On his very first day back in office as president of the United States of America, Donald Trump signed an executive order naming the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a “foreign terrorist organisation”. Also named in the order were Mexican drug cartels and the predominantly Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13).
As per Trump’s decree, the “campaigns of violence and terror” perpetrated by Tren de Aragua and MS-13 “in the United States and internationally are extraordinarily violent, vicious, and … threaten the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere”. Never mind the extraordinarily violent and vicious activity perpetrated in the hemisphere and beyond by the US itself, which has a solid history of inflicting military and economic devastation on Latin America and backing right-wing dictators and death squads.
While MS-13 has long been a pet nemesis of Trump’s, Tren de Aragua is the new preferred dial-a-bogeyman. The gang formed in Tocoron prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua and spread to various South American nations before allegedly bringing its “campaign of violence and terror” into the heart of the US. In July 2024, the Joe Biden administration paved the Trumpian warpath by designating Tren de Aragua a “transnational criminal organisation”, bowing to pressure from the fanatical likes of then-Senator Marco Rubio – now Trump’s secretary of state – who had co-sounded the alarm that the “invading criminal army” Tren de Aragua was poised to “unleash an unprecedented reign of terror”.
Of course, the usual suspects in the US media have taken the hype and run with it, churning out sensational reports on the “bloodthirsty” gang that, according to Trump’s personal hallucinations, has managed to take over entire US cities. The problem, however, is that no one has really been able to produce much evidence of the “terror” that Tren de Aragua is said to be unleashing; the New York City Police Department (NYPD), for example, has declared the gang to be largely focused on snatching mobile phones and robbing department stores.
Last June, a 19-year-old Venezuelan resident of a migrant shelter was accused of non-fatally shooting two NYPD officers, with CBS News reporting that he “told detectives he’s a member of a Venezuelan gang and that guns are smuggled into shelters through food delivery packages to avoid metal detectors”. Other media outlets also jumped at the opportunity to paint such shelters as Tren de Aragua hotbeds, effectively promoting a blanket criminalisation of refuge seekers.
Not only does the fabricated vision of an invading army of terrorist gangbangers help detract American attention from objectively more troubling manifestations of violence – like, say, the ongoing epidemic of school shootings – it also provides a handy justification for Trump’s current deportation frenzy. A number of suspected Tren de Aragua members have already been deported to Guantanamo Bay, the site of everyone’s favourite illegal US prison-cum-torture centre on occupied Cuban territory and fittingly emblematic of the unilateral US right to violate other people’s borders at will while manically fortifying its own.
And yet, as a recent Washington Post investigation revealed, it seems there is good reason to doubt the Tren de Aragua credentials of some of Guantanamo’s newest guests: “Families of two of the men said they believed their loved one had been singled out because they were born in the Venezuelan state of Aragua.” In many cases, it appears an individual’s tattoos may have played a role in his detention – despite the fact that Tren de Aragua “does not even use tattoos to signal membership”, as the Post notes.
Obviously, this would hardly be the first time that the US has wrongfully imprisoned folks. But the point of Trump’s mass deportations and the existential hype over Tren de Aragua is not, ultimately, to punish criminals for wrongdoing; rather, it is to maintain a terror spectacle and thereby keep Americans good and ignorant of the fact that their own government might just be their worst enemy.
Alleged Tren de Aragua operatives may also soon find themselves behind bars in the Central American nation of El Salvador if Trump takes Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele up on his suggestion that the US “outsource part of its prison system” by sending over convicted criminals for internment, “in exchange for a fee”, in the Salvadoran mega-prison known as the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT).
This is the same Bukele, of course, who continues to literally terrorise his own population via his policy of mass incarceration, which has seen countless Salvadorans with no criminal ties whatsoever jailed indefinitely in a prison system characterised by wanton human rights abuses.
In Bukele’s view, he has saved El Salvador from the scourge of MS-13 and other gangs – outfits that incidentally owe their existence to none other than the US. During the Salvadoran civil war of 1979-92, which killed more than 75,000 people, many Salvadorans fled north to the very country that was fuelling the worst of the violence: the US, a primary backer of the right-wing Salvadoran military and allied paramilitary groups and death squads. In December 1981, the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion slaughtered some 1,000 Salvadoran civilians in what is known as the El Mozote massacre.
Sounds kind of “extraordinarily violent” and “vicious”.
Following the end of the war, the US undertook mass deportations to El Salvador of members of gangs that had formed in Los Angeles and its environs as a means of communal self-defence. But Bukele has now solved the whole gang problem by simply imprisoning a significant portion of the country’s population – and he may yet solve Trump’s Tren de Aragua problem, too!
For all of Trump’s chatter about Tren de Aragua’s violent savagery, it bears underscoring that US policy vis-a-vis Venezuela has been nothing less than totally savage. An infographic published by the Venezuelanalysis website – utilising, inter alia, statistics from the US Government Accountability Office and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization – found that, as of 2020, US-led sanctions on Venezuela had caused more than 100,000 deaths.
Naturally, the economic hardship generated by sanctions is also a driving force behind US-bound migration from Venezuela. But that is one of the things the US does best: wreak havoc worldwide and then screech about resulting “invasions”.
Back in September, The New York Times warned that Tren de Aragua members were said to have “similar identifying marks”, like tattoos with clocks or crowns, and were known to favour “Michael Jordan brand clothing and Chicago Bulls apparel”. I personally have made the acquaintance of a whole lot of Venezuelan refuge seekers in the Darien Gap, Mexico, and elsewhere, and can safely attest to a disproportionate predilection for such apparel among young Venezuelan men – meaning that the dress code warning issued by The New York Times is pretty much a surefire recipe for punitive profiling by US officials and the attendant trampling of civil liberties.
To be sure, the US has never been one to let a good bogeyman go to waste. And as a Tren de Aragua-obsessed Trump administration goes about terrorising undocumented people while obliterating the right to asylum, the Western Hemisphere is looking rather vicious indeed.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
