Cúcuta Has Grown More Violent as Venezuelan Criminal Groups Gain Strength

This article, produced by the Venezuelan Investigative Unit, was originally published by InSight Crime, a Medellín-based foundation dedicated to the investigation and analysis of crime and security in Colombia and Latin America.

The principal crossing point from Venezuela into Colombia, the frontier city of Cúcuta, has seen rising levels of violence as it struggles to confront the growing strength of Venezuelan criminal groups.

Photo: A Colombian police officer on patrol in Cúcuta. (Credit: National Police of Colombia)

In a report published February 25 by the Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice (Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad Pública y la Justicia Penal), Cúcuta ranks 43rd of the 50 most violent cities in the world. The report states that the city’s homicide rate was 33.8 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, with a total of 369 homicides in 2023.

Fenalco, president of the Board of Directors for the National Merchants Federation (Fenalco) in Norte de Santander, told a local newspaper, that from 2022 to 2023, kidnapping grew 92%, extortion 110%, armed robbery 115%, and murder 62% in the department of Norte de Santander.

In response to the rise in violence, Mayor Jorge Acevedo ordered the militarization of the city in early February, launching the Liberty and Order security strategy.

A few days earlier, he had denounced several Venezuelan criminal groups for threatening him.

“I leave at the disposal of [the Prosecutor’s Office] and [the Police of Cúcuta] this threat sent to me by the gangs ‘AK 47 and Tren de Aragua,’” he wrote in a post on X.

According to local authorities, the rise in violence and criminality is closely linked to the four criminal organizations that originated in Venezuela: the AK 47, Los Porras, Los Lobos, Carlos Pecueca, and Tren de Aragua.

InSight Crime Analysis

The regular flow of migrants and range of illegal economies on the border make Cúcuta the perfect launching point for Venezuelan criminal groups to expand across the border.

The arrival of Venezuelan groups in Cúcuta, specifically Tren de Aragua, coincided with the 2018 increase in migrants fleeing Venezuela, when some 3.4 million citizens crossed into Colombia. By January 2019, according to Colombian government figures, 1.2 million were living in different cities in Colombia, including Cúcuta.

Criminals camouflaged themselves among the migrant population settling along the Colombian-Venezuelan border. This initially led to clashes with Colombian guerrilla groups, such as the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN), with whom they competed for control of the irregular border crossings, known as “trochas,” as well as other criminal economies that proliferate along the borders.

However, Venezuelan organizations resisted attacks by the ELN and Colombian security forces, and gangs such as the Aragua Train and the AK 47 managed to hold on to territory and expand their influence in the Cúcuta.

When InSight Crime visited Cúcuta in 2023, journalists, public officials, and security forces described how the AK 47 had gained control of important neighborhoods in the city, controlling criminal activities like extortion and micro trafficking.

Recently, the Venezuelan groups have begun to recruit Colombians to their ranks, a sign that they can offer better opportunities to criminals than the local groups.

“In Norte de Santander, on the Colombian territory side, organized crime gangs are structured and made up of individuals of both nationalities,” a social leader in Cúcuta told InSight Crime.

Tren de Aragua, whose reach extends across South America, is the most powerful of the Venezuelan gangs in Cúcuta. In addition to controlling certain impoverished neighborhoods, the group also currently controls part of Cúcuta prison, in a replica of the pranato model the group employed in Venezuela to run jails. This requires a certain level of power over Colombian criminal groups and influence over corrupt security forces, and is further evidence of Tren de Aragua’s criminal reach in the border city.

This criminal foothold in Cúcuta served as a springboard for Tren de Aragua to extend its tentacles into other areas of Colombia and beyond, following migrants as they traveled down through South America, as far as Chile.

Based on Tren de Aragua’s success in spreading throughout the region, it is possible that other Venezuelan groups may follow in their footsteps, again using Cúcuta as the launch point for their transnational expansion.

This article, produced by the Venezuelan Investigative Unit, was originally published by InSight Crime, a Medellín-based foundation dedicated to the investigation and analysis of crime and security in Colombia and Latin America.