On November 7, 2025, Spanish police said they arrested 13 people suspected of belonging to Tren de Aragua in the first operation in Spain designed to dismantle a suspected cell of the Venezuelan prison gang. The arrests took place across Barcelona, Madrid, Girona, A Coruna and Valencia, giving the case a wider geographic footprint than a single-city crackdown and signaling a coordinated investigative effort rather than a one-off raid.
Police said the operation also led to the seizure of illegal drugs and the shutdown of two laboratories used to make tusi, a street drug mixture that combines cocaine, MDMA and ketamine. That detail matters because it points to more than simple possession or street-level dealing. The labs indicate a trafficking and processing operation that authorities believed was active enough to manufacture drugs rather than only move them.
The Spanish investigation did not begin with the November arrests. According to the evidence packet, police opened the probe last year after the brother of the gang leader known as Niño Guerrero was arrested in Barcelona under an international warrant issued by Venezuelan authorities. That earlier arrest appears to have given investigators a point of entry into a wider network that could be tracked across cities and possibly across borders.
Tren de Aragua began more than a decade ago in a prison in the central Venezuelan state of Aragua and has spread as Venezuelans have left the country in large numbers over the past several years. The group now surfaces in cases in Latin America, the United States and Europe, and Spanish police are treating it as a transnational organized crime problem rather than a local street gang issue.
The United States designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization in February. In the AP report, the gang also figured in the Trump administration's arguments for strikes on suspected drug boats and in domestic immigration rhetoric. Those broader political uses are part of the backdrop, but the Spanish case itself is narrower: an investigation, arrests, drug seizures and lab closures carried out by Spanish police.
What the evidence supports is a relatively precise law-enforcement picture. Police arrested 13 suspects, shut down two drug labs and described the effort as the first Spanish operation aimed at dismantling the gang's suspected local cell. The file does not support claims about the size of the network in Spain or the scope of any remaining activity, so the safer reading is that Spanish authorities believe they have disrupted one branch of a larger criminal enterprise.
The operation also shows why Tren de Aragua remains difficult to pin down in Europe. The AP report links the Spain case to an investigation that started more than a year earlier, which suggests patient work rather than a single intelligence breakthrough. Even without evidence of a larger prosecution, the arrests in five cities, the drug seizure and the lab closures together indicate that Spanish authorities believe they found a functioning local branch. That is enough to matter in practical terms, because police have now interrupted the group's ability to move product and recruit people in at least one part of Europe.
