FEATURES

Beauty contests, marketing agencies and prison visits have been some of the Tren de Aragua’s most common strategies to recruit women and girls for sexual exploitation across Latin America. A team of journalists from Colombia and Venezuela reconstructed, through intercepted audios of the mega-gang, testimonies of trafficked migrant women and statements from government officials, the way in which the crime organisation operates and its impact on vulnerable groups.

The Venezuelan mega-gang Tren de Aragua is the first transnational organised crime group to operate in Chile, a country experiencing a crime crisis of historic proportions. Here’s how they did it, the names behind the phenomenon and what’s to come.

The Aragua Train extended its criminal control to strategic areas of Venezuela, such as the Orinoco mining arc, where it imposed itself as the de facto authority. Ronna Rísquez describes what she found in the state of Bolívar.

In 2021, one of Caracas’s most marginalized neighbourhoods was the scene of an unprecedented intervention by state security forces to tackle a notorious criminal gang that had controlled the area for nearly seven years. People living in Cota 905 now say the police is targeting them for money.

The murder of three reporters in 2018 marked a milestone in the escalation of crime in Ecuador. Five years later, violence at the hands of criminal organizations and a lack of government protection are pushing many to self-censor or leave the country, creating serious information gaps. These are their stories.