(Just The News)—In the 10 months after President Donald Trump designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization, more than 260 of its leaders and members have been federally indicted.
This month, five U.S. attorneys unsealed multiple indictments, including for terrorism, against more than 70 TdA members in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York and Texas, the DOJ announced.
Trump designated TdA as an FTO for the first time in U.S. history in February and directed the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to eradicate it from the U.S.
TdA, which means, “Train from Aragua,” referring to the Venezuelan state of Aragua, initially operated out of Tocorón Prison in Aragua. Its operatives have spread worldwide including into the United States under the Biden administration.
Trump made the FTO designation after more than one million Venezuelans illegally entered the U.S. and TdA crime expanded in at least 22 states under the Biden administration, The Center Square exclusively reported.
TdA members are committing terrorist acts, extortion, kidnapping, robbery, murder, drug trafficking, prostitution, sex trafficking, trafficking weapons and ammunition and partnering with a notorious cocaine trafficking organization and committing a range of financial crimes, the indictments allege.
Two major indictments were unsealed in New York and Texas charging TdA cofounders and top leaders with terrorism – the first charges of their kind, The Center Square reported.
In the Southern District of New York, alleged TdA mastermind Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, 42, of Venezuela, was indicted on charges include racketeering, providing material support to terrorists, using and carrying firearms, machine guns, and destructive devices to commit drug trafficking. According to the indictment, he issued orders from Tocorón Prison, including “acts of violence and terrorism transcending national boundaries,” The Center Square reported.
Guerrero Flores escaped Tocorón Prison in 2012 and is currently at large. A reward of up to $5 million has been offered leading to his arrest and/or conviction.
In the Southern District of Texas, four Venezuelans, including two top leaders and two high-ranking members, were indicted on terrorism charges and on charges they orchestrated an international gold and narcotics smuggling enterprise using extortion and murder, The Center Square reported.
One has been arrested; three remain at large. Giovanni Vicente Mosquera Serrano, 37, a top TdA leader, is on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives List. Yohan Jose Romero, 48, another top TdA leader, and Juan Gabriel Rivas Nunez, 44, are fugitives. Rewards of up to $5 million have been offered for information leading to their arrest and/or conviction.
In the District of Nebraska, one major TdA leader was indicted: Venezuelan entertainer Jimena Romina Araya Navarro, accused of helping Guerrero Flores escape from Tocorón Prison. She’s been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department and charged with providing material support to TdA, including related to a TdA ATM jackpotting scheme involving stealing from multiple ATMs in Nebraska.
A federal grand jury in Nebraska returned two indictments charging 54 people with using malware to steal millions of dollars in the TdA ATM jackpotting scheme. Nearly half indicted, 22, were charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, bank fraud, money laundering and other crimes. In a separate indictment, 32 people were charged on 56 counts on bank fraud charges.
In the District of New Mexico, 11 alleged TdA leaders and members were indicted on racketeering charges, accused of “kidnapping, brutally interrogating, and strangling a victim in an Albuquerque apartment, before burying his body in a remote desert grave.”
The indictment describes in detail the brutal nature of the crimes, including ordered assassinations, strangling victims, taking pictures of bodies to confirm deaths, stuffing bodies in suitcases to transport them to be buried in the desert, and cleaning crime scenes attempting to eliminate evidence.
Some of the defendants were also involved in a 2024 shootout at an Aurora, Colorado, apartment complex killing one, according to the indictment. Charges also include a range of weapons and narcotics offenses, including possession of cocaine, ketamine, methamphetamine, MDMA, fentanyl, marijuana and materials used to manufacture tusi, a popular narcotic in Venezuela.
In the District of Colorado, two alleged TdA leaders were indicted by a federal grand jury, charged with committing racketeering, robbery, extortion, kidnapping, money laundering, cyberstalking, using a firearm to commit the crimes, and controlled substance offenses. Others were charged in a jewelry store robbery in Denver. One defendant was sentenced to 240 months in prison on Dec. 17 after pleading guilty to charges including Hobbs Act Robbery and using a firearm during a June 2024 robbery.
The indictments stem from investigations led by the DOJ’s Joint Task Force Vulcan. The task force was created in 2019 by the first Trump administration to eradicate MS-13. It expanded this year to target TdA.
Information about TdA fugitives may be reported to the FBI via WhatsApp or Telegram at 281-787-9939 or online. Texas is also offering rewards for information about TdA.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
