CNN (6/10/24) on Tren de Aragua: “The scale of its operations is unknown, but crimes attributed to alleged members of the gang have worried elected officials.”
A CNN headline (6/10/24) last June menacingly warned readers about the United States’s latest dial-a-bogeyman, guaranteed to further whip up anti-immigrant vitriol in the country and justify ever more punitive border fortification: “This Is the Dangerous Venezuelan Gang Infiltrating the US That You Probably Know Nothing About But Should.”
The gang in question was Tren de Aragua, which formed in Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, and spread to various South American countries before allegedly setting its sights on the US. Now the organization that you probably knew nothing about has achieved such a level of notoriety that President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his first day of returning to office, declaring the group (along with other regional drug cartels and gangs) to be a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Although there is approximately zero evidence of a smoking gun on the old terror front, the corporate media are doing their best to bring fantasy to life. And as usual, it’s the average refuge seeker who will suffer for it.
‘Invading criminal army’
Fox News (12/20/24): “The vicious gang has taken advantage of a lax southern border under the Biden-Harris administration, with many of its foot soldiers swarming the US and unleashing hell on unsuspecting communities.”
In the course of educating its audience about the little-known peril last year, CNN quoted a March letter to then-President Joe Biden from a group of Republican congressmembers, led by Florida’s Marco Rubio and María Elvira Salazar (incorrectly identified by CNN as Ana María Salazar). The letter sounded the alarm that the “invading criminal army” Tren de Aragua was positioned to “unleash an unprecedented reign of terror” across the US.
Rubio—the xenophobic son of Cuban immigrants to the United States and Trump’s new Secretary of State—took to social media (X, 6/17/24) to declare that Tren de Aragua was already “causing terror across America as a result of President Biden’s open border policy.” Rubio linked to Salazar’s post from the same day, in which she cast the outfit as a “vicious gang that the dictator Maduro is dumping into America through our open southern border”—a reference to current Venezuelan president and US enemy extraordinaire Nicolás Maduro. Maduro has himself accused the exiled right-wing Venezuelan politician Leopoldo López of being behind the gang.
Of course, the fact that Biden deported more migrants than Donald Trump did during his first term undermines the whole “open border” argument. Then again, racist propaganda has always been more useful than reality in crafting US policy. In July, the Biden administration bowed to pressure from Rubio et al. and designated Tren de Aragua a transnational criminal organization, thus elevating the gang “you probably know nothing about but should” into a supposed existential threat to the homeland.
In the months following the designation, the US corporate media fell into line with breathless reports on the “bloodthirsty” Tren de Aragua, as Fox News (12/20/24) put it in a December would-be exposé on how the gang has allegedly “immersed itself among the general population in the sanctuary city” of New York. As per Fox’s calculations, “many” of Tren de Aragua’s “foot soldiers” have also busied themselves by “swarming the US and unleashing hell on unsuspecting communities.” The article vaguely accused the gang of “all sorts of violent crime,” including (nonfatal) shootings of police officers and “gun smuggling into migrant shelters.”
‘Feared criminal organization’
“Its widening presence in the United States has become a political lightning rod for Republicans,” the New York Times (9/22/24) reported, “as they seek to blame the Biden administration’s border policy for allowing criminals into the country”—and the Times was happy to help them out by running a feature on a group responsible for 50 arrests nationwide, in a country that arrests 7 million people a year.
But it’s not just the predictable likes of Fox News that have permitted the Tren de Aragua hype to fuel a general persecution of migrants by implying that migrant shelters are gang hotbeds and that any undocumented person could be an “immersed” foot soldier. In back-to-back items in September, the New York Times (9/22/24, 9/23/24) explored how, in New York City, Tren de Aragua—a “feared criminal organization focused on sex trafficking, human smuggling and the drug trade”—is “believed to recruit Tren de Aragua members arriving in the United States from inside the city’s migrant shelters,” where gang members also reportedly “live, or have lived.” According to New York City police,
one of the largest challenges…is how quickly gang members have blended into the city’s fabric, not just among asylum seekers in shelters, but also by posing as delivery drivers on mopeds, in some cases transporting firearms inside food delivery packs.
The Times reported that Tren de Aragua members are said to “have similar identifying marks,” such as tattoos with clocks, anchors or crowns, as well as “Michael Jordan brand clothing and Chicago Bulls apparel.”
