In recent years, Brazil has seen the rapid expansion of the Venezuelan criminal group Tren de Aragua (TdA), which has leveraged the arrival of over 560,000 Venezuelan migrants in the last decade to consolidate its illicit activities. Through alliances with Brazilian criminal organizations, the TdA rapidly expanded its influence over human, arms, and drug trafficking in key regions of the country, alongside widespread extortion, posing a serious threat to the local population.
“Tren de Aragua is not simply a Venezuelan gang. It is a transnational criminal enterprise that has evolved under the protection and complicity of the Venezuelan state,” analyst Jesús Romero, co-founder of think tank Miami Strategic Intelligence Institute, told Diálogo. According to the expert, this expansion provides Nicolás Maduro with a regional proxy force capable of gathering intelligence, intimidating opponents, and laundering money beyond Venezuela’s borders without formal attribution to his regime.
“The TdA has in fact become a criminal instrument of Venezuelan foreign policy, extending Caracas’ reach through fear, corruption, and hybrid warfare,” Romero said.
Alliance with the PCC
In April 2025, Brazilian Minister of Justice and Public Security Ricardo Lewandowski warned about the Venezuelan group’s penetration into Brazilian prisons, which are controlled by the country’s main criminal organizations, the Red Command (CV) and the First Capital Command (PCC). Lewandowski’s concern stems from the fact that Brazilian prisons traditionally serve as the central command and recruitment hubs for the CV and PCC, indicating the TdA has achieved an unprecedented level of negotiated power within the local security architecture.
“The danger lies in their hybrid nature: They combine the brutality of organized crime with the reach of a state apparatus. This means that the TdA is not just spreading violence but is exporting Venezuela’s model of criminal governance to the entire hemisphere,” Romero says. According to the expert, several police investigations confirm that these networks operate with resources and information from Venezuela.
Gold trafficking
Proximity to the Venezuelan state of Bolívar and its rich Las Claritas mines has turned Roraima into a hub for gold trafficking managed by the TdA and the PCC. It is no coincidence that Yohan José Romero, alias Johan Petrica, head of TdA operations in Las Claritas, was intercepted in 2018 when registering the birth of his son under his real name in the capital of Roraima, Boa Vista, where, according to Venezuelan journalist Ronna Rísquez, he owns numerous properties. The TdA also recently signed an agreement with the Red Command to exploit local illegal mining, according to the Roraima Prosecutor’s Office.
“There is documented cooperation between the TdA and the Maduro regime in the Venezuelan gold sector. Reports from the United Nations and Human Rights Watch describe how Venezuelan military units and security forces have allowed the group to control mining areas in the states of Bolívar and Amazonas,” says Romero.
According to the expert, the TdA acts as the regime’s armed wing, intimidating workers, expelling communities, and ensuring that illegal gold continues to flow through official state channels.
The impact on the Brazilian side is significant. The TdA’s presence has fueled a spike in violent crime and threatened local Brazilian communities, especially Indigenous groups in the Amazon basin who suffer the environmental and social fallout of illegal mining. Indebted and threatened, many Venezuelan migrants are forced into labor for the group. Some traffic drugs and weapons; others are exploited in prostitution or forced to work in Amazonian mines. Others disappear. In early 2025, a clandestine cemetery holding the bodies of Venezuelan citizens was discovered in a poor neighborhood of Boa Vista. The police suspect that they were “tried” and killed by members of the TdA.
International recognition of the threat
The severe transnational risk posed by the group has led to its formal designation as a terrorist organization by several governments. The U.S. State Department designated the TdA as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in February 2025, underscoring its role in destabilizing the hemisphere. This action was followed by similar designations by nations such as Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago, providing further grounds for coordinated international efforts to combat the group’s regional expansion.
“What we are seeing is not a casual criminal arrangement, but a coordinated system in which state power and organized crime merge to exploit the natural wealth not only of Venezuela, but of the entire region,” concludes Romero.
