Andean Group - July 2026

A US air strike which took out the leader of the transnational organised crime group Tren de Aragua in Venezuela on 12 June is unlikely to have dealt a fatal blow to the group, which President Donald Trump’s administration designated as a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO) in February 2025. However, the operation, which was carried out in coordination with the Venezuelan authorities, did raise questions over whether the country could become a new frontier in Washington’s efforts to combat criminal groups in Latin America.

Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, alias ‘Niño Guerrero’, was killed in a strike that President Trump said was carried out by US forces in collaboration “with our friends in Venezuela”. Writing on social media, Trump said that the decision to “execute” Guerrero showed that “Tren de Aragua terrorists no longer have safe haven in Venezuela or anywhere else”. He shared footage of a building in a rural area erupting into a fireball.

Venezuela’s communications ministry said that the strike had taken place in the south-east of Bolívar state. It described the action as a “joint operation between Venezuelan and US security entities” and said it was the result of intelligence sharing. It also said that the operation “resulted in clashes” with criminals, seemingly diverging from Trump’s description of it as a “swift and lethal kinetic strike”.

Guerrero founded Tren de Aragua in 2013 and oversaw its rise from a prison gang, based out of the Tocorón penitentiary in Aragua state, into a transnational criminal enterprise. Over the next decade the group expanded significantly alongside mass migration from Venezuela, establishing a foothold in countries from Chile to the US. Amid rising international concern over the Tren de Aragua’s spread, the gang became a feature of anti-immigration rhetoric across much of the hemisphere. Trump’s social media post leaned heavily into this theme, accusing his predecessor Joe Biden (2021-2025) of having “opened our southern border to millions of illegal criminals, and allowed this foreign army to rape, maim, and murder American citizens with total impunity”.

Tren de Aragua has come under escalating pressure since being categorised as an FTO by the US in February last year, with this designation echoed by Trump allies in Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, and Trinidad and Tobago. The Trump administration has said that the Tren de Aragua is a key target in the air strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats which began in September 2025 and which numbered 66 as of 1 June, resulting in 215 deaths, according to a tally by The New York Times. The group’s alleged ties to the government of Venezuela’s former president Nicolás Maduro (2013-2026) were also repeatedly referenced by US officials in the run-up to the January military raid on Caracas to seize Maduro and bring him to the US to face drug trafficking charges [SSR-26-01].

Maduro’s successor, President Delcy Rodríguez, has been extremely amenable to US demands on issues ranging from mining and hydrocarbon reforms to the extradition of fugitives wanted by the US, and it follows that she would also take a tougher stance against Tren de Aragua than her predecessor. Maduro made a great show of a huge military raid on the Tocorón prison in September 2023, with the aim of dismantling the gang’s criminal headquarters. However, it later transpired that several high-profile members, including Guerrero, had escaped in the days leading up to the raid, fuelling speculation that the operation was more of a spectacle than anything else and that the plan may have been shared with the gang in advance.

By collaborating with a US air strike on Venezuelan soil, Rodríguez has banged another nail in the coffin of the anti-Americanism that characterised Venezuelan diplomacy under Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez (1999-2013). The military operation will no doubt cause unease among some in the ruling Chavista movement – not least the hardline interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, who has repeatedly claimed that the Tren de Aragua is a fiction invented by the US to justify sanctions and regime change. Speaking on 17 June, five days after the air strike, Cabello claimed that “there was no Tren de Aragua here – it was thrown out of Venezuela,” adding, in an allusion to Guerrero: “One person remained… unfortunately for him and his followers”.

What impact will Guerrero’s death have?

The Tren de Aragua is a sprawling, transnational group that operates in an atomised structure and is far removed from the prison gang that Guerrero founded in 2013. As such, his death is unlikely to have a major impact on the group’s day-to-day activities. Jeremy McDermott, co-director of specialist website Insight Crime, described the gang in the ‘Insight Take’ podcast on 15 June as a “franchise” that is “associated with [a] brand of hyperviolence”. As a result, he argued, Guerrero’s killing “has a huge amount of symbolic value” but will have “pretty much no effect on Aragua”.

McDermott also raised the question of whether the Tren de Aragua may have already peaked before Guerrero’s death, as the increased attention it was drawing from Washington began to deter pre-existing criminal groups in the Americas from joining its ‘franchise’. He observed that, since the deportation in March 2025 of dozens of alleged Venezuelan Tren de Aragua members from the US to El Salvador, where they were detained in the infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Cecot) mega-prison, “it’s not that cool to call yourself Aragua anymore”. As a result, he argued, “even the franchise model and the brand [that drove Tren de Aragua’s international expansion] have died”.

A new role for Venezuela?

Perhaps more consequential is the question of whether the operation to take out Guerrero will be followed by other US strikes on criminal and insurgent groups in Venezuela. An 18 June article by Insight Crime asked whether Colombia’s Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) guerrilla group could be a target of US military action in Venezuela. The ELN maintains a presence on both sides of the porous frontier and is involved in illegal gold mining operations in Venezuela’s Bolívar state. Dissident units of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) guerrilla group also regularly flit back and forth across the border and could be a target of future US military action.

Appetite will perhaps be growing in Washington for an airstrike campaign against Colombian guerrilla groups in Venezuela following Colombia’s 21 June presidential run-off, which was won by the far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella. De la Espriella has said that he will immediately seek US military cooperation in the fight against Colombian armed groups after he takes office on 7 August, raising the prospect of these groups facing unprecedented pressure on both sides of the border, with the Colombian and Venezuelan militaries possibly being supported from the air by the US.

With the ELN’s mining revenue also under threat as the Rodríguez administration aims to reassert state control over Bolívar’s gold belt (see page 7), the Colombian armed groups operating on both sides of the border are facing new pressures as De la Espriella draws a line under the unsuccessful ‘total peace’ strategy of outgoing President Gustavo Petro, who sought to reach negotiated settlements with a long list of armed groups.

Opposition response

Opposition leader María Corina Machado praised President Trump for the killing of Guerrero while reiterating the Tren de Aragua’s alleged links with Venezuela’s ruling Chavismo movement. Thanking Trump for the action his government has taken against “armed groups, criminal organisations and mafias”, among them the Tren de Aragua, which “operate with complete impunity in Venezuela,” she said the “human, social, ecological and economic damage caused by these criminal groups in Venezuela, which were conceived under the protection of Chavismo and acted in complicity with [it], is immeasurable”.

Atlantic Council

Henry Shuldiner, associate director at the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center at the Atlantic Council, a US think tank, argued in a 17 June article that, “with Venezuela having given the US the green light for a lethal strike on its own soil, Washington has a model it will hope to reproduce elsewhere in the region”. Noting President Trump’s previous threats of US military action against Mexican cartels, Shuldiner highlighted that Ecuador has already allowed a joint military operation with the US, in March this year, while Bolivia’s government has recently resumed cooperation with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after a 17-year pause.