Mexican authorities announced Tuesday the arrests of six alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang in Mexico City on allegations tied to drug trafficking, extortion and human trafficking, and separately arrested four alleged members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
The announcements came a day after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and U.S. President Donald Trump spoke about their governments’ ongoing collaboration against drug cartels as the U.S. continued to pressure Mexico for tangible results.
The Trump administration designated Tren de Aragua and the Jalisco cartel as foreign terrorist organizations last year, and the U.S. has alleged that Tren de Aragua had ties with Venezuela’s now-deposed President Nicolás Maduro. The U.S. has also targeted some boats in the Caribbean that it alleges were carrying drugs for the gang.
Mexico’s Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch announced the Tren de Aragua arrests on social media but did not provide nationalities, according to the AP report.
The Attorney General’s Office said later Tuesday it had arrested four alleged members of the Jalisco cartel, including the group’s boss overseeing operations in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city. The report said the arrests also included a man allegedly coordinating the movement of its drug shipments from Central America.
Attorney General’s Office spokesman Ulises Lara said that in the city of Tepic in Nayarit state on Mexico’s Pacific coast, one suspect was arrested who allegedly coordinated flights of small aircraft from Central America to clandestine landing strips in Nayarit, Jalisco and Zacatecas states.
Lara said that in Zapopan, outside Guadalajara, three more suspects were arrested, including the Guadalajara boss. The AP report said Lara did not say when the arrests occurred, and it noted that Guadalajara is one of the sites for this summer’s World Cup soccer tournament.
For the Tren de Aragua arrests, Mexico said the operation followed surveillance on several buildings in the capital. Authorities said they seized drugs, a gun and a notebook recording extortion in the city.
The AP report said the Tren de Aragua arrests involved one woman and five men. It also said the gang started more than a decade ago in a Venezuelan prison and gained global notoriety after Trump placed it at the center of his anti-immigrant narrative.
The report further said the gang has expanded in recent years as nearly 8 million Venezuelans fled economic turmoil and migrated to other Latin American countries or to the U.S.