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Tren de Aragua
“Very, very dangerous people”
Who or what is the Tren de Aragua? In an interview with news network CNN on 21 March this year US President Donald Trump had his answer: “They’re a group of thugs. They come from the prisons of Venezuela. They’re very, very dangerous people…They are tough people, they’re bad people. We don’t want them in our country.” A week earlier Trump had made a more formal statement claiming the Tren (TdA) “is a foreign terrorist organisation…a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion and predatory incursion into the United States”. Separately the US president also stated that “TdA has been sent here by the hostile Maduro regime in Venezuela…and is conducting Irregular Warfare” against the US.
- “Very, very dangerous people”
- The context: a country in a state of collapse
- Origins: Tocorón prison
- A dystopian hotel?
- The prison business model
- Death of the Tren?
- Life after death: international expansion
- The Ronald Ojeda story
- Donald Trump’s ‘invasion model’
- Unfair deportation: the Kilmar Abrego story
- Is there a connection between crime and migration?
- Conclusion: answering four key questions