The arrest in Colombia of one of the co-founders and principal leaders of Tren de Aragua represents the most significant blow to the transnational group’s leadership so far, and opens a window for future fragmentations.
After months of tracking him, the Colombian National Police captured Larry Álvarez Nuñez, alias “Larry Changa,” the co-founder and leader of Tren de Aragua, on July 1. They arrested him in a mansion in the municipality of Circasia, in the coffee-growing region of Colombia’s Quindio department.
Álvarez is one of the three main leaders and founders of Tren de Aragua, along with Hector Rusthenford, alias “Niño Guerrero,” and Yohan Jose Romero, alias “Johan Petrica.” Álvarez was being held in Tocorón prison in Venezuela, where the criminal group was born, in 2007, but escaped in 2015 with the help of the gang. His whereabouts were unknown until he went to Chile in 2018.
“[Álvarez] was in charge of the criminal strategy for the territorial expansion of the ‘Tren de Aragua’ in Colombian territory, ” according to a Colombian Defense Ministry publication on the social network X.
Changa first traveled to Colombia in 2022 with false documents, according to the Colombian authorities. He’d been living in Chile for the previous four years but fled in the face of increasing investigations against him. He’d made it to Chile like hundreds of thousands of other Venezuelan migrants, with his documents in order and no criminal record, according to police, judicial, and academic sources who spoke to InSight Crime from Chile’s capital Santiago.
Once there, Álvarez was key to the growth and consolidation of the Tren de Aragua in Chile. Under his leadership, the gang became one of the country’s principal criminal groups, controlling key border crossings for migrant smuggling, human trafficking, and extortion in urban areas. He gradually expanded the group’s criminal portfolio into kidnapping for ransom, drug dealing, and money laundering.
“He demonstrated a capacity for entrepreneurship. He is a guy who has a certain organizational capacity,” Tanía Gajardo, director of the Organized Crime Unit (UCO) of Chile’s National Prosecutor’s Office, told InSight Crime.
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Following the fall of Tocorón prison, Tren de Aragua’s base in Venezuela, in September 2023, the capture of Larry Changa is the most significant blow the gang has been dealt so far.
His detention creates a leadership vacuum the group has not faced before. The fact that Álvarez and other senior leaders of the Tren de Aragua are behind bars could cause the proliferation of new structures within the group, as has happened with the Tren del Coro in Arica, a former Tren de Aragua faction that decided to go independent following the arrest and murder of several of the group’s original leaders.
“The same thing can happen here that happened in the case of the Gallegos. When the first mass arrest took place in Arica, an arm of them broke off, and some soldiers from the Gallegos created their own criminal organization: Tren del Coro,” said Carlos Basso, an investigative journalist from Chile with access to documents from the Attorney General’s Office at the time.
The Tren de Aragua cells that have expanded throughout South America have adapted to the urban criminal dynamics of each city where they have a presence, a modus operandi that Changa himself helped establish.
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After spending several years as an informal vendor in the center Santiago, authorities discovered that Changa was the owner of two vehicles connected to homicides in popular areas of the capital, He was arrested and made to attend an inquest.
“In his statement he says he is part of an organization called Tren de Aragua and apparently that had no effect on the prosecutor who was investigating those homicides,” Basso told InSight Crime. “Subsequently, they ordered the detectives to let him go because there was not enough evidence.”
Once back in hiding, Álvarez established himself as the leader of the main Tren de Aragua faction in the country, and brought in Carlos Gonzalez Vaca, alias “Estrella,” and Hernan David Landaeta Garlotti, alias “Satanás,” as lieutenants. They were both eventually arrested between 2022 and 2023.
After fleeing to Colombia, Álvarez continued to lead the gang’s operations in Chile, Hassel Barrientos, head of Chile’s Metropolitan Anti-Kidnapping Special Police Investigations Brigade (BIPE), told La Tercera.
However, following his capture, it is uncertain whether the faction under his leadership, known locally as the Pirates of Aragua, will continue under the mantle of the Tren de Aragua. So far, no new leaders or leadership have emerged.
Featured image: Larry Álvarez Núñez, alias “Larry Changa” after he was arrested by the Police. Credit: Policía Nacional de Colombia.