Entrance to the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico City. Photo: VTV/file photo.
A Venezuelan embassy official in Mexico was arrested for his ties to the migrant trafficking gang (coyotes) led by Juan Guaidó, Julio Borges, Leopoldo López, Carlos Vecchio, David Smolansky, María Machado, Antonio Ledezma, and other opposition figures. The information was made public by Venezuela’s Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello on Friday, March 21.
According to Cabello, one of the Venezuelans who returned to the country through a Return to the Homeland Program flight on Thursday, March 20, filed a complaint “with evidence of how much the entrenched mafias were charging him” to put him on a plane to Venezuela.
“These despicable individuals orchestrated this entire scheme after the route from the US to Venezuela was closed,” remarked Cabello on his podcast with National Assembly Deputy Tanía Díaz, Sin Truco Ni Maña. “These ‘geniuses’ thought: ‘Now it is time to charge for trips from the US to Venezuela.’ They even infiltrated the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico. One of the youths who arrived yesterday reported a person from the embassy in Mexico, and we arrested him, by the way.”
Cabello explained that as migration by Venezuelans through the Darién forest (on the Colombia-Panama border) decreased significantly, the migrant trafficking mafia started to experience difficulties. This situation was exacerbated by investigations launched in the United States, prompting them to change their “business model.”
Cabello further claimed that the migrant trafficking gang is involved in Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s business of setting up “concentration camps” in El Salvador. “There is a [Venezuelan] woman named Sara Hanna George, an assistant of Leopoldo López and his wife Lilian Tintori. She has learned a lot about fascism, as she is Bukele’s chief of staff.”
He pointed out that Bukele receives payment for every Venezuelan transferred to these camps and further exploits them through compulsory prison labor.
“These are fascist actions of Mr. Bukele. What the US government is doing is an outrage and a persecution against a people who are simply working,” he said.
Mother of Venezuelan Illegally Imprisoned in El Salvador Ready to Do Anything to Rescue Her Son
The Tren de Aragua narrative
On Tuesday, March 18, the Spanish news podcast La Base detailed how mainstream media and far-right governments are exaggerating the power of the Tren de Aragua. According to the podcast, the aim of this narrative is to create a smear campaign against Chavismo and the Venezuelan government while facilitating racist deportation policies in the United States.
The podcast acknowledged that the Tren de Aragua is undeniably a criminal organization deserving total condemnation. However, it questioned the narrative equating it to ruthless, bloodthirsty groups like the Salvadoran gang MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) or the Mexican drug-trafficking gangs like the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, Los Cárteles Unidos, the Northeast Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, or the Nueva Familia Michoacana.
They raised doubts about how a criminal organization that is leaderless, disbanded and broken up into pieces in Venezuela, and reduced to minor “contractor” roles for migrant trafficking mafias in Mexico could be equated to the aforementioned infamous organized crime gangs. The podcast also highlighted the absence of political motives of Tren de Aragua that might have served to classify it under the standard definition of a terrorist organization.
Additionally, the podcast cited academic research supporting this perspective, which similarly argues that the scale and influence of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang has been blown out of proportion.
(Diario VEA) by Yonaski Moreno, with Orinoco Tribune content
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SC
