Socialist dictator of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro on Thursday claimed that the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden helped the Tren de Aragua terrorist organization expand into the United States after establishing a foothold in Colombia.
Maduro made the assertions during an official regime event and called on U.S. President Donald Trump to request reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that, according to him, will allow Trump to see who “financed” Tren the Aragua.
“I say to President Donald Trump with respect, ask for the reports of the last four years from the FBI and the DEA, from the offices in Colombia so that you can see, President Trump, who financed, who moved, who directed the famous Tren de Aragua, who brought it to Colombia, who brought it to the United States,” Maduro said.
“And ask for the truthful reports so that you know that here in Venezuela we defeated, dismembered and put an end to that violent criminal group that tried to be used from Colombia with deep ties to the former Biden administration to bring terrorism to Venezuela,” he continued.
The socialist dictator, who did not provide evidence of the purported FBI and DEA reports, once again claimed that his regime “dismantled” the “extinct” Tren de Aragua in Venezuela. Maduro further claimed that the criminal organization wanted to “attack the cities of the country with terrorism and we prevented it with intelligence, with action.”
“President Trump, ask for those reports so that you can see, I say this with sincerity and respect, so that you can see the truth about the famous Tren de Aragua,” Maduro said.
The U.S. Department of State designated Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) on Thursday alongside six Mexican drug cartels and El Salvador’s Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). Tren de Aragua, now officially designated as an FTO, originally began in 2012 in the eponymous Venezuelan state of Aragua as a local trade union gang. It experienced a dramatic expansion in the following decade into a full-fledged transnational criminal organization under the tacit endorsement of the Maduro regime, with which is largely believed to maintain deep ties.
The Maduro regime’s lenient prison policies and the proliferation of pranato — a pseudo-fiefdom system maintained by Venezuelan gangs across the nation’s prisons that effectively allows gang leaders to coordinate criminal activities from within prisons — also contributed to the expansion of Tren de Aragua.
Throughout 2024, several members of the Maduro regime repeatedly claimed that Tren de Aragua “does not exist” and the gang was a fictional “international media invention” that sought to tarnish the image of the rogue Venezuelan socialists. In reality, an extensive list exists of crimes committed by its members in the United States including, but not limited to, a trafficking network in Louisiana, a string of robberies in New York, and fentanyl trafficking in South Carolina.
Last week, Venezuelan Interior Minister and wanted drug lord Diosdado Cabello claimed that none of the roughly 300 Venezuelan illegal migrants that had been deported from the United States by that time had any links to Tren de Aragua, further claiming that “only 17” of the deportees had criminal records in Venezuela.
The Maduro regime has maintained the assertion that Tren de Aragua was “dismantled” in September 2023 after Venezuelan security officials “raided” Tocorón, a prison that served as its main base of operation. Tocorón and other Venezuelan prisons were emptied of their inmates at the time as part of a purported security operation.
Under the tacit approval of the Maduro regime, Tren de Aragua’s leader, Héctor “The Child” Guerrero, had Tocorón renovated with a wide array of “amenities” such as a zoo, baseball field, bars, a casino, a nightclub, a bank, a pool, playgrounds, and even its own cryptocurrency farm while the Venezuelan National Guard provided external security to the facility.
Experts largely believe that the Maduro regime negotiated with Guerrero before the “raid,” allowing him and his top brass to safely escape Tocorón through a series of tunnels at some point before the raid. The tunnels, which connected the prison to a nearby lake, were allegedly used by the gang to come and go from the prison at their leisure. Guerrero’s whereabouts remain unknown since the “raid.”
Weeks after the Tocorón “raid,” the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Chicago, Illinois, reportedly confirmed the presence of Tren de Aragua there. Other U.S. cities confirmed the gang’s presence in the following months.
Although Tren de Aragua “does not exist” according to the Venezuelan socialist regime, dictator Nicolás Maduro claimed in August that Tren de Aragua was allegedly behind a nationwide wave of protests in Venezuela against his regime after Maduro “won” a highly fraudulent presidential election in late July, securing his third illegitimatedly-obtained consecutive six-year term. Maduro responded to the protests by unleashing a brutal persecution crackdown campaign that left 27 dead and more than 2,400 detained according to United Nations experts.
https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2025/02/21/venezuelas-nicolas-maduro-claims-biden-moved-tren-de-aragua-u-s/
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