Core, Franchises and Copycats - The Triple Threat Posed by Tren de Aragua

As World of Crime's book on Tren de Aragua is released, we analyze the Anti-Tren phenomenon and look at what this means for the gang in the United States.

On April 1, I finished the revised text for Tren de Aragua: The Guide to America’s Growing Criminal Threat, which was published today.

The book was originally meant to be released in February. But when President Trump designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization in late January, I had to rethink it. I added a chapter fully engaging with whether Tren de Aragua deserved to be labelled as terrorists. The book is a lot better and more complete as a result.

But then on April 23, 21 Venezuelan men shuffled into a Manhattan courtroom to face an unusual indictment. The charges were standard fare: drug dealing, prostitution, and extortion. The unusual part was in their designation.

They were not just accused of being Tren de Aragua, they were allegedly members of “Anti-Tren,” a faction that had broken away from the larger gang and was now targeting it for violent reprisals.

That narrative was irresistible: Venezuelan gangsters splintering off from their infamous parent gang and sparking a violent feud in New York. It was quickly sensationalized, with some observers saying the Anti-Tren was trying to distinguish itself by being more violent than Tren de Aragua.

This brought up a familiar problem. It is highly difficult to prove the extent to which Tren de Aragua is active in the US. But as I detail in Tren de Aragua: The Guide to America’s Growing Criminal Threat, the rise of Anti-Tren isn’t an anomaly—it is exactly the kind of fragmentation that has characterized Tren de Aragua’s growth across the Americas.

There are several reasons for this:
1. Unlike Mexican cartels, which have been present for decades, Tren de Aragua is a new and little-understood gang. It has expanded across Latin America in very specific ways, and this modus operandi can provide a strong lens through which to assess its credible expansion in the US, as I explain thoroughly in the book.

2. The Tren de Aragua label is thrown around far too easily by policymakers, law enforcement, and the media. There are numerous examples of Venezuelan citizens being arrested for petty crimes and immediately being tagged as Tren de Aragua members, with absolutely no evidence.

3. The mechanics used to identify Tren de Aragua members, including tattoos, are deeply flawed. Tren de Aragua has no defining tattoos or identifying markers of any kind.

4. The rapid deportation of arrested Venezuelans has made it difficult to build any kind of reliable data about the gang’s real presence.

However, the Anti-Tren indictment was more convincing than most.

Read the full Anti-Tren indictment here.

The list of crimes was pretty much textbook Tren de Aragua:
- The 27 suspects allegedly trafficked young Venezuelan women from their home country through Peru and into the US.
- They allegedly extorted the women once in the US, killing, assaulting, or threatening them if they did not comply.
- They also trafficked “tusi”, or pink cocaine, in New York and neighboring areas.

While the full details of the case will be revealed at trial, this very much resembles the MO Tren de Aragua used to spread from Venezuela to Colombia, Peru, Chile, and beyond.

On top of that, the Anti-Tren breakaway faction also made sense as Tren de Aragua is no longer a top-down hierarchical organization. It is a patchwork of fragmented factions and copycats all using the name as they see fit.

Core, Franchises, and Copycats

To understand how an Anti-Tren faction could arise, one must first understand Tren de Aragua’s unconventional expansion. What began as a tightly controlled prison gang in Venezuela has, over the past decade, morphed into an almost viral criminal brand spanning multiple countries.

The brand name of Tren de Aragua is so coveted that it is now used by three distinct types of group:

1. Core members working for the same leadership that founded the group.
2. Franchises, who use the name to further their ambitions whilst paying a fee to Tren de Aragua leaders.
3. Copycats, who use the name with no permission in order to gain notoriety.

What makes Tren de Aragua’s structure especially confusing is that all three types can coexist and overlap.

In Tren de Aragua: The Guide to America’s Growing Criminal Threat, I explain how this happened. In September 2023, the Venezuelan government seized control of Tocorón prison, Tren de Aragua’s legendary stronghold.

During the gang’s heyday, its imprisoned kingpin Niño Guerrero reportedly dispatched lieutenants abroad to jump-start cells in countries like Colombia, Peru, and Chile – a classic top-down expansion. Yet alongside these sanctioned outposts were freelance outfits of Venezuelan criminals who “borrowed the moniker” to boost their credibility with victims.

