by Jerry Dunleavy
Tren de Aragua’s alleged assassination of Venezuelan dissident Ronald Ojeda in Chile in 2024, using tactics linked to Venezuela’s military counterintelligence, underscores the gang’s growing transnational threat and highlights its ties to Nicolas Maduro’s regime and U.S. intelligence disputes. Coordinated with the Cartel de los Soles, TdA’s narcoterrorism activities now threaten multiple nations across the Western Hemisphere.
The Treasury Department said last summer that “from its origins as a prison gang in Aragua, Venezuela, Tren de Aragua has quickly expanded throughout the Western Hemisphere in recent years.”
Trump has repeatedly argued that Maduro has purposely emptied jails in Venezuela for the purpose of sending the criminals into the United States, including in a speech last May where he said that “in Venezuela, their prisons have been emptied into the United States. Their criminals and drug dealers have been taken out of the cities and brought into the United States.”
Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector Intelligence Unit reportedly assessed that “information received indicates that the Venezuelan government released criminals from prison and teamed them up with intelligence and counterintelligence agents to be deployed to the United States to conduct operations on selected targets,” according to a Breitbart report in November.
Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security advisor, said in a Tuesday interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show that “we know that Maduro is emptying out prisons” and that Maduro “has no problem with these gangs coming into our inner cities.”
TdA accused of murdering a Venezuelan dissident in Chile
Investigations of the assassination of a Venezuelan dissident inside Chile have also unearthed TdA links to Maduro. The Heritage Foundation released a lengthy report in late 2024 on TdA which included analysis on the links TdA gang member Walter Rodriguez Perez had with Maduro official El Aissami before Perez allegedly assassinated Venezuelan dissident Ronald Ojeda.
“The methodical, sophisticated, and targeted nature of the Ojeda assassination in Chile extends beyond known TdA foreign capabilities. The TdA can carry out targeted killings on their own, and they have done so in the past, but acquiring authentic Chilean police equipment, including helmets and bulletproof vests, employing countersurveillance techniques, and using technical countermeasures are well beyond the capabilities of a street gang,” the Heritage Foundation assessed, adding, “Walter Rodriguez Perez worked on El Aissami’s security detail in Aragua, making it very likely he was trained by Venezuela’s Military Counterintelligence Directorate (DGCIM). … These details highly suggest that the targeted assassination of Lieutenant Ronald Ojeda in Chile was a joint DGCIM/TdA operation.”
The Justice Department also weighed in on this in April by including analysis from a Trump immigration official.
“TdA’s most notorious alleged crime was the 2024 killing of Ronald Ojeda, a former Venezuelan army officer who conspired against Nicolas Maduro, the country’s authoritarian leader, then fled to Chile,” Marcos Charles, the acting assistant director of enforcement and removal operations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told Boasberg in court filings earlier this month. “Suspected gang members dressed as Chilean police officers abducted Ojeda from his apartment. Days later, his body was found stuffed in a suitcase and buried in cement. The history reflects over a decade of savage criminal activity, vicious disregard for authority, and violent crimes which threaten the stability of order. TdA poses the same terrorizations in the United States as the origin countries from which they started – Venezuela, and now also to include Colombia, Peru and Chile.”
Maduro’s regime has denied involvement, and Venezuelan attorney general Tarek William Saab labeled the attack “a false flag operation that the Chilean State itself covered up.” The Miami Herald also reported in January that Chilean prosecutor Hector Barros, who led the investigation into TdA’s murder of Ojeda, found evidence implicating Cabello and the Maduro regime.
“We always said from the start that given the profile of the victim this was a political event. But the evidence that now exists in the investigation shows that this conclusion is no longer solely based on the victim’s profile. But that the payments [to the gang] were made by the Venezuelan government,” Barros told Chilevision, the outlet reported.
