Last Wednesday, more than 11,000 soldiers and police occupied the Tocorón prison (Aragua state, north), which functioned as the gang’s operations center.
In uniform, with backhoes behind him demolishing structures in a courtyard of the now vacated prison, Ceballos asserted that 88 members of Tren de Aragua have been captured in the operation, in which weapons of war such as rocket launchers, rifles and grenades were seized.
Ceballos declared at the end of a tour organized by the government for the press of the facilities.
“GNB—acronym for the military Bolivarian National Guard—the train is over,” read one graffiti.
The authorities released messages on social networks and the media with photographs, name and ID number of Héctor Guerrero, alias ‘El Niño’ Guerrero, the top leader of the gang. “Reward. Wanted.”
An NGO that defends the human rights of prisoners, the Venezuelan Prisons Observatory, denounced on Friday that the leaders of the Aragua Train fled abroad before the prison was occupied.
“The most violent (prisoners), that is, the ‘pranes’, had already negotiated (with the authorities) the eviction of the facility and emigrated from the country a week ago,” the organization said in a statement.
The ‘pranes’, as the leaders of prisoners in prisons are called in Venezuela, had ordered the construction of a nightclub, a zoo and a baseball field in the prison.