Shortly after 9 p.m. on Friday, US President Donald Trump made an uncommon announcement on his social media platform Truth Social.
Trump mentioned that the US and Venezuela had collaborated to kill Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, also referred to as “Niño Guerrero” and recognized as the prime chief of the infamous prison gang Tren de Aragua, which the US designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization early on in Trump’s second time period.
The assault on Guerrero Flores was “swift and lethal,” Trump introduced, including that below his management, the US will “find these vicious murderers and drugs lords anytime, anewscentral.sitelace, and send them to the depths of hell where they belong.”
In his publish, Trump included a 10-second video of the alleged assassination, exhibiting a fowl’s-eye view of a constructing with a galvanized metallic roof being blown aside.
The authorities of Venezuela’s performing President Delcy Rodríguez mentioned in a separate assertion that the joint operation was carried out “in the southeast of Bolívar state” in Venezuela, including that the US and Venezuela had exchanged each intelligence and specialised technical assist.
Until the joint assault was introduced on Friday, Guerrero Flores’ whereabouts had been unknown. The prison chief, who, authorities say helped discovered Tren de Aragua, had been a fugitive for years, with a prison report stretching again many years.
Trump described Guerrero Flores as “infamous” in his announcement, however few Americans doubtless know something about him. Those curious would discover little info in authorities data and statements. Guerrero Flores’ State Department wished web page has a single, grainy black and white picture, along with his top and weight listed as “unknown.”
So, who was “Niño Guerrero?”
Although the State Department’s biography on Guerrero Flores is skinny, it contains his full title and date of beginning – although that, unusually sufficient, differs from the birthday listed in Venezuelan court records. Both paperwork say that Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores was born in the metropolis of Maracay, capital of the Venezuelan state of Aragua, in 1983.
According to a Venezuelan Supreme Court ruling from 2018, Guerrero Flores’ prison report started in 2005, when he was arrested for the homicide of an official. Years later, in September 2012, he escaped from a infamous jail in Tocorón, Aragua earlier than being recaptured in 2013.
It was after his recapture, someday between 2013 and 2015, that Tren de Aragua started to method its present type.
The group step by step accrued extra energy and territory from inside Tocorón Prison, and Tren de Aragua started to ally with different prison gangs to develop its affect. It finally got here to regulate the San Vicente neighborhood in Guerrero Flores’ hometown of Maracay, based on the suppose tank InSight Crime and studies from the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence.
On December 15, 2016, a trial court docket in the state of Aragua sentenced Guerrero Flores to 17 years and two months in jail for twelve crimes, together with intentional murder, escape from custody, concealment of a weapon of warfare, drug trafficking and prison affiliation.
But Tren de Aragua’s management inside Tocorón jail was so absolute, with gang-built swimming swimming pools and eating places inside the penitentiary partitions, that imprisoning Guerrero Flores there was as efficient as letting him go. It was solely when the Venezuelan authorities took full management of the facility in October 2023 that they found he had vanished. He had change into a fugitive and remained one till his demise.
The US Department of State offered a reward of $5 million for info resulting in his seize or conviction. In December 2025, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York charged Guerrero Flores with ordering, directing, and facilitating acts of terrorism inside the United States.
With Guerrero Flores at its head, Tren de Aragua not solely expanded its presence in Venezuela, but additionally reached different nations in the area and even, allegedly, crossed the Atlantic.
According to InSight Crime, the gang maintains a presence in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile. Meanwhile, Transparencia Venezuela — the Venezuelan arm of the nongovernmental group Transparency International — says the prison group operates in Brazil and Costa Rica, as effectively. Likewise, Mexican authorities have reported the arrests of alleged leaders and people related to Tren de Aragua. In 2023, a NCS investigation documented its presence in the United States.
In March 2024, Guerrero Flores’ brother Gerso was arrested in Barcelona, Spain and extradited to Venezuela a number of months later. A bit of over a yr later, Spanish police arrested 13 people whom they described as the first known Tren de Aragua cell dismantled in the nation.
In July 2024, then-US President Joe Biden designated the Tren de Aragua as a significant transnational prison group. But at the begin of his second time period, Trump went a step additional, signing an government order designating the gang as a overseas terrorist group. Soon afterward, Ecuador, Peru and Argentina adopted go well with.
Tren de Aragua and different Latin American gangs lie at the middle of the Trump administration’s preliminary wave of deportations. Since his second time period started, the president and his allies have argued in and out of court docket that the presence of alleged gang members inside the United States are part of a wider “invasion” of the US from its southern border.
The US authorities used that rationale to deport hundreds of people in March 2025 after Trump invoked the Foreign Enemies Act.
Just a few months later, in September, the US Defense Department started pursuing alleged drug trafficking vessels working in the Caribbean and japanese Pacific, a few of which they alleged are linked to the Venezuelan gang.
More than 200 people have died in the US strikes towards these vessels. The Trump administration has not introduced public proof of the presence of narcotics on the attacked ships, nor of their hyperlinks to drug cartels.
NCS’s Michael Williams, Rafael Romo, Ray Sanchez, Belisa Morillo, Laura Weffer, Osmary Hernandez, Max Saltman, Sebastian Jimenez, Pau Mosquera and Jaide Timm-Garcia contributed to this report.