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Venezuela wanted a dissident dead and hired Tren de Aragua gang to kill him, Chile says

Antonio Maria Delgado, Miami Herald on

Published in News & Features

Following the U.S. designation of Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization, new evidence has surfaced in Chile showing not only that there are links between the Venezuelan gang and the Nicolás Maduro regime, but that members of the Caracas leadership were the ones ordering the criminal organization to carry out the notorious killing of a dissident in the Chilean capital of Santiago.

According to the police report revealed this week by the televisión channel Chilevisión, the order to kidnap exiled Army Lieut. Ronald Ojeda was issued and paid for by Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, a powerful member of the Venezuelan regime. The U.S. has a standing $25 millon offer for his capture on charges that Cabello and Maduro are the top leaders of the Soles drug cartel.

Ojeda was killed soon after he was kidnapped and tortured in Santiago in February 2024. He had been taken by force from his 14th-floor apartment by three men dressed as officials of Chile’s Investigative Police while a fourth member of the team waited outside in a vehicle. The abduction was caught on video, which later went viral on social media.

His body was found nine days later inside a suitcase hidden under a concrete slab inside a house in Santiago in which he was presumably tortured. The autopsy showed that he died of asphyxiation, which is believed to have occurred at least a week after his abduction.

Ojeda’s activities as a Venezuelan dissident and the fact that kidnappers never attempted to collect a ransom led officials to believe that the abduction and killing was politically motivated. Later, as the investigation continued, Chilean officials were able to establish that the operation was run by members in Chile of the Tren de Aragua Venezuelan gang.

This week, officials in Chile said that while the Venezuelan gang executed the kidnapping, those that decided to carry it out were top ranking members of the Maduro government.

“We always said from the start that given the profile of the victim this was a political event. But the evidence that now exists in the investigation shows that this conclusion is no longer solely based on the victim’s profile. But that the payments [to the gang] were made by the Venezuelan government,” said regional prosecutor Héctor Barros, who is in charge of the investigation, in an interview with Chilevisión.

Citing documents from the investigation of the prosecutor’s office, the TV channel reported that key evidence gathered by officials point to Cabello issuing the order to initially abduct Ojeda and later to carry out his execution.

The Chilean prosecutor has gathered testimony claiming that Cabello issued the orders and made the payments through Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, a.k.a Niño Guerrero, the alleged head of Tren de Aragua, which is currently believed to be operating in about a dozen countries, including the United States.

Arising out of a Venezuelan prison and quickly expanding to become an umbrella organization for other gangs, the Tren de Aragua for years has dominated crime in vast areas of the South American country, specializing in a long list of crimes ranging from extortion, car-theft and kidnapping to drug-trafficking, prostitution and murder for hire.

 

As an estimated 7.7 millions Venezuelans left their homes to migrate to other countries in the past 10 years, the gang saw in the exodus an opportunity to grow exponentially, increasing its ranks from the estimated 400 members to an army of more than 3,000 strong reportedly operating now in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Central America, in addition to Venezuela.

While the link between the Maduro regime and the Tren de Aragua has for long been suspected, the news coming out of Chile this week is being viewed as further evidence that the links between the two go beyond a friendly relationship.

Tren de Aragua has long been suspected of being at the service of the Venezuelan regime, with its members used for political destabilization actions in countries with large Venezuelan populations, but now are being used to kill individuals considered a threat to Maduro regime, said José Antonio Colina, president of Veppex, a Venezuelan exile NGO based in Miami.

Cabello’s alleged role in the gang’s activity also reinforces the long-held belief among regime critics that Tren de Aragua is also at the service of the Venezuelan drug cartel.

That is one of the main conclusions Venezuelans are gathering out of the news coming out of Chile this week, Colina said. “We are now seeing that not only Tren de Aragua is tightly linked with the tiranny in Venezuela, but that one of the main people calling the shots in the gang is Diosdado Cabello Rondon, who is at the same time one of the top members of the cartel,” Colina said.

The presence of Tren de Aragua members inside the United States has generated concerns among U.S. officials and was part of Donald Trump’s campaign issues on immigration.

Arguing that the presence of Tren de Aragua in the United States poses a significant threat to the country, Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday declaring the gang, along with the Salvadorean gang La Mara Salvatrucha and a number of Mexican drug cartels, as foreign terrorist organizations.

The gang’s “campaigns of violence and terror in the United States and internationally are extraordinarily violent, vicious, and similarly threaten the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere,” the White House said in a statement on the executive order.

The designation will allow U.S. enforcement agencies to channel more resources to combat Tren de Aragua’s activities in the United States.


©2025 Miami Herald. Visit at miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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