Via The Daily Mail:
A former Venezuelan police officer lay dead in his silver Toyota 4Runner in a vacant industrial park. He’d been strangled. His hands and feet were bound with tape; his body showed signs of torture.
Investigators later determined that – just hours earlier – Jose Luis Sanchez Valera, 43, had been lured by a petite raven-haired prostitute to a seedy hotel late on the night of November 27th, 2023. There, they met up with a second dark-haired, dark-eyed woman and rented a room for what Sanchez Valera surely must have expected to be a good time.
Little did he know that he was the target of a deadly honeytrap and that three hooded men lay in wait in the parking garage – ready to ambush him, ransack his home and then kill him. The brutal murder had all the telltale signs of a street gang crime, and sure enough, a 23-year-old suspected member of Venezuela’s notorious Tren de Aragua gang was arrested for the homicide.
But this slaughter was not committed in the back alleys of Caracas. It happened in Miami. The murder marks a disturbing new milestone – the first Tren de Aragua killing on U.S. soil and the undeniable spread of ultra-violent gangs from the ruins of Venezuela’s socialist dystopia to U.S. cities.
Tren de Aragua is “the fastest-growing Transnational Criminal Organization in the world,” Joseph M. Humire, a national security expert who specializes in Latin American issues, told DailyMail.com. “Just five years ago they operated in one or two countries. Now they operate in ten, including the United States.”
“Police authorities in Chicago, New York, and Miami, have already discovered elements of the Tren de Aragua in their cities,” said Humire, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society.