Tren de Aragua: How a Criminal Network Exploited Venezuela's Migration Routes
Across South America, millions of Venezuelans have crossed borders seeking safety, work, and stability. Their journeys involve shifting visa rules, crowded terminals, improvised shelters, and informal transport. These obstacles create opportunities for criminal groups to exploit people with few alternatives.
Tren de Aragua, a gang that emerged in a Venezuelan prison and expanded across the region, illustrates this problem. Its presence across South America has sometimes been portrayed as evidence that migration spreads crime. Yet Venezuelan migrants have frequently been its victims. How, then, did the gang expand across borders? Its expansion depended on exploiting migrants’ vulnerability and reliance on intermediaries. Restrictive border policies, precarious legal status, and limited access to safe transport and formal work created opportunities for criminal groups to demand payments and exercise coercive control.
Migration Routes Are More Than Roads
Nearly 7.9 million people have left Venezuela, according to UNHCR, most settling elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean. Many move through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile, passing through recurring border crossings and transport hubs. Along the way, access to accommodation, documents, employment and assistance influences where they stop and whom they trust. Some spend weeks in frontier towns, waiting for paperwork, finding work or moving onward.
Researchers Biao Xiang and Johan Lindquist describe these interconnected arrangements as “migration infrastructure.” It includes official institutions, humanitarian organizations, social networks, and commercial intermediaries. When legal crossings become inaccessible, migrants may turn to informal guides or brokers offering passage, transport, or work. Such assistance is not necessarily criminal. However, those lacking legal status, money, or reliable protection may have little power to challenge exploitation. The danger arises when dependence becomes an opportunity for threats, forced payments, or trafficking.
From Prison Control to Criminal Networks
Tren de Aragua developed inside Tocorón prison in Venezuela’s Aragua state, where leaders regulated internal commerce, collected payments, and enforced rules through intimidation and violence. InSight Crime reports that leaders then sent trusted emissaries outside the prison and co-opted smaller Venezuelan gangs. These alliances helped turn control of one institution into a broader network of criminal businesses.
From around 2018, the organization followed migration corridors into Colombia and then farther south. Investigations describe senior members deployed to cells abroad, sometimes moving between countries, while local associates helped them enter illicit markets. InSight Crime identifies three recurring stages: scouting border crossings and diaspora neighborhoods, penetrating local markets through alliances or intimidation, and consolidating cells through violence. Migrants were often targets and sources of income, not participants in this expansion.
Cells established themselves in Colombia, Peru, and Chile, engaging in extortion, migrant smuggling, sexual exploitation, and other illicit activities. Controlling an entire city was unnecessary: influence over a crossing, transport terminal or neighborhood could yield substantial revenue.
The Venezuelan government’s 2023 operation against Tocorón weakened the gang’s original stronghold. Regional police operations fragmented it further. InSight Crime’s updated 2026 assessment describes increasingly loose ties among cells rather than consistent central control. Some emerging groups may also appropriate its name, so reported activity should not automatically be attributed to a single chain of command.
Border Restrictions Can Create Profitable Bottlenecks
Migration corridors concentrate people around bridges, remote crossings, and bus stations. Those stranded there often need food, shelter, and onward transport urgently. Criminal groups can exploit that demand by demanding payments for passage, threatening transport operators, or coercing vulnerable workers.
Chile offers a documented example of how policy can reshape this dependence. In June 2019, it introduced a consular tourist-visa requirement for Venezuelans. IOM monitoring found that this changed travel patterns and left applicants waiting near the frontier. After Chile closed its land borders to non-resident foreigners in March 2020, some migrants used hazardous informal routes near Colchane. In a 2021 UNHCR-supported survey of 190 adults in Colchane and Iquique, 17.9 percent said they paid someone to enter Chile; 68 percent believed their lives were in danger. The survey was not nationally representative, but it shows why brokers can be difficult to avoid.
A restriction does not itself create a criminal cell, nor does every broker work for a gang. But when an unauthorized route is inaccessible, the price of unofficial passage can rise, and travelers may have fewer ways to refuse extortion or report abuse. Political scientist Peter Andreas has described how enforcement displaces migration rather than necessarily stopping it. For groups such as Tren de Aragua, these bottlenecks can become markets for controlling transport, charging illegal fees, and intimidating rivals. Enforcement without realistic legal alternatives can therefore increase the leverage of predatory intermediaries.
Colombia, Peru and Chile Reveal Different Forms of Exploitation
Near Cúcuta, Colombia, the border settlement of La Parada connects official crossings with informal routes known as “trochas.” Migrants moving through this area encounter competing armed and criminal groups. In June 2025, Colombian police reported arresting 17 suspected Tren de Aragua members in La Parada, accusing them of extorting businesses and transport companies. Threats against bus operators show how controlling a service can affect a broader migration corridor.
Farther south, the Rumichaca crossing between Colombia and Ecuador and the Ecuador-Peru border near Tumbes form part of a route toward Lima. In April 2026, Peruvian prosecutors announced the detention of 25 suspects linked to two alleged Tren de Aragua factions. Investigators said the networks transported Venezuelan and Colombian women into Peru and imposed debts of 15,000-20,000 soles tied to sexual exploitation. These remain allegations, but they reveal the mechanism under investigation: transport costs converted into debt and coercive control. In Chile, a June 2026 judgment reported by Chilean prosecutors provides direct evidence of control over transport. Seven members of Los Piratas, a Tren de Aragua cell, were convicted in connection with organized crime and killings. The court found that the group controlled formal and informal bus terminals in Tarapacá used to move irregular migrants, extracting payments and using violence against those who resisted, including transport operators.
Together, the three cases show distinct but related mechanisms: extortion of border commerce in Colombia, trafficking through debt in Petu, and violent control of transport in Chile. What links them is not migrants’ criminality but the ability of armed groups to profit where travelers and service providers have few safe alternatives.
Migrant Protection Is Also a Security Policy
These examples answer the central question: migration does not inevitably produce criminality. Rather, the conditions under which people move, including uncertain documents, dangerous crossings, and dependence on unregulated services, can create opportunities for organizations such as Tren de Aragua to profit. Targeted prosecutions are necessary, but protection also reduces the leverage of criminal intermediaries.
Colombia’s temporary protection arrangements have helped Venezuelans obtain documents and access formal employment. A Migration Policy Institute study documents these gains while noting continued labor informality and the limitations of short-term permits elsewhere in the region. The 2026 regional response plan, coordinated by humanitarian partners, aims to support 1.2 million refugees and migrants with protection, integration and essential services.
Practical measures can target the points of coercion. Confidential, multilingual reporting channels that do not automatically trigger immigration enforcement could help victims report threats. Oversight of bus terminals, licensed carriers, and transport fees could make extortion more difficult. Accessible legal crossing procedures, regularization, and enforceable labor protections could reduce reliance on illicit guides and exploitative employers. These measures should complement investigations into trafficking and violent cells, not replace them.
Combating Tren de Aragua thus requires both enforcement against perpetrators and protection for people at risk. Borders shape more than movement: they also shape who can demand money, exercise coercion, and claim authority over those trying to reach safety.
The OCC publishes a wide range of opinions that are meant to help our readers think of International Relations. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and neither the OCC nor Saint Louis University can be held responsible for any use which may be made of the opinion of the author and/or the information contained therein. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of Venezuelan migrants, the communities discussed, or any organizations or institutions referenced herein.
To quote this article, please use the following reference:
Volonte, Vittoria. “How Tren de Aragua Exploited Venezuela’s Migration Routes.” November 2026, https://www.crisesobservatory.org/post/tren-de-aragua
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