Given the widespread popularity of such apparel among certain demographics, and the NYPD’s notorious track record of racial profiling and selective stop-and-frisk harassment, such wardrobe analysis is a pretty good recipe for the further trampling of civil liberties. I myself have observed a disproportionate affinity for Jordan and the Chicago Bulls among young Venezuelan refuge seekers I personally know, all of whom happen to be quite opposed to Tren de Aragua—for reasons including the blanket vilification of Venezuelan immigrants that has attended the hullabaloo over the gang.
But what, precisely, does Tren de Aragua’s “unprecedented reign of terror” consist of? Well, the Times tells us that the NYPD
says the gang has primarily focused on snatching cellphones; retail thefts, especially high-end merchandise in department stores; and dealing a pink, powdery synthetic drug, known as Tusi.
Plus, in June, a 19-year-old Venezuelan migrant who might have been affiliated with Tren de Aragua was accused of shooting two police officers, who survived.
‘Expanding its deadly reach’
Wall Street Journal (9/12/24): “Tren de Aragua members are difficult to identify and track because they have entered the US through the southern border”—as opposed to gang members who are either homegrown or entered through the Canadian border, who are apparently easy to identify and track.
A September Wall Street Journal article (9/12/24), headlined “A Venezuelan Gang Is Expanding Its Deadly Reach to the US,” similarly warned that Tren de Aragua is
accused of robberies at Macy’s, Sunglass Hut and upscale stores, and moped-riding gang members also have been blamed for snatching phones from unsuspecting pedestrians.
While it is certainly shitty to have your phone stolen, it is quite a bit less “deadly” than the behavior exhibited by many police officers in the US, who can’t seem to kick the habit of killing Black people and Native Americans.
Never mind, too, that there are plenty of things it’s more rational to be afraid of in the land of the free than Tren de Aragua, such as the regularity of mass shootings in schools and the lethal for-profit healthcare system. A 2023 University of California, Riverside paper published in the Journal of the AMA (4/17/23) found poverty to be the fourth leading cause of death in the United States—hence the political utility, perhaps, of distracting Americans from actual problems with visions of marauding Venezuelan gangbangers.
Tempered by disclaimers
CBS New York (11/24/24): “Undocumented criminals as young as 11 years old are carrying out retail robberies and committing crimes on scooters.”
In reporting on Tren de Aragua, many media outlets purport to temper their sensationalism with the disclaimer that they are not in fact participating in a universal indictment of migrants. A November CBS New York intervention (11/24/24) on Tren de Aragua’s alleged attempts “to recruit children from migrant families” in shelters, while “blend[ing] in with the asylum seekers who began to arrive in the Big Apple in 2022,” held the following information until the very last line: “[Police] say it’s important to know that only a small portion of the migrant community is committing the majority of the crimes.”
In the midst of its own fearmongering, the New York Times (9/23/24) cautioned that “it’s important to note that overall crime in New York City has gone down as the number of migrants in the city has gone up.” NBC News (6/12/24) buried the observation that “criminologists have consistently found that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans” at the tail end of its June rant on “‘Ghost Criminals’: How Venezuelan Gang Members Are Slipping Into the US.”
In the NBC piece, journalists Laura Strickler, Julia Ainsley, Didi Martinez and Tom Winter complained that “the cases involving the Tren de Aragua gang show how hard it is for US border agents to vet the criminal backgrounds of migrants from countries like Venezuela that won’t give the US any help” in providing individual criminal records. The huffiness of such statements might be amusing, were the US itself not guilty of a quite lengthy criminal background in Venezuela itself; ongoing US sanctions against the South American nation are literally deadly, and in 2017–18 alone reportedly caused more than 40,000 deaths, according to a study by the Washington, DC–based Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Sanctions are also a key driver of the migration from Venezuela to the US. But the preponderant role of US efforts to financially asphyxiate Venezuela in fueling mass Venezuelan migration is not a subject corporate media like to dwell on (FAIR.org, 6/13/22)—and even less, it seems, in reporting on their new favorite bogeyman. A fleeting reference to the relevance of US machinations appears in the Wall Street Journal piece on the “deadly reach” of Tren de Aragua:
The gang is looking for better opportunities than those in Venezuela, where the economy has capsized under Maduro’s rule, leading to hyperinflation and poverty made worse by US sanctions.
Given that poverty and economic oppression are traditionally known to be driving forces behind gang membership, the sanctions factor would seem to merit a bit more journalistic investigation—that is, were the US politico-media establishment interested in explaining criminal phenomena rather than casting gang members as organically and inexplicably savage.
