In the early morning hours of September 20, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro sent thousands of police officers and service members to the Judicial Prison of Aragua state. Better known as Tocorón, the prison, located 100 kilometers west of Caracas, has become the main center of operations of international mega-gang Tren de Aragua.
“The [regime] knew what was going on there because it was obvious,” Roberto Briceño-León, director of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Venezuelan Violence Observatory, told Diálogo on October 23. “Authorities knew about it and allowed it; for whatever reason one wants to imagine, but they allowed it.”
“When 11,000 soldiers and police stormed into the prison, they discovered a professional baseball field, swimming pools, children’s games, and even a small zoo with monkeys and flamingos,” The Washington Post reported. “They also found concrete tunnels to get in and out and 200 women and children living on site. What they didn’t find was Tocorón’s most famous prisoner: Héctor Guerrero, alias El Niño.”
Guerrero is the leader of the Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s most prominent criminal gang. According to Transparencia Venezuela, a Caracas-based NGO, the gang is “the largest and most powerful criminal organization in the South American country, as it has 4,000 hitmen and alliances with other smaller groups.”
Three days after the intervention at Tocorón, the Interpol office in Caracas issued a Red Notice against Guerrero, unleashing an intense international search.
The NGO Venezuelan Prison Observatory later warned that Guerrero had left the prison on the eve of the operation, along with several of his main associates. The spokesman of this NGO, Humberto Prado, said the regime had negotiated with the criminal and his clique.
Briceño agreed. According to the sociologist, one of the reasons for the intervention in the prison were the constant complaints from Latin American governments. “There were complaints from neighboring governments, which saw it very complicated for their own countries to continue maintaining relations with a regime that allows the existence of the Tren de Aragua, which causes enormous problems for them,” he said, referring to Colombia and Chile.
Maduro attributed Guerrero’s escape to four corrupt officials linked to his security apparatus. However, according to Briceño, the relationship between Guerrero and the dictator ran deep. “The Venezuelan regime was aware of what was happening in the Aragua prison,” he added.
“The Tren de Aragua, was part of the power landscape that for a time took place in Aragua state, like many [illegally armed] ‘colectivos’ that provided services to the regime,” Briseño said. “That happened at different times. Even when the governor of Aragua was Tareck el Aissami, there were close ties between that group and political operators.”
Aissami was governor of Aragua state from 2012 to 2017 and was appointed vice president of Venezuela in January 2017. In 2019, he was added to the U.S. most wanted list for facilitating the shipment of narcotics through planes under his control and various drug routes through Venezuelan ports. He also oversaw or was part owner of multiple narcotics shipments of more than 1 ton each bound for Mexico and the United States, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement indicated.
The Interpol notice specifies that Guerrero is wanted for the crimes of kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking, and terrorism. He is responsible for a series of explosive attacks against the headquarters of the Bolivarian National Police; the National Guard; and the Scientific, Criminal, and Criminalistic Investigations Corps, starting in July 2019. According to Interpol, the leader of the Tren de Aragua could be in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, or Peru.
Following the intervention, Peruvian authorities said they had arrested the leader of a cell of this criminal organization. According to Argentine news site Infobae, a special group was created in Colombia to follow Guerrero’s movements. For Fermín Mármol García, president of the security commission of Fedecámaras, the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce, the Maduro regime clearly changed its tone with respect to the criminal organization.
“But one would like to see, as a citizen, the initiation of criminal investigations tending to establish responsibilities by action and omission, to a group of officials who were behind that perversion that the Tocorón prison became,” Mármol concluded.