Venezuelan Tren de Aragua and Cartels Collide with U.S. Crackdown

After U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, Donald Trump framed it as the opening move in a broader war on “narco-terror.” But in Venezuela and across the region, the labels Cartel de los Soles and Tren de Aragua carry politics, fear, and uncertain truths.

A Raid In Caracas and A Narrative in Washington

The image, a sitting president seized in his own capital, serves both as a powerful political symbol and a lived reality. On Saturday, President Trump stated that capturing Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores during the military operation in Caracas formed part of a calculated offensive intended, among other objectives, to dismantle the Cartel de los Soles, which he attributed to Maduro’s leadership. This framing foregrounds the strategic logic of linking criminal allegations to high-profile state action, bridging immediate events with broader policy intent.

For the United States, this strategic framing transforms Venezuela from a sanctioned authoritarian state into a newly designated battlefield in an expanding campaign against “narco-terrorism.” The Cartel de los Soles, as described, becomes a symbol of criminality fused to the state—allegedly composed of military and government elite, accused of supporting transnational criminal outfits. Caracas, meanwhile, repudiates these charges—revealing the contest over narrative and legitimacy at the heart of the conflict.

The name itself has always sounded like folklore with a razor inside it. It comes from the sun insignias worn by Venezuelan generals, symbols of rank that have become a metaphor for a network. The first public allegations date back to 2004, when journalist Mauro Marcano accused officers in the National Guard of participating in drug trafficking. From there, the idea of a “cartel” moved through Venezuelan politics like a ghost story: whispered, weaponized, dismissed, then revived whenever Washington needed a narrative with teeth.

In 2025, according to the text, the United States officially designated the Cartel de los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) after previously classifying it as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT). It was not an abstract bureaucratic step. It was a public claim about who controls the Venezuelan state and what that control is used for.

In the same document excerpt included in the text, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the action “further exposes” what he called the “illegitimate Maduro regime’s facilitation of narco-terrorism” through groups like Cartel de los Soles, and pledged further pressure on Tren de Aragua, Sinaloa Cartel, and their facilitators. The language matters because it draws a straight line from criminal networks to a justification for state-level force.

The Taxonomy of Terror and The Politics of Designation

The text describes Tren de Aragua as a transnational criminal group originating in Venezuela, considered the country’s most powerful gang. It was born in the Tocorón prison in the state of Aragua, where it consolidated under the leadership of Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, known as “Niño Guerrero.” Its structure, hierarchical and disciplined, replicated beyond prison walls and spread outward, especially from 2018, across Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, and, more recently, Spain and Argentina.

That expansion, the text argues, traveled on the backs of Venezuelan migrants fleeing the country, a detail that is easy to distort if you want a clean villain story. Migration is not criminality, but criminal groups can parasitize mass displacement. The text says the gang oversaw and profited from cells established in multiple South American countries, exploiting the desperation of people crossing borders, charging extortion fees, and inserting itself into smuggling and trafficking economies. In border zones, it fought for control of clandestine crossings, trochas, and the criminal markets clustered around them.

The gang’s myth grew partly because the state itself, according to the text, practiced an unofficial policy of handing control of certain prisons to crime bosses known as pranes. Under Niño Guerrero, Tocorón became notorious, reportedly housing a zoo, swimming pool, playground, restaurant, and nightclub, details that sound absurd until you remember how prison governance can collapse when the state bargains with violence.

In September 2023, the Venezuelan government sent 11,000 police and military personnel, backed by armored vehicles, to storm Tocorón and retake the prison. The text says leadership escaped, and the transnational cells continued to operate. The strike looked like the end of an era. Instead, it may have been a pivot, turning a prison-based hierarchy into a more dispersed network that can survive by fragmenting.

The United States has folded this criminal story into its own domestic political playbook. The text states that in February 2025, Washington designated both Tren de Aragua and Sinaloa Cartel as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs), and describes Tren de Aragua as involved in illicit drug trade, smuggling, trafficking, extortion, sexual exploitation, and money laundering. It notes that the Sinaloa Cartel is one of Mexico’s oldest and most powerful cartels, responsible for trafficking fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, and other drugs, and for widespread violence.

Then comes the most politically combustible claim in the text: that in March 2025, the White House invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, asserting that Tren de Aragua had “invaded” the United States under the direction of Maduro. Under that logic, hundreds of Venezuelan migrants were deported to El Salvador for alleged ties to the gang, often without concrete evidence presented. In Latin America’s memory, this reads like a familiar pattern: a criminal label expanding until it becomes a migratory policy tool, with ordinary people caught in the dragnet.

Regional Echoes from Buenos Aires to Havana

Designations do not land evenly across the hemisphere. The text says governments, including Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru, backed the U.S. decision to classify the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization, while Venezuela and Cuba rejected the accusation, calling it an “invention” or “fetish” of Washington.

This split is not merely ideological. It is also about proximity to violence, political alignment, and the domestic need to be seen as “tough” in a region that has spent decades living with organized crime. Linking Maduro to narco-terrorism offers an easy storyline for governments that want to frame security policy as moral clarity.

The text also notes that in the context of the 2025 designation, the United States offered a $50 million reward for information leading to the capture of Maduro and other members of the alleged group. Up to the beginning of 2026, it says, the Cartel de los Soles remained under international investigations and accusations, especially after Maduro’s capture in a U.S. military operation, which governments in Argentina and Ecuador tied directly to the fight against narco-terrorism in the region.

In this context, the capture functions as more than an isolated event; it becomes central to a campaign narrative, underscoring how symbolic victories reinforce policy agendas.

But the Venezuelan state’s position, as described in the text, is absolute: it denies the accusations, insists Tren de Aragua was dismantled and “defeated,” and portrays international claims as political aggression. That denial coexists uneasily with other details in the text citing regional security reporting and InSight Crime assessments that Tren de Aragua remains an active threat, described as Venezuela’s most powerful homegrown criminal actor, present in at least 16 states, with more than 100 federal investigations open in the United States.

Even the gang’s leadership story reads like unresolved tension. Niño Guerrero escaped before the September 2023 operation and remains at large. The text says the U.S. State Department offered a $3 million reward in July 2024 for information on Giovanny San Vicente, known as “Giovanny” or “El Viejo,” naming him as one of three leaders and suggesting U.S. intelligence believes key figures may be hiding in Colombia. The geographic uncertainty is not incidental. It is what makes the gang both feared and hard to defeat: a threat that can be everywhere because it is never fully located.

What changes now, after a president is captured, is the scale of consequences. When a state is publicly described as a cartel, every institution becomes suspect: the military, intelligence, the legislature, and the courts. The text explicitly claims the alleged cartel corrupted parts of the Venezuelan state to traffic narcotics into the United States. That is an accusation not simply of criminality, but of a captured government, a claim that, if accepted, turns international law into a blunter instrument.

Across Latin America, people understand what happens when security language expands without guardrails. It can justify raids. It can justify deportations. It can justify a new generation of interventions dressed as moral necessity. And it can also be used by authoritarian governments to dismiss all criticism as foreign aggression.

That is why the Venezuelan story in 2026 is not only about whether criminal networks exist; they do, and the text describes them in detail, but also about what happens when those networks are fused to the identity of the state itself. In the space between Caracas and Washington, the labels become weapons, and the ordinary people, the migrants on the road, the families under sanctions, the communities living under extortion, are left to absorb the shockwaves of a battle they did not choose.

Also Read: Cuba After Maduro’s Ouster Braces for Blackouts, Hunger, and Hope