The Herald wrote, “Citing documents from the investigation of the prosecutor’s office, the TV channel reported that key evidence gathered by officials point to Cabello issuing the order to initially abduct Ojeda and later to carry out his execution. The Chilean prosecutor has gathered testimony claiming that Cabello issued the orders and made the payments through Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, a.k.a Niño Guerrero, the alleged head of Tren de Aragua.”
Maduro ally Diosdado Cabello attempted to claim without evidence in September 2024, that the U.S. had actually tried to use TdA to assassinate Maduro: “The United States knows how to carry out destabilization operations… Why don’t they stop them?” The State Department issued a $10 million bounty on Cabello in 2020, and increased it to $25 million in January 2025.
“Diosdado Cabello Rondón is currently Nicolás Maduro Moros’ so-called minister of interior, justice, and peace, having oversight over Venezuela’s police forces and prisons,” the U.S. State Department website says. “After Maduro fraudulently declared victory in the July 2024 presidential election despite evidence to the contrary, Maduro purported to appoint Cabello to this position.”
It was reported by Reuters that Chilean officials met with International Criminal Court representatives last month to hand over evidence about the murder of the Venezuelan dissident which they argued is relevant to an ongoing ICC investigation into alleged human rights abuses by Venezuelan government officials.
Chile’s attorney general told Reuters that Ojeda’s murder “doesn’t have the characteristics of a normal crime.” Valencia said that “all the evidence we have at this state of the investigation lets us conclude that a cell or group linked to the Tren de Aragua that was politically motivated that originated from an order of a political nature.”
U.S.’s long battle against Maduro and Venezuelan gangs
The Justice Department during the first Trump administration charged Maduro, Cabello, and other regime figures in March 2020 over their links to transnational gangs. The DOJ said that Maduro, Cabello, and the others “acted as leaders and managers” of the Cartel de Los Soles — the “Cartel of the Suns” — since the 1990s. The DOJ said that the cartel’s name “refers to the sun insignias affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials.”
“Maduro Moros and the other charged Cartel members abused the Venezuelan people and corrupted the legitimate institutions of Venezuela — including parts of the military, intelligence apparatus, legislature, and the judiciary — to facilitate the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States,” the DOJ said in 2020. “The Cartel de Los Soles sought to not only enrich its members and enhance their power, but also to ‘flood’ the United States with cocaine and inflict the drug’s harmful and addictive effects on users in the United States.”
Then-Attorney General William Barr announced the narcoterrorism charges against Maduro for his role in facilitating the global drug trade in coordination with the Colombia-based terrorist group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — known as the FARC.
Barr said at the time that the U.S. expected to “eventually” gain custody of Maduro and his co-conspirators and made it clear that “we want these defendants captured so they can face justice in U.S. courts.”
The Biden-era Treasury Department sanctioned TdA as a transnational criminal organization in July 2024, arguing that the gang was “expanding throughout the Western Hemisphere and engaging in diverse criminal activities, such as human smuggling and trafficking, gender-based violence, money laundering, and illicit drug trafficking.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated TdA as a foreign terrorist organization in February, along with a number of other gangs and cartels such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), the Sinaloa Cartel, and the New Generation Cartel of Jalisco.
“TdA is a transnational organization that originated in Venezuela with cells in Colombia, Peru, and Chile, with further reports of sporadic presence in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil,” the State Department said in its announcement. “This brutal criminal group has conducted kidnappings, extorted businesses, bribed public officials, authorized its members to attack and kill U.S. law enforcement, and assassinated a Venezuelan opposition figure.”
Maduro’s regime reportedly sent thousands of troops to the Tocoron prison — a key base of operations for TdA inside of Venezuela — in 2023, and claimed to regain control of the facility from the gang. The Maduro government claimed victory over the gang soon after.
An analysis by InSight Crime stated that “it is hard to see this operation as much more than political theater, certainly in the claim that it has dismantled the Tren de Aragua” because “the gang is still intact, its leadership free, and its outposts spread across Latin America unaffected by the operation.”
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Jerry Dunleavy is the chief investigative correspondent at Just the News.
