A man rides a bicycle past the Aragua Penitentiary Center in Tocorón, Venezuela, Saturday, March 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Cristian Hernandez)

TOCORON, Venezuela (AP) — Tocorón once had it all. A nightclub, swimming pools, tigers, a lavish suite and plenty of food.

This was not a Las Vegas-style resort, but it felt like it for some of the thousands who until recently lived in luxury in this sprawling prison in northern Venezuela.

Here, between parties, concerts and weeks-long visits from wives and children, is the birthplace of the Tren de Aragua, a dangerous gang that has gained global notoriety after U.S. President Donald Trump put it at the center of his anti-immigrant narrative.

But kidnappings, extortion and other crimes were planned, ordered or committed from this prison long before Trump’s rhetoric.

The tiny, impoverished town where the Aragua Penitentiary Center is used to bustle with residents selling food, renting phone chargers and storing bags for prison visitors. Now, the prison is back under government control, and streets in the town, also called Tocorón, are mostly deserted.

Residents, however, still hesitate to speak about the notorious gang that used to control their lives.

“This, here, Tocorón, was all highly controlled,” Miguel Ponce said pointing to the prison behind him and the town around it. “I couldn’t have talked to you a while back. We weren’t allowed to move around.”

Even now, he said, perhaps he was talking too much.

The beginnings of Tren de Aragua

Tren de Aragua came together in Venezuela just as the South American country came apart.

In 2013, a crisis was taking hold in the country, as corruption, mismanagement and a drop in crude prices wrecked the oil-dependent economy. Hunger became widespread, grocery store shelves emptied, inflation soared and millions fell into poverty.

Around the same time, a notorious criminal, Héctor Guerrero, returned to Tocorón to serve time for the murder of a police officer and other convictions.

The prison, like others across the country, was badly run, and serious allegations of torture and government corruption abounded. Guerrero and a few other inmates saw a profitable opportunity, cementing what had been a budding gang for a few years.

“Once these prisoners realized they had more weapons and more power than the military force guarding them, they assumed control and administration,” Ronna Rísquez, author of a book on the Tren de Aragua, said.

Guerrero and others established an organization within the prison that controlled the inmates through force and extortion. Guards looked the other way or colluded with gang members.

The gang’s largest source of revenue was the weekly fee it charged inmates, which Rísquez said added up to $3.5 million a year.

Over time, Rísquez said, that turned Tocorón into the gang’s recruitment center and “a kind of city” tailored to the group’s needs, with amenities like a zoo, baseball field and restaurants. Inmates who abided by the gang’s rules, paid their weekly fees and had extra money could order meals at a food court. Their wives could visit them for weeks at a time. Those who could not pay fees or crossed the gang suffered. Some even died.

Prison walls do not contain the gang

In the decade that followed, Tren de Aragua’s activities extended well beyond Tocorón. By 2023, the gang had about 4,000 members across the country, operating in 11 of the 23 states, according to the independent organization, Venezuelan Observatory of Violence.

The gang extorted people and businesses, trafficked drugs and carried out kidnappings.

Venezuela’s food shortages added to the gang’s control. Often, prisoners’ wives would travel to Tocorón from faraway states to do their shopping, said a convenience store manager in Maracay, the state’s capital. The manager, who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation, explained that food was available inside the prison when it could not be found anywhere else.

Much of the flour, rice and other products sold inside Tocorón came from highway piracy. Thieves scouted a crucial interstate, stopped trucks and took their loot to the prison.

The gang hits other countries and becomes a talking point in the U.S.

Venezuela’s government regained control of Tocorón in September 2023. Some members of the gang scattered, and Guerrero got away.

Some gang victims left Venezuela, joining the exodus of more than 7.7 million people who migrated in search of better living conditions.

Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Chile — all with large populations of Venezuelan migrants — have blamed the group for violent crimes. Its presence in Colombia’s capital, Bogota, grabbed headlines in 2022 after authorities discovered at least 19 bodies, some dismembered, in plastic bags and linked Guerrero associates to the killings.

The Tren de Aragua has been on the radar of U.S. authorities for years. But it wasn’t until Trump campaigned for a second White House term that the gang became widely known in the U.S., as he and his allies turned the group into the face of the alleged threat posed by immigrants living in the country illegally.

Trump has taken the extraordinary steps to designate the group a “foreign terrorist organization,” and earlier this month, an invading force, invoking an 18th-century wartime law that allows the U.S. to deport noncitizens without any legal recourse.

Under those decisions, the Trump administration has sent Venezuelan immigrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. It has alleged that the transferred individuals were Tren de Aragua members, though it has not provided any evidence to back up that claim.

The parents of some of those immigrants categorically rejected the gang-affiliation allegation.

News from © The Associated Press, 2025