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A former high-ranking Venezuelan military is sounding the alarm about the migrant gang Aragua train (TdA) being used as a tool by the Venezuelan government to sow violence and discord throughout the United States.
Tren de Aragua, meaning “Train from Aragua,” is a massive criminal and terrorist organization that originated a decade ago in a Venezuelan prison and is now present in more than 30 major American cities.
José Gustavo Arocha, a former lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, told Fox News Digital socialist Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro is behind much of TdA’s growth and rapid expansion, first in Latin America and now in the US
Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix/Archive)
Arocha fled Venezuela to the United States in 2015 after being imprisoned by the Maduro regime for eight months. Since then, he said the situation has only gotten worse with Maduro asserting more and more control over the region. This year, Maduro retained control of the country by winning a closely contested elections which was widely believed to be fraudulent.
“We also need to understand something about Tren de Aragua, the TdA. It is an organization of the Maduro regime sponsored by the state,” he said. “The real head of the Tren d’Aragua is there Caracas, Venezuela. It is the Maduro regime, because they created ToA, and they use ToA as a blackmail (tool) for any situation”.
Arocha said that the Maduro dictatorship’s counterintelligence agency Directorate of Military Counterintelligenceaka “DGCIM” – has been using TdA as a asymmetric warfare toolgiving itself “plausible deniability”.
The leader of the opposition in Venezuela, Maria Corina Machado (AP Photo/Cristian Hernández/File)
Tren de Aragua first burst onto the scene in the US when several members of the band broke out violently took control of an apartment building in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado. Since then, the gang has been responsible for a steady stream of violent attacks and gang-related crimes, including murder of nursing student Laken Riley in Georgia
While some media reports have portrayed TdA as a mere gang, Arocha said the Venezuelan government and DGCIM have trained and empowered it to advance a specific agenda and criminal ideology. Even the name “Aragua train,” he said, evidences the group’s intent to transport its ideology throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Arocha said the Venezuelan government has already used TdA to inflict crippling crime waves on surrounding countries, helping usher in a slate of pro-socialist governments in Colombia, Peru and Chile.
“They want to create all kinds of chaos in the countries in order to shape the contours of the borders and also to create a sense of instability (and) criminality,” he said. “This kind of culture is being exported out of Venezuela, first (to) Latin America, and right now to the US”
Migrants enter the United States in Lukeville, Arizona. (Fox News/File)
DETENTED IN TRUMP’S YARD, VENEZUELA NATIONAL AND MEMBER OF THE ARAGUA TRAIN PANDA
According to Arocha, the Venezuelan government has used the historic migrant crisis under the Biden administration as a “great opportunity” to “take root” in the US. The administration made the situation even worse in temporarily lift key oil sanctions previously against Maduro.
“Imagine, there are more or less 8 million Venezuelan migrants. It’s a huge number,” he said. “If you look at this, it’s like a wall where it’s spreading across every state. And when you consider the transport of migrants from Texas to other states, they’re spreading like a disease, like a virus, all over the world . country”.
With President-elect Donald Trump soon to replace Biden, Arocha said Trump needs to put the destruction of Tren de Aragua at the “top” of his first-day priority list. While acknowledging that closing the southern border is crucial, Arocha said Tren de Aragua will simply return if the United States does not “contain” Maduro.
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President-elect Donald Trump (Allison Robbert/Pool via AP/File)
“Imagine, OK, you take the whole Aragua Train and send them to Venezuela or whatever country. It’s going to come back. That’s not going to end the disease,” he said. “You have to fight the cause of ToA. The cause of ToA is the behavior of the Maduro regime that is trying to hurt the American people by using this asymmetric tool.”
“The rule is not to give Maduro the ability to continue in Venezuela,” Arocha said. “What I mean is if you let Maduro have oil revenue, have access to resources, you have to have ToA here in the United States.”
