An eight billion naira bounty is the stuff of legends. Yet in March 2024, the United States Treasury pinned exactly that sum (in dollars, of course) on Hector Guerrero Flores AKA Nino Guerrero (The Guerrero Boy). That announcement attested to the evolution of Tren de Aragua from an anonymous Venezuelan gang to a shadowy transnational corporation of fear.
Picture Tocoron, a cloistered penitentiary baking under the Venezuelan sun in Aragua. By 2020, a mini-metropolis had developed within its perimeter. The prison-State boasted a pool tiled Caribbean blue; a zoo where peacocks strutted past caged jaguars, a nightclub thumping reggaeton until dawn and even a pastel-coloured playground where toddlers squealed while their fathers conducted board meetings.
Government guards still drew salaries, but Guerrero was their real employer. He issued receipts, timetables, and, according to local legend, Human Resources pamphlets. Tocoron was a Libertarian paradise with all services privatised; all rules optional.
With the capital amassed from replacing the State in their home prison, they hatched a brutally simple scheme. As Venezuela haemorrhaged citizens, Tren de Aragua marched alongside them, bags a’shoulder, like any other emigrant hustler. From Bogota’s red-brick bus terminals to Santiago’s hilltop camps, the gang set up welcome desks of extortion, kidnap-for-ransom and sex-trafficking rings.
Their side gigs flourished throughout the Americas. They dredged gold from the River Orinoco, laundered crypto, and, if the Yanqs aren’t lying, have started scouting for franchises in the American south.
DC has levelled stacked sanctions against enablers; Interpol has circulated red notices; and Chilean courts have handed down sentences so long they feel like arithmetic exercises. Yet Guerrero himself remains a magician’s rabbit, hidden in a hat. When 11,000 Venezuelan troops stormed Tocoron in September 2023, television cameras captured helmeted soldiers wading through the abandoned zoo, but the monarch had already slipped away. The State retook the prison and let a legend escape.
Venezuela is a country hollowed by hyperinflation. In the absence of stability and order, men do as they please. Once a country exports desperation, criminals inevitably flourish alongside as they toll the road to build empires erected on foundations of human misery. Readers from countries that fit that bill might wanna pinch themselves.
Rumours place Mr Guerrero everywhere and all at once. Frankly, I doubt he matters at this point. The next him is merely anonymous, for now. In an age of liquid borders and brittle institutions, nimble networks will always outpace the lumbering State and its servitors.
Welcome to our cyberpunk future; I wonder if Judge Dredd is in the market for an assistant.
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