Top Tren de Aragua Leader Killed in U.S. Strike in Venezuela, Trump Says

President Donald Trump announced Friday that a U.S. military strike had killed Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, the longtime leader of the Venezuelan crime syndicate Tren de Aragua, in what he described as retribution for the gang’s victims across the Western Hemisphere. Guerrero Flores, 43, was better known by his nom de guerre “Niño Guerrero,” and U.S. authorities had spent years pursuing him as the architect of one of Latin America’s most violent transnational organizations.

The strike was carried out by U.S. Southern Command in a “swift and lethal kinetic strike” on a Tren de Aragua compound in Venezuela’s Bolívar state earlier in the week, Trump said. The president shared video that appeared to show a projectile slamming into a building, which erupted in a fireball. “Tren de Aragua terrorists no longer have safe haven in Venezuela or anywhere else,” Trump said, adding that his administration would “find these vicious murderers and drug lords anytime, anyplace.”

In an unusual twist, the operation was coordinated with the government of Venezuela. Caracas’s communications ministry confirmed it had participated in a “combined operation” targeting organized crime, describing intelligence sharing and specialized technical support. The cooperation marked a striking shift in relations between Washington and Caracas, which have lurched between hostility and uneasy dealmaking throughout Trump’s second term.

Guerrero Flores rose from running a notorious prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua to commanding a criminal empire that trafficked drugs and migrants and seized turf from Chile to Spain to the United States. The Trump administration designated Tren de Aragua a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and the gang became a centerpiece of the president’s immigration and border messaging after its members were blamed for violent crimes in cities including Aurora, Colorado. The State Department had offered up to $5 million for information leading to his capture.

Guerrero Flores was charged in federal court in New York with racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and cocaine-trafficking conspiracy, in an indictment that authorities said spanned more than a decade of violent crime. Prosecutors described him as the mastermind of the gang’s expansion and the figure who turned a regional prison racket into a sprawling international threat.

U.S. officials cast the killing as a major blow to the organization, though analysts cautioned that Tren de Aragua’s decentralized cells could persist without its founder. The strike also intensified questions about the legal framework for lethal military action against criminal groups designated as terrorists, an approach the administration has increasingly embraced as it blurs the line between counternarcotics enforcement and military operations.