This decentralized model was not by grand design so much as born of circumstance. As Venezuela’s social collapse drove millions to migrate, Tren de Aragua followed those routes and implanted itself wherever Venezuelan communities took root.

Then came the hammer blow.

Tocorón Falls

On September 20, 2023, Venezuelan security forces stormed Tocorón prison – the gang’s longtime headquarters – in a massive raid involving some 11,000 troops. For years, Tocorón had been a virtually untouchable mini-kingdom run by Tren de Aragua’s “pran” (prison boss) and his henchmen, complete with luxury amenities and even a zoo.

Under increasing domestic and international pressure, Nicolás Maduro’s government finally decided to strike at the heart of the gang. The raid unfolded swiftly at dawn, but Tren de Aragua’s top brass were nowhere to be found.

Niño Guerrero and his elite had executed a well-timed escape – tipped off by corrupt insiders, Guerrero and his top lieutenants vanished into tunnels shortly before the first helicopters swooped in. By the time troops secured Tocorón, they discovered opulent gang hideouts and stashes of weapons – confirming every lurid rumor of the prison-turned-criminal fortress – but the masterminds had slipped away.

Venezuelan authorities declared victory and transferred over a thousand inmates to other facilities. But roughly 1,700 of Tocorón’s prisoners were unaccounted for after the raid. These likely included Tren de Aragua’s hardened cadres who simply melted into the population. Almost immediately, rumors placed Guerrero in border regions of Venezuela, Colombia or Brazil.

In short, the Tocorón raid decapitated the gang’s command hub but scattered its parts. The result was that an already decentralized criminal network became even more fragmented. Cells abroad that once looked to Tocorón for guidance or legitimacy suddenly found themselves cut off and free to chart their own course.

This post-Tocorón vacuum helps explain the Anti-Tren faction. In the chaos following the prison takedown, some Tren de Aragua operatives fled Venezuela entirely, joining the ever-growing ranks of migrants heading north. But some, freed from oversight, could carve out criminal turf independently.

If the allegations are substantiated at trial (and that is a big if, given the current murkiness around Tren de Aragua in the US), Anti-Tren could be seen as yet another Tren de Aragua franchise breaking away.

Fear, Myth, and the US Crackdown

The emergence of Anti-Tren comes after years of mounting – and often misplaced – fear in Washington about Tren de Aragua itself. In October 2024, for example, then-candidate Donald Trump dramatically brandished mugshots of Venezuelan immigrants at a rally, claiming a “TDA Gang” had occupied an apartment building in Colorado – a claim local police later walked back amid lack of evidence . President Trump then involved the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century, to deport hundreds of alleged gang members.

The Anti-Tren indictment is only likely to strengthen this play.

A Rogue Franchise, Not a New Cartel

As one of the most convincing cases related to Tren de Aragua in the US to date, it is crucial to remember Anti-Tren does not represent a new criminal organization. If proven guilty, their tactics were identical to Tren de Aragua: migrants, sex trafficking, extortion, and tusi. They were Tren de Aragua.

The crucial difference is simply one of allegiance and branding. Anti-Tren’s members no longer pledged loyalty to Niño Guerrero, nor did they want to use the name anymore.

Such rogue franchises are not unprecedented either. Tren de Aragua civil wars have happened elsewhere. Around 2018, a burly Venezuelan crime boss named Héctor Prieto slipped out of Tocorón and made his way to Lima, Peru. His massive physique saw him given the nickname, Mamut, or Mammoth.

Prieto was part of the second wave of Tren de Aragua leadership who fled Venezuela as the gang broadened its reach. Once in Peru, Mamut spearheaded Tren de Aragua’s presence there, building an extortion and sex trafficking empire that preyed on Venezuelan and Colombian migrants in Lima’s nightlife and border regions.

In doing so, however, he annoyed another Tren de Aragua faction, loyal to a boss known as Mamera. In 2021 and 2022, the two cliques were at war for control of Lima. Mamut had been jailed by this point, but continued to manage his network behind bars through smuggled phones and proxies.

Seen in this light, the Anti-Tren phenomenon is far from an anomaly. It is further proof that Tren de Aragua is not a centralized threat. It has split, mutated and evolved.