On the night of June 12, 2026, President Donald Trump announced the death of Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, known as Niño Guerrero and identified as the founder of the Tren de Aragua. According to the official version, a strike by U.S. Southern Command destroyed the house where he was hiding, in Las Claritas, a mining town in Bolívar state, in southern Venezuela. Trump called it a “rapid and lethal kinetic strike,” the military term for a blow delivered with weapons guided from a distance, with no troops on the ground.
The interim government of Delcy Rodríguez confirmed that the operation was coordinated with its authorities. It also made clear that at no point were there U.S. soldiers on Venezuelan territory.
Guerrero had been a fugitive for almost three years. He had left the Aragua Penitentiary Center, in Tocorón, in September 2023, shortly before the military intervention in the prison. Washington had declared the Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization, and that label is what made it possible to use military force against its leaders. The State Department was offering five million dollars for information on his whereabouts.
The video of the strike, released by U.S. authorities, was replayed on newscasts across the continent. The reading that took hold was that of a decisive blow. But the documents that the U.S. government itself had published months earlier, and others it published that same week, tell a different story.
Eleven months earlier
In July 2025, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, known as OFAC, sanctioned Guerrero and five of his lieutenants. On that list was Wendy Marbelys Ríos Gómez, his wife, whom the Treasury accused of money laundering and terrorist financing.
Also on it was Yohan José Romero, alias Johan Petrica, a co-founder of the gang. According to the Treasury, Romero runs the illegal mining operations in Venezuela. The State Department is offering up to four million dollars for him.
The list showed an organization with divided tasks. Some handled the money and others managed the gold. The strike eliminated only one of those names. The authorities have reported neither the capture nor the death of Romero.
Two days earlier
Las Claritas was no ordinary hideout. According to InSight Crime, the town is the stronghold of Romero, who runs a structure there known as the Sindicato de Las Claritas. Guerrero died in the territory of the man who manages the gold, and that man is still a fugitive.
On June 10, two days before the strike, OFAC published a package of licenses on Venezuela. Two of them, 51B and 54A, authorize U.S. companies to buy, sell, transport, process and refine Venezuelan gold through the state-owned CVG Minerven. What they still prohibit is for those companies to explore for or extract the mineral inside Venezuela.
A day earlier, on Tuesday, June 9, Venezuela's armed forces had deployed troops and helicopters at Kilometer 88 and in Las Claritas, a movement confirmed by the outlets Crónica Uno and TalCual. According to Efecto Cocuyo, the operation had the support of the United States. The organization SOS Orinoco, which has monitored the area since 2018, reported that it was aimed at illegal mining bosses, among them alias Juancho. The analyst Ignacio Montes de Oca, writing in the outlet Pucará, wrote that the troops ordered the main mining enclaves cleared within 72 hours and burned rafts and extraction plants.
The same analyst describes how the gang makes money in that area. The Tren de Aragua does not extract the gold. According to Montes de Oca, it charges miners between 10 and 20 percent for letting them work, charges the mills between 15 and 30 percent of the gold extracted, and charges another commission so that the metal can reach the market. It works like a tax system, and a tax system does not die with its collector. It passes into the hands of whoever controls the territory.
The question that dominated the coverage was who will inherit command of the Tren de Aragua. To follow the money, another matters more. Who manages the gold of Las Claritas now, and through what channel will it leave?
A high-volume legal export channel is what we at the Theseus Foundation call an ocean of dilution, a flow of legitimate money so large that money of illicit origin dissolves in it without being noticed. If gold extracted under the old collection system reaches the circuit that the licenses now authorize, separating clean metal from dirty becomes much harder. The licenses require oversight and periodic reports. Who is going to verify, mine by mine, the origin of the gold that reaches Minerven?
The missile cleared the territory. The license enlarged the ocean.
A network with no single center
The Tren de Aragua no longer resembles the cartels of the 1980s, where everything depended on one boss. Its cells in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and the United States operate with considerable autonomy.
The command in Venezuela, first from the Tocorón prison and later from hiding, received a percentage of the profits and gave general orders. Finances, logistics and control of each territory were left in the hands of local bosses. It works almost like a franchise, and that is why the founder's death does not by itself stop the branches.
The organization also does not live on a single business. It extorts shopkeepers, sexually exploits migrant women, charges for the passage of people across borders, sells drugs at street level and collects on the gold of illegal mines. Each activity brings in money every day, in small and scattered amounts, and mid-level commanders keep having reasons to stay.
