On his very first day again in workplace as president of the USA of America, Donald Trump signed an government order naming the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a “overseas terrorist organisation”. Additionally named within the order had been Mexican drug cartels and the predominantly Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13).
As per Trump’s decree, the “campaigns of violence and terror” perpetrated by Tren de Aragua and MS-13 “in the USA and internationally are terribly violent, vicious, and … threaten the soundness of the worldwide order within the Western Hemisphere”. By no means thoughts the terribly violent and harsh exercise perpetrated within the hemisphere and past by the US itself, which has a stable historical past of inflicting navy and financial devastation on Latin America and backing right-wing dictators and loss of life squads.
Whereas MS-13 has lengthy been a pet nemesis of Trump’s, Tren de Aragua is the brand new most well-liked dial-a-bogeyman. The gang shaped in Tocoron jail within the Venezuelan state of Aragua and unfold to varied South American nations earlier than allegedly bringing its “marketing campaign of violence and terror” into the guts of the US. In July 2024, the Joe Biden administration paved the Trumpian warpath by designating Tren de Aragua a “transnational prison organisation”, bowing to stress from the fanatical likes of then-Senator Marco Rubio – now Trump’s secretary of state – who had co-sounded the alarm that the “invading prison military” Tren de Aragua was poised to “unleash an unprecedented reign of terror”.
After all, the standard suspects within the US media have taken the hype and run with it, churning out sensational stories on the “bloodthirsty” gang that, in response to Trump’s private hallucinations, has managed to take over whole US cities. The issue, nonetheless, is that nobody has actually been capable of produce a lot proof of the “terror” that Tren de Aragua is claimed to be unleashing; the New York Metropolis Police Division (NYPD), for instance, has declared the gang to be largely targeted on snatching cellphones and robbing shops.
Final June, a 19-year-old Venezuelan resident of a migrant shelter was accused of non-fatally capturing two NYPD officers, with CBS Information reporting that he “instructed detectives he’s a member of a Venezuelan gang and that weapons are smuggled into shelters via meals supply packages to keep away from steel detectors”. Different media retailers additionally jumped on the alternative to color such shelters as Tren de Aragua hotbeds, successfully selling a blanket criminalisation of refuge seekers.
Not solely does the fabricated imaginative and prescient of an invading military of terrorist gangbangers assist detract American consideration from objectively extra troubling manifestations of violence – like, say, the continued epidemic of college shootings – it additionally supplies a helpful justification for Trump’s present deportation frenzy. A lot of suspected Tren de Aragua members have already been deported to Guantanamo Bay, the positioning of everybody’s favorite unlawful US prison-cum-torture centre on occupied Cuban territory and fittingly emblematic of the unilateral US proper to violate different folks’s borders at will whereas manically fortifying its personal.
And but, as a latest Washington Put up investigation revealed, it appears there may be good cause to doubt the Tren de Aragua credentials of a few of Guantanamo’s latest company: “Households of two of the lads stated they believed their cherished one had been singled out as a result of they had been born within the Venezuelan state of Aragua.” In lots of instances, it seems a person’s tattoos might have performed a job in his detention – although Tren de Aragua “doesn’t even use tattoos to sign membership”, because the Put up notes.
Clearly, this may hardly be the primary time that the US has wrongfully imprisoned of us. However the level of Trump’s mass deportations and the existential hype over Tren de Aragua will not be, in the end, to punish criminals for wrongdoing; fairly, it’s to keep up a terror spectacle and thereby preserve Individuals good and unaware of the truth that their very own authorities would possibly simply be their worst enemy.
Alleged Tren de Aragua operatives may additionally quickly discover themselves behind bars within the Central American nation of El Salvador if Trump takes Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele up on his suggestion that the US “outsource a part of its jail system” by sending over convicted criminals for internment, “in change for a charge”, within the Salvadoran mega-prison generally known as the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT).
This is identical Bukele, after all, who continues to actually terrorise his personal inhabitants through his coverage of mass incarceration, which has seen numerous Salvadorans with no prison ties in any way jailed indefinitely in a jail system characterised by wanton human rights abuses.
In Bukele’s view, he has saved El Salvador from the scourge of MS-13 and different gangs – outfits that by the way owe their existence to none aside from the US. Through the Salvadoran civil warfare of 1979-92, which killed greater than 75,000 folks, many Salvadorans fled north to the very nation that was fuelling the worst of the violence: the US, a major backer of the right-wing Salvadoran navy and allied paramilitary teams and loss of life squads. In December 1981, the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion slaughtered some 1,000 Salvadoran civilians in what is named the El Mozote bloodbath.
Sounds type of “terribly violent” and “vicious”.
Following the tip of the warfare, the US undertook mass deportations to El Salvador of members of gangs that had shaped in Los Angeles and its environs as a method of communal self-defence. However Bukele has now solved the entire gang drawback by merely imprisoning a good portion of the nation’s inhabitants – and he might but remedy Trump’s Tren de Aragua drawback, too!
For all of Trump’s chatter about Tren de Aragua’s violent savagery, it bears underscoring that US coverage vis-a-vis Venezuela has been nothing lower than completely savage. An infographic revealed by the Venezuelanalysis web site – utilising, inter alia, statistics from the US Authorities Accountability Workplace and the United Nations Meals and Agriculture Group – discovered that, as of 2020, US-led sanctions on Venezuela had triggered greater than 100,000 deaths.
Naturally, the financial hardship generated by sanctions can also be a driving pressure behind US-bound migration from Venezuela. However that is without doubt one of the issues the US does finest: wreak havoc worldwide after which screech about ensuing “invasions”.
Again in September, The New York Instances warned that Tren de Aragua members had been stated to have “comparable figuring out marks”, like tattoos with clocks or crowns, and had been identified to favour “Michael Jordan model clothes and Chicago Bulls attire”. I personally have made the acquaintance of an entire lot of Venezuelan refuge seekers within the Darien Hole, Mexico, and elsewhere, and might safely attest to a disproportionate predilection for such attire amongst younger Venezuelan males – that means that the costume code warning issued by The New York Instances is just about a surefire recipe for punitive profiling by US officers and the attendant trampling of civil liberties.
To make sure, the US has by no means been one to let bogeyman go to waste. And as a Tren de Aragua-obsessed Trump administration goes about terrorising undocumented folks whereas obliterating the proper to asylum, the Western Hemisphere is trying fairly vicious certainly.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.