The New York Times (9/22/24) lamented that, as Venezuela’s economic woes intensified, Tren de Aragua “began to profit off the millions of fleeing Venezuelans, exploiting, extorting and silencing vulnerable migrants.” Of course, such opportunities for profit would not exist if not for the twin US policies of sowing havoc worldwide while simultaneously criminalizing migration—but, again, revealing to readers how the world works is not the objective here.
‘Violent animals of MS-13’
Justin Anderson (FAIR.org, 7/22/18): The growth of MS-13 “from a small street gang in the US to a transnational criminal organization…provides an illuminating case study of how US foreign policy choices can backfire spectacularly.”
The media’s decontextualized coverage of Tren de Aragua brings back memories of the apocalyptic hype surrounding the presence in the US of the predominantly Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, which reached a peak during Trump’s first term and was aided by apparent mediatic amnesia as to how it was that MS-13 came to exist.
As Justin Anderson wrote in a 2018 article for FAIR (7/22/18), the gang had “become a major scapegoat for Donald Trump and right-wing media in rationalizing harsh immigration policies.” Anderson wasn’t exaggerating; that same year, the White House released a handy memo titled “What You Need to Know About the Violent Animals of MS-13,” in which the word “animals” appeared no fewer than nine times—as though a country responsible for bombing and otherwise terrorizing civilians across the globe were the arbiters of humanity. But as Anderson detailed, media coverage of the immigration debate largely obscured the fact that MS-13 was “Made in USA” in the first place.
Indeed, the origins of MS-13 are pretty straightforward. Once upon a Salvadoran civil war, which killed more than 75,000 people from 1979–92, the US in typical fashion backed the right-wing military that was ultimately responsible—along with allied paramilitary groups and death squads—for the overwhelming majority of “serious acts of violence,” as per the United Nations Truth Commission on El Salvador.
Fleeing this violence, many Salvadorans ended up in Los Angeles and environs, where the going was not exactly easy, either; as Anderson noted, LA
was at the time in the midst of violent gang turf wars stemming from the crack cocaine epidemic—itself partially the product of plummeting cocaine prices as the result of drug-smuggling by the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
In the Salvadoran community, gangs formed as a means of communal self-defense.
Following the end of the civil war, the US decided to deport a mass of prison-hardened gang members back to a country it had just helped destroy, where the ensuing US-backed neoliberal assault left many Salvadorans with few options for economic and social survival aside from gang membership. The double whammy of neoliberal violence and gang violence in turn fueled more US-bound migration, and voilà: Enter the “violent animals of MS-13” to make xenophobia great again, and justify any and all sociopathic border-fortification measures.
As Anderson pointed out at FAIR, the media could scarcely be bothered to delve into such relevant history—although
one article in the DC Metro Weekend section [of the Washington Post] (6/14/18) did mention immigration in relation to the civil war, but only in the context of where to get some tasty Salvadoran food in Maryland.
Perhaps some future article on Venezuelan arepa establishments will offer an insight or two as to Washington’s outsized hand in Venezuela’s decimation. In the meantime, a 2023 infographic on the “deadly consequences” of US-led sanctions on the country—published by the Venezuelanalysis website, using statistics from the US Government Accountability Office, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and other sources—revealed that coercive economic measures had thus far made some 2.5 million people food insecure. As of 2020, more than 100,000 deaths were attributed to sanctions.
‘Total elimination’
As with fabricated claims that immigrants were eating pets, the idea that Tren de Aragua had taken over a Colorado housing project didn’t have to be true to have a political impact (Washington Post, 9/6/24).
At an October rally in New York, Trump announced that, if elected president, he would “expedite removals of Tren de Aragua and other savage gangs like MS-13, which is equally vicious.” Earlier that month, he had expanded on rumors that Tren de Aragua had taken over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver: “I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered.”
Now that America is safely back in Trump’s hands, a surge in Tren de Aragua–centered propaganda will no doubt facilitate his pledge to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history.” The brand-new designation of Tren de Aragua, MS-13 and other outfits as foreign terrorist organizations was accompanied by Trump’s declaration that it is the “policy of the United States to ensure the total elimination of these organizations’ presence in the United States”—whatever sort of action, military or otherwise, that may entail. The accompanying media offensive will surely be streamlined with the help of the reductionist “terrorist” label that has now been added to the linguistic arsenal.
Meanwhile, over on the frontlines of the invasion in Aurora, the Washington Post reported in September (9/6/24) that “some tenants” of the apartments in question had
held a news conference…and disputed the notion that the gang has taken over the complex. Instead, they said, the problem is that the apartment block has fallen into disrepair and is infested with bedbugs, cockroaches and rats.