So the United States has finally done it. They have killed the leader of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang in an airstrike, and President Trump has confirmed it with the usual triumphalism. One might expect a moment of sober reflection, a recognition that this is not a video game but an act of war, however surgical.
Instead we get chest-thumping and the illusion of control. The fall of a gangster is always a spectacle, but in this case it is also a mirror held up to a decaying empire. The Tren de Aragua, a criminal enterprise born from the wreckage of Chavez’s socialist experiment, had metastasized into a transnational hydra.
Their leader, a man whose name will be forgotten within a week, was a symbol of the chaos that liberal internationalism has sown. But what is the United States doing? Dropping bombs on foreign soil without a declaration of war, without a coherent strategy, without even the pretence of a legal framework.
This is not the Roman Republic dispatching a legion to crush a pirate king. This is a late-stage empire lashing out, hoping that a single strike can restore a sense of order. It will not.
The gang will fracture, regroup, and find a new leader. The slums of Caracas will remain festering. And the American public, fed on a diet of action movies and cable news, will cheer the death of a villain without asking why the villain existed in the first place.
The Tren de Aragua did not emerge from a vacuum. It emerged from the collapse of the Venezuelan state, a collapse accelerated by American sanctions and the grotesque incompetence of Nicolas Maduro. To pretend that a missile can solve this is not just naive: it is dangerous.
It allows the ruling class to avoid the hard questions about inequality, about the drug war, about the endless appetite for cheap labour and cheap thrills that fuels this trade. And so we applaud the death of a man we barely knew, while the system that created him churns on. This is the tragedy of modern empire: we have become experts at killing, but we have forgotten how to think.
