Southern Pulse Reacts: US Treasury Department Designates Tren de Aragua as TCO

Yesterday, 11 July 2024, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Tren de Aragua (TDA) as a transnational criminal organization. The US State Department also announced a reward for information leading to the arrests or convictions of three of its publicly known leaders.

If you are pressed for time, make sure to read the section ‘What does this mean for my business in Latin America?’ at the end of this article.

Who is Tren de Aragua, and how did we get here?

Tren de Aragua is a criminal organization that began in the Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua. The prison served as the group’s base of Venezuelan operations, or headquarters, for many years.

As Venezuelan migrants began leaving the country in droves, particularly after 2018, so too did TDA members. As these members began to settle in other countries throughout the Americas, including the US, they began to familiarize themselves with the criminal underworlds in those respective locations. While expanding their networks and engaging in less sophisticated criminal activities such as prostitution, theft, narcomenudeo (retail drug sales), and small-scale extortion, the group began to ingrain itself within the local fabric of communities beginning with the Venezuelan diaspora and then expanding to include local neighborhoods, towns, and cities. 

Earning respect and support from local criminal groups was easy in some jurisdictions, or irrelevant in others. When confronted with a more challenging local landscape, TDA had quite the offer to suggest collaboration with local criminal networks — a massive supply of Venezuelan migrants looking to be moved across borders.

Initially, these migration patterns and TDA support were primarily legal, with the group opening legitimate transport companies, many of which still exist and move people around the region daily. These companies would transport migrants across borders into new countries, where they were received and processed, eventually gaining work permits. However, as the number of migrants continued to grow, more and more countries began to limit legal pathways for Venezuelan migrants, or cut them off entirely. 

• Peru, for example, used to require Venezuelans to apply with their IDs (cédulas) for a relatively easily obtained humanitarian visa when entering the country until 2019. As of 2024, not only do all Venezuelans require a visa prior to arrival, but they must have a valid passport (expired for five years or less) to obtain the visa. This is a significant hurdle for many Venezuelans who do not have passports or whose passports are more than five years expired. Obtaining this visa is required in order to gain a temporary work permit (PTP). Up until November 2023, Venezuelans could arrive in the country and then apply for a PTP.

TDA knew how to move people, and they knew the criminal underworld. So, in response, they simply increased the price per individual transported and set up smuggling operations. 

As prices increased, inability to pay increased the prevalence of trafficking — both human trafficking and the use of humans being smuggled to traffic drugs. Then, COVID-19 shut down borders and smuggling operations had to become more sophisticated, further driving up prices for smuggling services. With a lack of local job opportunities worldwide, more and more migrants decided to take a chance and get to the United States, using South American countries as their launching pad. 

Tren de Aragua is now a Tier 2 transnational criminal organization, but the group shows almost every characteristic of a Tier 1 TCO except for the monopoly on lethal use of force in their areas of operation. Their tentacles touch nearly every economy in the Americas now, and they are the premier human smuggling organization in the region. 

How is TDA structured? 

Tren de Aragua is not a singular organization. Tren de Aragua operates a franchise model, meaning they allow factions to use their name in exchange for a percentage of profits, firepower, or other similar pre-negotiated deals. Sometimes these groups refer to themselves as “trenes” or “tren de X” and other times they do not. Currently, Tren de Aragua factions remain mostly made up of Venezuelans, but the groups’ numbers of non-Venezuelans are growing quickly. Faction leadership remains relevant depending on location, but mapping out a “hierarchical” criminal structure is irrelevant. TDA members have roles and there are local and regional bosses, but this is a flat network and individual groups have significant autonomy. 

How TDA went about their expansion in areas that already had heavy criminal penetration is a question we are still analyzing. At this time, we’re aware of what is likely a relationship between TDA and the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), a Brazilian crime syndicate. This relationship was helpful in TDA expansion into Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay. In Chile, TDA was able to expand easily because local criminal organizations lacked TDA’s level of sophistication. The Santiago airport heist in 2023 was TDA announcing their penetration in the country. TDA’s expansion in Peru overpowered local criminal groups in much of the country, and forced collaboration in others. 

We hypothesize that collaboration between the Gulf Clan in Colombia and TDA is highly likely, given both group's involvement in the migrant smuggling business. We expect similar collaboration throughout Central America and Mexico. The current violence in Chiapas is primarily due to the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG fighting over their shares of migrants, as they operate separate smuggling routes through the rest of Mexico from there.  

