One Friday three months ago, on June 12, US President Donald Trump announced sensational news with a post on his own social network, Truth Social: “Under my direction, the United States Southern Command carried out a rapid and lethal kinetic attack to successfully execute Niño Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren de Aragua, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist organizations on the planet,” he strutted. “This action was closely coordinated with our friends in Venezuela, with whom we are collaborating very well.”
In a statement issued shortly after the same day, the regime of the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, confirmed the information: “During the development of the operation, clashes occurred with members of these criminal structures, in which Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, alias Niño Guerrero, leader of a criminal organization, was neutralized.” The text also specified that said neutralization occurred within the framework of “a combined operation between security agencies of Venezuela and the United States in the southeast of the state of Bolívar” that had had “specialized technological support.”
Later, more details of the “fast and lethal kinetic” attack became known. It took place on June 9 in the towns of Las Claritas and Kilometer 88, a mining node in the Sifontes municipality of Bolívar State, on the traditional gold basin of the Cuyuní River and within the Orinoco Mining Arc that Nicolás Maduro created by presidential decree in February 2016. According to the video released by the United States Southern Command, the military assault included a precision bombing with an air-to-ground missile over the Guerrero’s rustic lair, whose remains were left in conditions that made them difficult to identify at the site.
The legendary Héctor El Niño Guerrero led the Tren de Aragua (TdA), a criminal gang that the State Department designated in 2025 as a “foreign terrorist organization” and that Trump himself used in his 2024 presidential campaign as a scarecrow to incite fear of immigration, particularly Venezuelan immigration, then on the rise.
If Guerrero’s head had a price for Washington, the elimination of the boss sounded like a clarion of liberation in the mining southeast of Bolívar state. Although the name of the cartel alludes to its origin in the Aragua state of north-central Venezuela – more precisely, in the Tocorón prison, according to journalistic investigations and its own founding myth – and that the TdA’s operations extended along with the Venezuelan diaspora to at least eight countries, it was around the mining of this area of Bolívar, close to the borders with Guyana and Brazil, where it established its stronghold.
Months later, the initial expectation has faded. A recent tour by Amazon Underworld and Armando.info through the area – from north to south, from Upata to Guasipati, El Callao, Tumeremo and El Dorado, until reaching the conglomerate of Las Claritas-Kilómetro 88, at the gates of La Gran Sabana and the Canaima National Park – found that, with the Aragua Train decapitated in situ and in the face of the preventive rout of criminal leaders active on the ground for three decades, the locals perceive that the real dynamic has barely changed.
The leaders of the mining cartels vanished. New actors, such as the Gpamo security command, are present, while the announced return of the mining transnationals is awaited with a mixture of hope, uncertainty and skepticism.
However, the fact that the visible faces of crime withdrew or went into hiding did not mean that the feeling that its control persists in other forms had gone with them.
Like never before, there is a greater military and police presence. People see more uniformed security agents than in other times, much more frenetic and with greater commercial activity than what is recorded today. However, he comes to miss the relative order that the gangs offered, relentlessly and by means as discretionary as they were atrocious. The System prevails, although with reforms still in progress.
By LIsseth Boon and Marcos David Valverde
More details at https://armando.info
