US sanctions a Venezuela gang for spreading criminal activity across Latin America

MIAMI (AP) — The Biden administration on Thursday sanctioned a Venezuelan gang allegedly behind a spree of kidnappings, extortion and other violent crimes tied to migrants that have spread across Latin America and the United States.

The US also offered a $12 million reward for the arrest of three leaders of Tren de Aragua, which now joins the MS-13 gang from El Salvador and the Mafia-styled Camorra from Italy on a list of transnational criminal organisations banned from doing business in the US.

“Tren de Aragua poses a deadly criminal threat across the region,” the US Treasury Department said in a statement, adding that it often preys on vulnerable populations such as migrant women and girls for sex trafficking.

“When victims seek to escape this exploitation, Tren de Aragua members often kill them and publicise their deaths as a threat to others,” the statement added.

The Tren de Aragua traces its origins to more than a decade ago, to an infamously lawless prison in the central state of Aragua where a number of hardened criminals were held. But it has expanded in recent years as millions of desperate Venezuelans fled President Nicolás Maduro's rule and migrated to other parts of Latin America or the US.

Authorities in countries such as Colombia, Peru and Ecuador — with large populations of Venezuelan migrants — have accused the group of being behind a spree of violent crimes in a region that has long had some of the highest murder rates in the world.

Initially its focus was exploiting Venezuelan migrants through loan sharking, human trafficking and the smuggling of contraband goods to and from Venezuela.

But as the Venezuelan diaspora has settled more permanently abroad, it has joined — and sometimes clashed — with homegrown criminal syndicates engaged in drug trafficking, extortion of local businesses and murders for hire.

Among the groups the Treasury Department said the gang has teamed up with is Primeiro Comando da Capital, a notorious organised crime group out of Brazil that has also been sanctioned by the US.

Earlier this year, prosecutors in Chile blamed the gang, whose name means “train” in Spanish, for the killing of a Venezuelan army official who had sought refuge in that country after partaking in a failed plot to overthrow Maduro.

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