The raiding teams moved before dawn. In five cities across Spain, police with battering rams smashed through apartment doors as tactical units swept stairwells and seized makeshift drug labs. By the end of the operation, 13 alleged members of Tren de Aragua — the Venezuelan criminal mega-gang that has spread fear across Latin America were in custody.

Authorities say the group had established its first European cell, complete with “pink cocaine” labs and distribution hubs stretching from Madrid to Malaga, part of an effort to carve out a foothold on the continent.

Spanish officials described this month’s dismantling as a watershed moment: confirmation that a gang born inside a Venezuelan prison had arrived on European soil. Police linked the detainees to drug trafficking, extortion, and violent enforcement tactics mirroring those used in Venezuela and Colombia. 

According to Spanish media reports, the cell was operating inside tourist zones and nightlife districts, mixing synthetic stimulants with ketamine to produce tusi — the bright-colored powder increasingly popular among young partygoers.

Investigators had monitored the network for months, tracing what they described as a structured and expanding group that mirrored the hierarchies found in Latin America. The raids, coordinated by Spain’s National Police, revealed a gang confident enough to move from street-level sales to testing its own synthetic-drug production chain.

But the operation also raised a deeper question: if Tren de Aragua has reached Europe, how far is its global footprint expanding — and what threat does it pose beyond the region that spawned it?

From Prison Yard to Transnational Criminal Syndicate

Tren de Aragua’s origins are well known. The gang emerged in 2014 inside Venezuela’s Tocorón prison, where leaders developed a hybrid structure combining prison-based control, external criminal cells, and a hierarchy overseen by figures such as Héctor Guerrero Flores, known as “Niño Guerrero.” Over the last decade, the group has grown into a decentralized but coordinated criminal network with influence in Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and beyond.

Experts say the gang benefited from Venezuela’s state collapse, which created conditions ripe  for criminal recruitment, local economic capture, and rapid geographic expansion. TdA diversified its activities as it spread, moving from extortion and kidnapping into drug trafficking, smuggling, illegal mining, human trafficking, and control of migrant routes – often hidden among the mass movement of Venezuelan migrants.

This month, Colombian authorities captured Kenffersso Jhosue Sevilla Arteaga, alias “Flypper,” described as the second-in-command and financial chief of Tren de Aragua. Other senior figures in custody include Larry Amaury Álvarez Núñez, alias Larry Changa, a co-founder and key figure in the gang’s international reach. 

While imprisoned in Bogotá, Mr. Álvarez attempted last month to negotiate with the Colombian government – reportedly seeking inclusion in President Petro’s “Total Peace” process – in an effort that analysts say was aimed at delaying his extradition to Chile, where he faces terrorism and murder charges.

Those arrests and extradition battles underscore a group that is no longer rooted solely in Venezuela’s underworld but is deeply entangled in regional politics.

The Spanish Foothold: What the Raids Revealed

The intelligence picture that led to the Spanish raids formed slowly. Authorities tracked suspected TdA members through nightlife zones, intercepted communications, and analyzed financial patterns suggesting a coordinated drug network. The group used short-term rentals across multiple cities, moved narcotics through courier routes, and tried to establish a permanent supply chain for tusi.

What troubled investigators most was the structure they uncovered: leadership roles, enforcers, couriers, logisticians – a replication of the gang’s Latin American model rather than a loose group of opportunistic offenders.

To understand the intent behind such an organization, former Venezuelan counter-narcotics chief Johan Obdola, tells The New York Sun that the structure alone “shows this was not a loose clique but a deliberate probe – an attempt to build a semi-autonomous production and distribution hub on European soil.”

Mr. Obdola, the founder of the Global Organization for Security and Intelligence, underscores that Tren de Aragua’s goal is not to reinvent smuggling but to slot itself into long-established routes already used by Latin American and West African networks. 

“They are inserting people and products into corridors that have existed for years, from Caribbean-Iberian flows to the South America-West Africa-Europe pipeline. The Venezuelan exodus created a corridor of vulnerable, often undocumented people, and Tren de Aragua embedded itself early along those routes,” Mr. Obdola said. He noted that the suspects arrested this month in Spain had obtained humanitarian-based residency before their arrests.

A Growing Footprint Reaching Toward the United States

While Tren de Aragua’s European presence is considered relatively new, its activities have already intersected with United States transit routes. American authorities have documented connections between TdA-linked actors and human-smuggling networks, migrant exploitation, and cocaine transport through South and Central America.

Mr. Obdola said the gang is becoming “a hybrid parasite,” embedding itself inside migrant corridors that already concern American officials. He warned that a major red flag would be “recognizable Tren de Aragua cliques operating in U.S. cities and sending revenue back to leadership – a clear shift from incidental presence to strategic projection.”

Another expert who has long studied smuggling dynamics under cover in the region, speaking on background, tells the Sun that the gang’s activities look less like a classic trafficking organization and more like a parasitic ecosystem feeding on displacement. 

“People misunderstand what TdA actually is,” the source said. “They don’t run cocaine the way big cartels do – they operate more like MS-13, a micro-gang with many cells spread across South America.”

The insider said the group follows migrant flows and embeds itself in them. 

“They follow, pretend to assist, harass and prey on the Venezuelan migrant community first, then on local communities,” the source continued. “Tren de Aragua is an opportunistic criminal enterprise that profits from human trafficking, sex trafficking, extortion, copper theft, illegal mining, and assisting larger drug-trafficking actors as low-visibility foot soldiers.”

The corridors they operate along, the insider noted, often depend on informal border crossings run by criminal or corrupt actors. They run random checkpoints at holes in the border, serving migrants who rely on these illegal paths to avoid paying for Venezuela’s prohibitively expensive, short-validity passports. 

The source highlighted that the area near San Cristóbal – a key Colombia-Venezuela border crossing – is “a hotbed” of illicit commerce in products ranging from gasoline to re-labeled state food packages diverted into Colombia.

Caracas’s militarized corruption, experts contend, enabled much of this environment. 

“The military is involved in everything, from food distribution to cocaine trafficking,” the insider emphasized, describing a system in which criminal networks thrived as the state collapsed. 

A Global Threat Still in Motion

For Europe, dismantling the Spanish cell is both a warning and a test case. Spanish officials say the raids were successful because police detected the group early, before it could embed in local criminal markets. But synthetic-drug demand in tourist hubs creates openings for groups like TdA, and investigators fear the gang will try again.

Mr. Obdola stressed that what Spain disrupted was “the first serious beachhead – not the last attempt.”

Tren de Aragua’s evolution from a prison-based gang into a transnational criminal syndicate has unfolded over the course of barely a decade. Spain may have dismantled its first European cell, but experts say the group’s mobility and ability to hide within migrant flows make it difficult to know how many operatives may already be in place elsewhere.

“Spain is not an isolated incident – it is Tren de Aragua testing whether the same migration corridors that carried it across Latin America can now be used to project power into Europe,” Mr. Obdola said.