke an international crisis?
On the night of April 20, 2022, hundreds of heavily armed police and military officials descended on the municipality of Altagracia de Orituco in the central Venezuelan state of Guarico with orders to hunt down the Tren del Llano gang and its collaborators in what the government labeled Operación Trueno – Operation Thunder. But instead of directly confronting the gang, they rampaged through the region, terrorizing and traumatizing the population.
Ten years ago, Tren de Aragua was a little more than a prison gang, confined to the walls of the Tocorón penitentiary and largely unheard of outside its home state of Aragua in Venezuela. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing security threats in South America.
The evolution of a hybrid state in Venezuela, combining governance with criminality, has helped President Nicolás Maduro hold on to power, even as his government has spent years battling near-constant crises. But today, that panorama is slowly beginning to change, and Maduro's hybrid state is changing with it.
The product of five years of fieldwork along the Colombia-Venezuela border and beyond, this investigation reveals the Venezuelan operations of Colombia’s guerrillas and explores the far-reaching implications for both countries of their evolution into Colombo-Venezuelan groups.
In 2013, Nicolás Maduro became president of Venezuela following the death of his charismatic predecessor Hugo Chávez. Since then, the country’s cocaine trade has undergone revolutionary changes.
President Maduro’s plan to help governors fund their states by gifting them each a gold mine soon ran into trouble. In the sprawling state of Bolívar, this led to immediate conflict. The criminal gangs that ran Venezuela’s mining heartland would never surrender. One group, in particular, has led the resistance.
Colombian rebel groups long ago set up shop in Venezuela, seeking sanctuary beyond the reach of the US-back Colombian military. The Chavista regime welcomed them as allies against an “imperialist” common foe. But now some of them have become unwelcome, and extremely dangerous, guests.
There is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “mafia state”. Here are seven arguments as to why we think Venezuela qualifies and what the implications are of this troubled Andean nation as a regional crime hub.
