Tren de Aragua (TdA) Of Venezuela: The Emergence Of An Analytical Challenge

Much in the news is the present U.S. approach to the Venezuelan transnational gang, Tren de Aragua or TdA (also rendered TDA). 

From the day he was inaugurated, 20 January 2025, President Trump announced that he intended to designate a number of cartels and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs). By 20 February 2025, this had been done, and eight organizations were added to the existing list for a total (with the Houthis of Yemen back on and two Haitian gangs added on 2 May 2025) of 79 entities. 

Without getting into the minutiae, particularly the alphabet soup identifying what the British usefully tend to term simply serious organized crime (SOC), the point should be clear: particular criminal organizations which use terror as a tactic and cross borders to engage in their activities – the Sinaloa Cartel provides a useful example – have been labeled a threat to the United States in the same manner as FARC, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. 

A group lands on “the list” if a policy decision by the State Department (with a limited time for Congressional objections) determines that three criteria are satisfied: (1) group has to be foreign, (2) it must engage in “terrorist activity,” “terrorism,” or retain the capability and intent to do so, and (3) it threatens “U.S. nationals or the national defense, foreign relations, or economic interests of the United States.” 

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