The violent semester that Bogotá has just experienced, Colombiain terms of homicides, not only did it leave a balance of 16 people murdered, tortured and packed in garbage bags, but, apparently, it also added six other cases of people cremated and poisoned in Soacha and that, according to the Police, from that municipality would have been washed away by the waters of the Bogotá River.
This situation once again put on the radar of the authorities what could be a criminal cell of the violent Venezuelan criminal group Tren de Aragua, which in Bogotá settled in the towns of Kennedy, Santa Fe, Mártires and Bosa. It is also on the border, in cities such as Cúcuta and Arauca, where it has engaged in fierce clashes with the ELN and FARC dissidents for control of the corridors of illegal economies.
The arrival of the criminal network of the Araguas in Bogotá, for which there is still no specific date, has generated a homicide vendetta due to settling accounts between this gang of foreigners and the residuals of the Camilos, who operated in the sector. from gate 6 of Corabastos, María Paz and Patio Bonito. According to the investigators, this would be the central axis of the wave of bagged bodies found in Bogotá.
The authorities announced yesterday that there were five arrests for these macabre acts, including two alleged members of the Aragua Train, two men responsible for stabbing another 167 times and leaving him abandoned in garbage bags in Los Mártires, and another who, for reasons of the investigation, his identity is not yet public. The Prosecutor’s Office has also identified a third member of the Aragua group who remains at large to date.
The sectional director of the Bogotá Prosecutor’s Office, José Manuel Martínez, pointed out that “the capture of Alfredo Brito, alias Alfredito, and Víctor Salazar, alias el Capi, two members of the organization who played an essential role in what has to do with the hit man, with all that is the criminal phenomenon of the pocketed and, specifically, with the case of April 18 in which they tortured, beat and pocketed another Venezuelan citizen.
The torture test
In videos provided by the Judicial Police on this fact, it can be seen how a group of men keep a subject gagged while threatening him with a knife and asking him for the name of the person he works for. Apparently, the victim was a drug dealer, also of Venezuelan origin, who would have worked with one of the enemies of Los Terribles, as the Tren de Aragua gang is also known.
“I don’t know him, I don’t know them, okay, because of my morals I don’t know him (…) he hasn’t given me any money,” says the subject while another intimidates him and insists: “Ahhh! So you did work with that crazy guy.”
According to General Eliécer Camacho, commander of the Bogotá Metropolitan Police, the film findings made by the Judicial Police and the prosecutor coincide with the results of Forensic Medicine, “where there is excessive violence on the victims’ bodies. This is precisely to send messages to other groups about the control of territories and micro-trafficking.”
However, the video did not only reach the hands of the investigators. At the arrest legalization hearing, the judge in the case of the aliases Alfredito and Capi read the testimony of an anonymous witness who stated that he had seen the prisoners in a bar located in the María Paz y Corabastos sector, in the south of Bogotá. , “using drugs, alcohol and making fun of a video in which they themselves appear torturing a young Venezuelan named Jonathan.” These images would be the same video that is today in the possession of the investigating entity.
In the statement, the witness also said that the alleged murderers would have said that “that mamagüevo had to bite him for borrowed” and that the place where the murder would have been committed was a house in the sector of 38, very close to the so-called Virgen de abastos .
The arrival of the Aragua
According to Juan Sebastián Jiménez, a security expert at the National University, the Aragua Train is the most important cartel in Venezuela that arrived in Colombia as a result of the links that were generated between the two countries by the exchange of illegal economies. “On the one hand, drug trafficking and on the other, migrant trafficking. What we see is a consolidation of Venezuelan criminal forces in Colombia and vice versa, as in the case of the Clan del Golfo, and this gang that is now in Bogotá.”
According to Jiménez, the Aragua Train has been impacting cities such as Cúcuta, Arauca, Barranquilla and Bogotá. “The arrival of this group in the capital means the opening of a dispute to appropriate the typical areas of illegal economy such as San Andresito de la 38, Mártires, Santa Fe and Abastos.”
He explained that this structure is seeking to fill the gaps left by the leaders of Colombian groups that have already been captured and take control of the different drug trafficking routes that pass through Bogotá. “What we are seeing is a new battlefield of illegal economies that takes us back to Venezuela and later to Brazil. Now the picture is clear and we know who they are”, he detailed.
Time had told since 2021 that this criminal structure had taken the border in Cúcuta and that it was waging a battle with the elenos for control of the extortion business on the so-called trails between San Antonio del Táchira, Venezuela and Villa del Rosario, in North of Santander.
To this is added that the Aragua Train would have already slipped through the border that borders the department of Arauca. There, the authorities warned of an increase in homicides last year due to an open dispute between Colombian and Venezuelan criminal groups that occurred after the rupture of a coexistence agreement that they had reached to commit crimes together and dominate the drug market. , weapons and merchandise that moves between the Las Canoas pass and the Los Güires court.
Before the arrival of the Venezuelan group in the capital, the sectional director of Prosecutors indicated that the instruction is not to catch criminals, but to work to dismantle the entire network around this macro-criminal structure, which is horrifying Bogota citizens with its crimes.