Donald Trump designated the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a “foreign terrorist organization” on his first day as president of the United States of America. Mexican drug cartels and the largely Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) were also named in the order.
As per Trump’s decree, the “campaigns of violence and terror” perpetrated by Tren de Aragua and MS-13 “in the United States and internationally are extraordinarily violent, vicious, and … threaten the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere”. Never mind the US itself, which has a long history of supporting right-wing dictators and death squads and inflicting military and economic destruction on Latin America. It also has a strong history of perpetrating violent and vicious acts in the hemisphere and elsewhere.
While MS-13 has long been a pet nemesis of Trump’s, Tren de Aragua is the new preferred dial-a-bogeyman. The gang allegedly brought its “campaign of violence and terror” into the US by forming in the Venezuelan state of Aragua in the form of a gang in Tocoron prison before spreading to various South American countries. The Joe Biden administration paved the way for a Trumpian warpath by labeling Tren de Aragua a “transnational criminal organization” under the pressure of then-Senator Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state, who had co-sounded the alarm that Tren de Aragua was “unleashed an unprecedented reign of terror.”
Of course, the usual suspects in the US media have taken the hype and run with it, churning out sensational reports on the “bloodthirsty” gang that, according to Trump’s personal hallucinations, has managed to take over entire US cities. The problem, however, is that no one has really been able to produce much evidence of the “terror” that Tren de Aragua is said to be unleashing, the New York City Police Department (NYPD), for example, has declared the gang to be largely focused on snatching mobile phones and robbing department stores.
A 19-year-old Venezuelan resident of a migrant shelter was charged with non-fatally shooting two NYPD officers in June. According to CBS News, he “told detectives he’s a member of a Venezuelan gang and that guns are smuggled into shelters through food delivery packages to avoid metal detectors.” Additionally, other media outlets jumped at the chance to depict refugee camps as Tren de Aragua hotbeds, effectively promoting a blanket criminalization of refugees.
The manufactured image of a growing army of terrorist gangbangers helps draw attention away from more troubling instances of violence, like the ongoing epidemic of school shootings, and serves as a useful justification for Trump’s current deportation frenziedness. Guantanamo Bay, where everyone’s favorite illegal US prison-and-torture center is located on occupied Cuban territory, has already deported a number of suspected Tren de Aragua members, who are fittingly representative of the US’s unilateral right to invade other people’s borders at will while manically fortifying its own.
Yet, according to a recent Washington Post investigation, some of Guantanamo’s newest visitors’ families believe their loved ones were targeted because they were born in the state of Aragua, Venezuela. In many cases, it appears an individual’s tattoos may have played a role in his detention – despite the fact that Tren de Aragua “does not even use tattoos to signal membership”, as the Post notes.
It would be obvious that this is not the first time the US has unlawfully imprisoned people. However, the purpose of Trump’s mass deportations and the existential hype surrounding Tren de Aragua is not ultimately to punish criminals for their crimes; rather, it is to maintain a terror spectacle and keep Americans ignorant of the possibility that their own government may just be their worst enemy.
If Trump accepts Nayib Bukele’s suggestion that the US “outsource part of its prison system” by sending over convicted criminals for internment in the Salvadoran mega-prison known as the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), allegedly in exchange for a fee, alleged Tren de Aragua operatives could soon find themselves in prison in El Salvador.
Of course, this Bukele is the same person who, through his policy of mass incarceration, has sent countless Salvadorans without any prior criminal history to an indefinitely detained prison system known for their hateful human rights abuses.
According to Bukele, he saved El Salvador from the evil of MS-13 and other gangs, which incidentally owe their existence to US-only. Many Salvadorans fled north in the country that was causing the worst of the violence: the US, a major supporter of the right-wing Salvadoran military and allied paramilitary groups and death squads, during the Salvadoran civil war of 1979-1992, which resulted in more than 75, 000 deaths. In the El Mozote massacre, the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion massacred roughly 1, 000 Salvadoran civilians in December 1981.
Sounds kind of “extraordinarily violent” and “vicious”.
Following the end of World War II, the US began deporting members of gangs that had begun in Los Angeles and its environs as a form of collective self-defense. However, Bukele has already solved the entire gang problem by incarcerating a sizable portion of the population, and he may also solve Trump’s Tren de Aragua issue.
For all of Trump’s chatter about Tren de Aragua’s violent savagery, it bears underscoring that US policy vis-a-vis Venezuela has been nothing less than totally savage. According to an infographic released by the Venezuelanalysis website, which draws on statistics from the US Government Accountability Office and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Venezuelanalysis had as of 2020 resulted in more than 100 000 deaths.
Naturally, the economic hardship generated by sanctions is also a driving force behind US-bound migration from Venezuela. However, one of the best things the US does is to cause “invasions” everywhere and then retaliate against them.
The New York Times in September warned Tren de Aragua members that they were alleged to have “similar identifying marks,” such as tattoos with clocks or crowns, and that they were “proud to wear Michael Jordan brand clothing and Chicago Bulls clothing.” A lot of Venezuelan refugee men have been made acquaintances with them in the Darien Gap, Mexico, and elsewhere, so I can safely say that a disproportionate preference for such clothing exists among young Venezuelan men. This means that the dress code warning issued by The New York Times is a sure recipe for US officials’ arbitrary profiling and the ensuing infringement of civil liberties.
The US has undoubtedly never let a strong bogeyman go unpunished. The Western Hemisphere appears to be very vicious indeed as the Trump administration, which is obsessed with racial equality and terrorizes undocumented people.
Source: Aljazeera
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