WASHINGTON — President Trump has announced that a US military strike inside Venezuela killed the leader of the Tren de Aragua gang, a killing he said was coordinated with the government in Caracas, five months after American forces removed the country’s president in a raid on the capital.
Writing on social media on Friday, Trump said the strike had killed Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, known as Nino Guerrero, whom he called the infamous head of the transnational gang. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the operation hit a Tren de Aragua compound in Venezuela earlier in the week.
What set the announcement apart was the claim of collaboration. The mission, Trump said, was closely coordinated with the Venezuelan government, an extraordinary statement about a country whose president, Nicolas Maduro, was seized by American commandos in January and flown out of the capital.
The implication is that whoever now governs Venezuela is working hand in glove with the power that toppled its last leader, hosting lethal American operations on its own soil. Neither Washington nor Caracas has said who authorised the strike on the Venezuelan side, or under what law.
Guerrero Flores was a real figure with a real record. He was indicted in a New York federal court in December on charges of racketeering and supporting terrorism, and Tren de Aragua, a gang born in a Venezuelan prison, has been designated a terrorist organisation by Washington and blamed for violence across the Americas.
But the manner of his death is what alarms human rights lawyers. He was not arrested, tried or extradited to face the charges already filed against him. He was killed, along with whoever else was at the compound, in a strike the United States carried out on foreign territory and announced after the fact.
The killing is the latest in a campaign that has grown steadily more lethal. By the administration’s own accounting, US forces have killed more than 200 people in strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific since Trump began targeting what he calls narcoterrorists, vessels his government accuses, often without public evidence, of smuggling drugs.
Each strike follows the same pattern. The military destroys a boat or a building, the dead are described as gang members or traffickers, and no court is asked to weigh the accusation. Legal scholars have warned that the strikes amount to extrajudicial executions, carried out beyond any battlefield and without the due process the law requires.
The Venezuelan theatre adds a darker layer. The United States removed President Maduro in January in an operation Caracas called an act of war, and has since treated the country as a zone of open American action, an arrangement now apparently formalised in joint strikes against targets the two governments agree to call enemies.
It also fits a wider doctrine. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate this month that cooperation with the United States is not optional for the nations of the hemisphere, a message Venezuela, stripped of the president who defied Washington, now appears to be living out.
For Trump, the killing of Guerrero Flores is a trophy in a war on gangs he has made central to his presidency. For the region, it is something more unsettling, proof that a Latin American government can be unmade by American force and then enlisted to help fire the next shot, with the law a spectator to both.
