Shortly after 9pm on Friday, US President Donald Trump made an unusual announcement on his social media platform, Truth Social.
President Trump said the United States and Venezuela worked together to kill Hector Rustenford Guerrero Flores, also known as “Niño Guerrero” and the alleged top leader of the notorious criminal organization Torren de Aragua. The United States designated the organization as a foreign terrorist organization early in the Trump administration’s second term.
President Trump announced that the attack on Guerrero Flores was “swift and deadly,” adding that under his leadership, the United States will “find brutal murderers and drug traffickers wherever and whenever they belong and send them to the depths of hell where they belong.”
In his post, President Trump included a 10-second video of the alleged assassination, showing a bird’s-eye view of a building with a galvanized metal roof being blown off.
In a separate statement, Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodríguez said the joint operation was carried out in Venezuela’s “southeast Bolivarian state,” adding that the United States and Venezuela exchanged both intelligence and specialized technical assistance.
Guerrero Flores’ whereabouts were unknown until the coordinated attack was announced on Friday. The crime leader, who authorities say helped find Torren de Aragua, had a decades-long criminal history and had been on the run for years.
President Trump described Guerrero Flores as “notorious” in his announcement, but it’s likely that few Americans know anything about him. Curious people will find little information in government records and statements. The State Department’s wanted page for Guerrero-Flores includes a grainy black-and-white photo with his height and weight listed as “unknown.”
So who was “Niño Guerrero”?
The State Department’s biography of Guerrero Flores is thin, but it does include his full name and date of birth, which, oddly enough, is different from the birth date listed in Venezuelan court records. Both documents state that Hector Rustenford Guerrero Flores was born in 1983 in Maracay, the capital of Aragua state, Venezuela.
According to a 2018 Venezuelan Supreme Court ruling, Guerrero Flores’ criminal career began in 2005 when he was arrested on suspicion of murdering an employee. Several years later, in September 2012, he escaped from the notorious prison in Tocolon, Aragua state, and was rearrested in 2013.
It was after his recapture sometime between 2013 and 2015 that Torren de Aragua began to approach its current form.
The group gradually gained power and territory within Tocolon Prison, and Torren de Aragua began to form alliances with other criminal organizations to expand its influence. It eventually came to control the San Vicente neighborhood of Guerrero Flores’ hometown of Maracay, according to a report by the think tank Insight Crime and the Venezuelan Violence Observatory.
On December 15, 2016, the Court of First Instance of Aragua State sentenced Guerrero Flores to 17 years and two months in prison for 12 crimes, including intentional murder, escape from custody, concealment of weapons of war, drug trafficking, and criminal association.
However, Torren de Aragua’s control inside the Tocolon prison was absolute, with the gang setting up swimming pools and restaurants within the prison walls, and imprisoning Guerrero Flores was just as effective as releasing him. It was only when the Venezuelan government took full control of the facility in October 2023 that it was discovered that he had disappeared. He became a fugitive and remained a fugitive until his death.
The U.S. State Department has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction. In December 2025, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York indicted Mr. Guerrero-Flores on charges of ordering, directing, or promoting acts of terrorism within the United States.
Led by Guerrero Flores, Torren de Aragua not only expanded its presence in Venezuela, but also reached other countries in the region and is said to have even crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
According to InSight Crime, the gang maintains a presence in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. Meanwhile, Transparencia Venezuela, the Venezuelan arm of the non-governmental organization Transparency International, says the criminal group also operates in Brazil and Costa Rica. Similarly, Mexican authorities have reported arrests of alleged leaders and associates of Torren de Aragua. In 2023, a CNN investigation documented its presence in the United States.
In March 2024, Guerrero Flores’ brother Guelso was arrested in Barcelona, Spain and extradited to Venezuela a few months later. Just over a year later, Spanish police arrested 13 people and announced that they were the first cell in the country to be dismantled in Torren de Aragua.
In July 2024, then-US President Joe Biden designated Torren de Aragua as a major transnational criminal organization. But early in his second term, President Trump went a step further and signed an executive order designating the gang as a foreign terrorist organization. Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina soon followed suit.
Torren de Aragua and other Latin American gangs are at the center of the Trump administration’s first wave of deportations. Since the beginning of his second term, the president and his allies have argued in and out of court that the presence of alleged gang members in the United States is part of a broader “invasion” of the country from the southern border.
After President Trump invoked the Foreign Enemies Act, the U.S. government used that basis to deport hundreds of people in March 2025.
A few months later, in September, the Pentagon began tracking drug-trafficking vessels operating in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, some of which it claimed were affiliated with Venezuelan gangs.
More than 200 people were killed in US attacks on these ships. The Trump administration has not presented any public evidence of the presence of drugs on the attacked vessels or any links to drug cartels.
CNN’s Michael Williams, Rafael Romo, Rey Sanchez, Belisa Morillo, Laura Wefer, Osmary Hernandez, Max Saltman, Sebastian Jimenez, Pau Mosquera and Jade Tim-Garcia contributed to this report.