When the boss is killed and the money is left intact, the usual outcome is that a lieutenant takes the empty seat or that the gang splits into smaller groups that fight over territory or ally with local mafias. In neither case does the business shrink.
What is seen and what is not
The governments of the region have reasons to prefer military operations over financial investigation. An air strike produces an immediate result and an image to show.
Following the money is something else. Freezing accounts, tracing cryptocurrency wallets, finding the front men and dismantling shell companies takes years of accounting work, and the results usually arrive when someone else is already governing. The missile leaves a photo. The financial investigation leaves a case file, and case files do not make it onto television.
That is why resources go to operations, while the gang's ability to move and reinvest its money remains almost intact. It is that ability that allows it to rearm after every blow.
The neighborhood's money
Attention tends to go to the money that flows back to Venezuela. For the gang's day-to-day, however, what is laundered in the countries where it operates matters more. What it collects from extortion, street-level drug sales and sexual exploitation has to enter the neighborhood's legal economy quickly, because it pays for motorbikes, weapons, rent and salaries.
To do this it does not set up large companies. It gets into small businesses. It uses fleets of delivery riders who carry cash and, along the way, watch and distribute. It uses barbershops, hair salons and fast-food stands, where almost everything is paid in cash and it is easy to inflate sales in the books.
And it uses currency exchange houses and remittance agencies that serve migrants, where a worker's honest transfer gets mixed with the organization's money.
The gota a gota loan, a form of loan sharking with daily collections, completes the scheme. The gang lends cash to merchants who cannot get credit from a bank and charges very high interest. That way the illicit money circulates and also grows. If the debtor does not pay, the gang takes his business, which from that day serves as a front with its own customers, permits and history.
What stands out is that this part of the business is not hidden. Pagadiario loans, which are repaid in daily installments, are offered on the street, the collectors ride their motorbikes along the same blocks at the same hour, and any shopkeeper knows who he owes. Usury is a crime in Colombia. Why, then, is the most visible link in the laundering chain also the least prosecuted? What prevents following the collector to the person who hands him the cash every morning, and from there to the person who receives it back?
From cash to cryptocurrencies
In Chile, according to that country's authorities, several operations against Tren de Aragua networks between 2025 and 2026 showed how this neighborhood-level laundering connects with something more elaborate. The networks exchanged Chilean pesos for USDT, a cryptocurrency that holds the value of the dollar, to move the money out of the country without going through the banks.
One of those networks moved about ninety million dollars. Another, known as Tren del Mar, laundered some thirteen and a half million and even brought in an executive from a commercial bank.
The method relied on hundreds of people who lent their names to open bank accounts for a few days, and on companies with no real activity that justified the transactions. The money came in as the proceeds of extortion or illegal mining and went out converted into digital assets, which are very hard to freeze on the order of a judge from a single country.
Colombia and the money that does get pursued
In Colombia, the organization has already lost important pieces. Larry Álvarez Núñez, alias Larry Changa, the third co-founder, has been jailed in Bogotá since June 2024. In September of this year, the authorities captured alias El Coti and alias El Patón, two leaders who appear on the OFAC sanctions list.
On September 30, according to the news agency EFE, the Treasury sanctioned a ten-person financial network linked to a Tren de Aragua fraud scheme, and Juan Gabriel Rivas Núñez, alias Juancho, identified as head of the gang's operations in several South American countries.
Juancho is no ordinary name in this story. According to Crónica Uno, he is one of the main illegal mining bosses in Las Claritas and Kilometer 88, and is of Colombian origin. According to SOS Orinoco, he was one of the targets of the June 9 operation. Three and a half months after he was hunted with helicopters in the territory of the gold, the Treasury sanctions him. Where is he today, and who collects in his place?
Hitting the finances would require the financial intelligence units of Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Ecuador and the United States to share information on a permanent basis. Diplomatic ruptures, political differences and corruption inside the states themselves prevent it. A transfer takes seconds. A letter rogatory, the formal request that a judge sends to another country, can take months.
What remains to be answered
Who collects the taxes on the gold of Las Claritas today? How did the man who controlled the territory where Guerrero died get out of the military cordon? What guarantees that the gold reaching Minerven under the new licenses was not extracted under the gang's collection system? Why did the financial sanctions arrive months after the missile, if the names behind the gold had been identified since June? Why are the pagadiario networks, which operate in plain sight, not investigated as part of the laundering chain?
In Las Claritas the founder fell. Who collects now?
The Theseus Foundation will keep following the trail of the gold of Las Claritas.
