President Trump announced Friday night that a U.S. military airstrike earlier in the week killed Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, the founder of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, at a compound in Venezuela's southeastern Bolivar state, and said the operation was carried out in coordination with the Venezuelan government.
The strike, and the joint claim of credit by Washington and Caracas, marks the most concrete sign yet of a working security partnership between the Trump administration and the post-Maduro government in Venezuela five months after U.S. forces removed Nicolas Maduro from power in a January raid on his Caracas home.
What happened
Trump said in a Truth Social post that U.S. Southern Command "delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute" Guerrero Flores, 43, also known as Nino Guerrero. The post included a video showing a projectile striking a building that then erupted in flames. The mission, Trump wrote, was "closely coordinated" with the Venezuelan government.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on X that the strike took place earlier in the week on a Tren de Aragua compound in Venezuela and that Venezuelan security forces participated. "The operation underscores the shared U.S. and Venezuelan commitment to take the fight to narco-terrorists and deny them any safe haven in our hemisphere," Hegseth wrote.
Venezuela's communications ministry confirmed in a statement that Guerrero Flores was killed in a "combined operation" between U.S. forces and Venezuelan security services targeting organized crime in Bolivar state.
The target
Guerrero Flores ran Tren de Aragua for more than a decade, expanding it from a Venezuelan prison gang based at Tocoron Prison into a transnational network the State Department says operates across the Americas, including in the United States. He was indicted in federal court in New York late last year on charges including racketeering, conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and cocaine conspiracy, and the State Department had offered up to $5 million for information leading to his capture. U.S. Southern Command described him as a "wanted fugitive."
He escaped from Tocoron in September 2023 and had been at large since. The Trump administration designated Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization early last year and named Guerrero Flores as a co-defendant in the federal drug indictment of Maduro, who has pleaded not guilty.
The counterpoint
The operation lands on contested legal ground. Al Jazeera reported that a parallel U.S. campaign of strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, which the administration has cast as part of an "armed conflict" with Tren de Aragua, has killed at least 207 people and is "widely considered illegal under both US and international law" and described as "extrajudicial killings" by legal scholars and rights groups. Family members of some of those killed have said they were fishermen. A National Intelligence Council assessment last year, cited by CBS News, found that the Venezuelan government does not direct Tren de Aragua, despite administration claims to the contrary. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told CBS's "Face the Nation": "They're wrong."
Venezuela is now led by Maduro's former deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, whom the Trump administration has cultivated by lifting sanctions and opening talks on oil cooperation. The Friday strike is the first joint kinetic operation the two governments have publicly acknowledged.