Media Hype Set Up Tren de Aragua to Serve as Trump's New Bogeyman

January 25, 2025
Belén Fernández

A CNN headline (6/10/24) last June menacingly warned readers about the United States’s latest dial-a-bogeyman, guaranteed to further whip up anti-immigrant vitriol in the country and justify ever more punitive border fortification: “This Is the Dangerous Venezuelan Gang Infiltrating the US That You Probably Know Nothing About But Should.”

The gang in question was Tren de Aragua, which formed in Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, and spread to various South American countries before allegedly setting its sights on the US. Now the organization that you probably knew nothing about has achieved such a level of notoriety that President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his first day of returning to office, declaring the group (along with other regional drug cartels and gangs) to be a “foreign terrorist organization.”

Although there is approximately zero evidence of a smoking gun on the old terror front, the corporate media are doing their best to bring fantasy to life. And as usual, it’s the average refuge seeker who will suffer for it.

In the course of educating its audience about the little-known peril last year, CNN quoted a March letter to then-President Joe Biden from a group of Republican congressmembers, led by Florida’s Marco Rubio and María Elvira Salazar (incorrectly identified by CNN as Ana María Salazar). The letter sounded the alarm that the “invading criminal army” Tren de Aragua was positioned to “unleash an unprecedented reign of terror” across the US.

More:
https://fair.org/home/media-hype-set-up-tren-de-aragua-to-serve-as-trumps-new-bogeyman/