How does TDA make money?

As mentioned above, the group’s factions are highly engaged in human trafficking and smuggling, as well as running prostitution rings. However, additional income generation activities vary because the group is not one entity but many groups with varying degrees of connectivity between one another and South American TDA leadership.

• One of the foremost services the group offered, and still remains active today, is money exchange and transfer services. They do this in both large and small volumes, primarily taking advantage of cryptocurrency to move both licit and illicit funds. 
• The group does engage in the movement of illicit goods, such as drugs, cash, and weapons. However, the group is also involved in the movement of licit or legal goods obtained illegally. The group is increasingly active in the extraction and transport of metals from mining concessions in the region, and they’re known for the creation and movement of counterfeit pharmaceuticals or other manufactured goods.
• Like many criminal organizations, Tren de Aragua factions are also known to carry out hits, be involved in organized theft and kidnapping. TDA factions are also engaged in extortion, particularly within areas and neighborhoods heavily populated by the Venezuelan diaspora. However, more recently they have expanded their extortion operations extensively in Northern Chile and throughout Peru, targeting everything from storefronts to high-value assets like mines and oil and gas fields. 

What happens if they capture Romero/San Vicente/Guerrero?

Because Tren de Aragua operates under a franchise model, the capture of key leadership in South America will do very little to quell the spread of the group. Similar to the capo model the USG has pushed in Mexico — arresting the heads of TCOs and watching the fallout — removing key TDA leadership from the structure will likely see infighting between those factions that worked most closely with respective leaders, but not much else. In this case, we expect the fallout to be the greatest in Colombia and Peru, should the leaders with reward offers be found and extradited to the US. 

If these leaders are not extradited to the US, you can expect little to no change. This group started in a prison, currently runs some of their income generation operations from prisons, and leadership would simply continue to run operations from their prison cells in South America.  

What does this mean for my business in Latin America?

If you have operations in Bolivia, Chile and Peru, TDA is going to affect you first, if your operations are not already impacted. Northern Argentina will be next. The group has smuggling and trafficking down — their expansion will increasingly touch licit business primarily through direct and indirect extortion, and secondarily through the creation of licit businesses that may serve as key vendors. 

Let’s set three things straight up front:

1. Since this group is not going anywhere, your first instinct is probably to begin to gather everything you can to learn about TDA. A strong baseline is a good start, but this group is currently widely misunderstood. If you read a piece about TDA and it refers to the group as a singular organization, we strongly recommend disregarding the analysis. 
2. You cannot “monitor” Tren de Aragua because it is not a singular organization. Full stop. If you “add” Tren de Aragua to your “monitor” you’re going to end up with a ton of false positives or hits for information that is inaccurate, misleading yourself and your organization. 
3. Whether you’re a financial institution, a manufacturer, a transport and logistics company, in extractives, or active in tourism, this group will touch your operations at some point. This could be in a few weeks, a few months, or a few years from now. Assuming that because your exposure is “minimal” and choosing to do nothing is a choice you’ll have to sit with once “pineapples” hit the fan. Be sure you’re comfortable with that.

If you have operations in South America, you need to first determine:

1. Is my operation in an area under the influence of a local Tren de Aragua faction?

If the answer is “no,” begin to determine the likelihood that the area you’re operating in falls under the influence of TDA, when that shift might occur, and how. 

If the answer is “yes,” then you need to determine who leads this faction, who do they roll up to, how sophisticated is this faction, and what income-generating activities are they most involved in?

This group has co-opted public security in multiple jurisdictions already. OSINT is not enough for the reasons already mentioned, and if your HUMINT relies heavily on contacts within local law enforcement, proceed with caution. TDA is known to have penetrated law enforcement in several countries.

This group is not properly understood, and the USG announcements today will create a hubbub, with new IRs, new priority areas, and a desire to learn more. All the information you’ve read above in this piece comes from fieldwork across the region from the past five years, not from analysts reading articles behind a computer screen. 

We would love to work with you to help your organization understand its exposure to TDA and how to navigate the emerging threat. But if you take matters into your own hands, be highly critical of your information sourcing on this group.

Across Latin America, Southern Pulse has the experience, network, and relationships to simplify this challenging region with honest, direct answers to your most complicated questions.

Want to learn more? Let’s chat.

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