How a US Invasion of Venezuela Would Make Tren de Aragua Much Stronger

A military incursion into Venezuela could displace millions, allowing Tren de Aragua to expand their core criminal economies: migrant smuggling, sex trafficking, extortion and debt bondage.

On November 29, President Trump declared that Venezuelan airspace should be considered “closed in its entirety.” Although his proclamation had no legal standing, it was taken very seriously.

This warning risks escalating a military campaign which has killed over 80 people in three months. After almost every strike, the US president has blamed a familiar target: Tren de Aragua (TDA).

The administration’s strategic narrative is straightforward. To them, TDA is a cartel-proxy of the Maduro regime, smuggling cocaine into American cities and destabilizing U.S. allies across the Caribbean and South America. By this logic, naval interdiction, airstrikes on trafficking vessels, and potential regime-change will degrade the gang’s capacity to traffic drugs and destabilize the region.

Venezuelan migrants crossing over into Colombia via an irregular crossing. Source: El Diario.

This framing, however, rests on a fundamental misreading of what TDA is and how it operates. Intelligence assessments, law enforcement filings, and TDA’s own documented behavior reveal an organization structurally incompatible with traditional counter-narcotics strategy. It is not a vertically integrated cocaine cartel dependent on maritime smuggling corridors and jungle processing infrastructure. It is a decentralized criminal franchise, a parasitic service provider that has monetized the Venezuelan exodus by industrializing the exploitation of human movement, synthetic drug production, and sexual slavery.

Here, World of Crime will therefore show an uncomfortable truth. A U.S. military intervention would BENEFIT Tren de Aragua. By destabilising Venezuela’s remaining state institutions and displacing millions of people, an invasion would create the precise conditions under which TDA’s criminal ecosystem has thrived.