Violent Venezuelan gang exploits technology to turbocharge its dominance: experts
Tren de Aragua recruits IT specialists, has its own online language, experts say
By Peter D'Abrosca Fox News
Published May 14, 2025 4:00am EDT
The brutal Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), which has rapidly grown in recent years and is wreaking havoc in communities nationwide, is using tech savvy to best its rivals and infiltrate American communities, experts say.
"Part of their recruitment process is to get individuals with IT backgrounds so that not only are they maintaining a presence on social media to keep their ear to the ground, they're also getting and recruiting and exploiting individuals with IT backgrounds so that they can operate digitally more easily in their marketing and advertising of individuals in the sex trade [and] sex trafficking," said Ali Hopper, a researcher from the nonprofit GUARD Against Trafficking.
Jarrod Sadulski founded GUARD Against Trafficking, and he and Hopper travel to prisons on the southwest border, in Mexico and Central America, where they interview imprisoned former gang and cartel members for research purposes.
"They absorb people into the ranks, sometimes by force," Sadulski said. "For example, if they come across somebody in a Venezuelan community that they've embedded themselves in and that person has IT skills or some specific set of unique skills, they'll draw in that person, even if it's unwillingly, into their enterprise, into their gang, because of that special skill set that they have. So that speaks to their sophistication."
Hopper said that much like organized cartels, TdA uses a specific cloud communication style as a way of avoiding digital surveillance while directing gang activities, unlike typical gangs.
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