News Desk

Police in Colombia have arrested one of the founders of the feared transnational crime gang Tren de Aragua.

In a rural Quindío province location, Larry Amaury ÁlvarezNúñez, popularly known as “Larry Changa,” was apprehended.

According to the ministry of defense for Colombia, Larry Changa is wanted for terrorism-related offenses, arms trafficking, extortion, and kidnapping in both his home country of Venezuela and Chile.

In recent years, the criminal organization Tren de Aragua, which he co-founded, has expanded from Venezuela to places as far south as Chile and as far north as the United States.

Larry Changa, 46, is a native of Aragua, Venezuela, which is also the name of his criminal group.

Under his direction, the Tren de Aragua expanded into an international criminal organization from its beginnings as a prison gang located in the Tocorón jail, where he and his co-founder Héctor Guerrero Flores were incarcerated for murder.

In 2015, Changa succeeded in escaping Tocorón.
He reappeared in Chile three years later, where authorities claim he set up the gang’s money laundering operations.

In a BBC News Mundo piece [in Spanish], Venezuelan novelist Ronna Rísquez, who has published a book about the Tren de Aragua, explained how the expansion of the Tren de Aragua has led to a sharp rise in crime in Chile.

According to Ms. Rísquez, the gang used the migration of millions of people from Venezuela to other countries in Latin America as a means of growing its empire.

He was located by Colombian police in the coffee area of the country, in the little town of Circasia.

The message for other criminal leaders is obvious, according to a tweet from the ministry of defense:

“We will continue to go after them until we hunt them down so that they will pay for their crimes.”

Police departments throughout Latin America are expecting that Larry Changa’s apprehension will provide information on Guerrero Flores’s location.