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Spain has dealt a significant blow to the Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan criminal mega-network that has terrorised communities across Latin America. On 7 November, the Policía Nacional announced the arrest of thirteen individuals accused of forming the gang’s first operational cell in Spain — a discovery that marks the group’s debut on European soil.
The arrests took place in Barcelona, Madrid, Girona, A Coruña, and Valencia as part of Operación Interciti, a long-term intelligence effort coordinated by Spain’s Comisaría General de Información. Two clandestine laboratories producing cocaína rosa — known as tusi — were dismantled, and investigators uncovered stocks of synthetic drugs, cocaine, and an indoor cannabis plantation.
The network was allegedly led by Venezuelan nationals in their thirties, living discreetly in urban areas such as El Cañaveral in Madrid and El Raval in Barcelona. According to police sources, they were preparing “for war with rival gangs” to seize control of territory and distribution networks. This is the second major operation against the Tren de Aragua in Spain. The first occurred in March 2024, when police arrested Gerso Guerrero, brother of the group’s notorious leader Héctor Rustherford “Niño” Guerrero Flores. Gerso was later extradited to Venezuela on charges of terrorism, human trafficking, arms trafficking, and money laundering.
The Rise of a State-Protected Criminal Empire
The Tren de Aragua is not simply another cartel. It is the offspring of a failed socialist state. It was born and nourished within the prison system of Venezuela — a country where the distinction between the state and organised crime has long ceased to exist. Tocorón prison, where the gang’s leader once ruled, was less a correctional facility than a microcosm of Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela: a place where impunity, corruption, and political complicity replaced the rule of law.
For two decades, the narco-communist regime in Caracas has treated crime as a tool of control. While the regime presents itself as anti-imperialist, it has permitted and even facilitated the growth of criminal structures that export violence and drugs abroad. The Tren de Aragua is one of the clearest expressions of this alliance between dictatorship and delinquency.
When the Venezuelan state collapsed, the criminal state took its place. The same apparatus that jails political opponents and censors journalists also protects traffickers, militias, and paramilitary groups. What Spain has dismantled on its own territory is not only a criminal cell, but an outpost of that deeper perversion: the fusion of political tyranny and organised crime.
Spain’s Integration Model — Strengths and Limits
Spain’s relationship with Latin America has always been unique. As I explored in my recent report The Empire Strikes Back: Why Civilisational Aspects Matter in Migration Policy (Danube Institute, 2024), the Spanish migration model has been, on balance, a success. Cultural proximity, shared language, and religious continuity have allowed the country to integrate millions of Latin American migrants with relatively few of the tensions that have plagued Britain or France.
But even this successful model faces limits. The arrival of the Tren de Aragua illustrates the darker side of global mobility: when humanitarian policies are exploited by criminal networks seeking refuge and profit. Spain’s openness to Venezuelan refugees — motivated by compassion and historical connection — has unfortunately provided an entry point for elements that owe their survival to Maduro’s criminalised state.
The challenge for Spain is to defend the generosity of its system without allowing it to be used against itself. Integration requires vigilance. Compassion must go hand in hand with enforcement.
A Criminal Model for Export
The Tren de Aragua is expanding internationally by replicating its domestic formula: combining drug production, human trafficking, and control over migrant communities. In Spain, as in Latin America, it has relied on the manufacture of tusi, a synthetic drug marketed to young consumers. The use of small urban laboratories shows how the gang adapts quickly to its environment, blending into local economies while keeping links to its command structure abroad.
Its methods are modern. Investigators have uncovered evidence of cryptocurrency transactions and encrypted communications. In other words, this is not a relic of Latin American violence transplanted to Europe, but a hybrid network — part digital, part territorial — that understands how to exploit both the anonymity of the internet and the moral confusion of open societies.
The Venezuelan Connection
The Tren de Aragua’s global reach would be impossible without the permissiveness of the Maduro regime. Caracas remains a hub for money laundering, arms trafficking, and protection rackets tied to both political elites and the military. The regime’s dependence on illicit finance has turned Venezuela into the nucleus of a hemispheric criminal economy that extends from the Caribbean to southern Europe.
For years, the United States and several Latin American governments have documented how senior Venezuelan officials — including those close to Maduro — have collaborated with drug cartels, guerrilla movements, and paramilitary forces. The Tren de Aragua operates in this grey zone: tolerated, occasionally managed, and always useful to the regime as a pressure valve for migration and an instrument of regional destabilisation.
That this network has now appeared in Spain is therefore no accident. It is a symptom of Venezuela’s deliberate export of disorder — a policy that weaponises both migration and crime to project its influence abroad.
Lessons for Europe
For Europe’s conservatives, the message could not be clearer. Law and order are not merely domestic concerns; they are the first line of national security. When sovereignty is diluted, when enforcement weakens, and when ideology replaces authority, the vacuum will be filled by actors who respect neither law nor borders.
Spain’s police deserve credit for dismantling this cell, but policymakers must now ensure that prevention accompanies repression. Residency procedures, humanitarian protections, and asylum pathways must be protected from infiltration by criminal groups. International cooperation — particularly with Latin American democracies such as Colombia and Chile — should be deepened, while any contact with the Venezuelan regime must be conditioned on its cooperation against transnational crime, which at present is nonexistent.
Above all, Europe must recognise the moral dimension of this threat. The Tren de Aragua is not simply a gang; it is the shadow of a regime that has turned criminality into governance. To tolerate Maduro is to tolerate the conditions that breed such organisations.
Conclusion: Reasserting the Rule of Law
The dismantling of the Tren de Aragua’s first Spanish cell is a victory for law enforcement and a warning to Europe. Wherever criminality grows unchecked — whether in Caracas, Barcelona, or Brussels — it is because authority has been eroded.
Spain’s response must now become Europe’s standard: an unambiguous reassertion of law and order. Because what stands behind every gang, every trafficking route, and every synthetic laboratory is not only greed, but a political ideology that despises justice itself.
The Tren de Aragua is the armed wing of a failed socialist experiment. Its spread is a symptom of the narco-communist disease that has destroyed Venezuela and now seeks to infect the free world. Spain’s operation should therefore be seen not just as a police success, but as a moral statement: that Europe will not allow tyranny, corruption, and crime — however distant their origin — to take root on its soil.