The Devil's Foot Soldiers

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
The president of El Salvador describes where altars for satanic rituals were found inside the home of gang members.  

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MS-13 tattoo The gang’s devil horns hand sign is known as “la garra,” a Spanish reference to Satan’s claws.

It's not surprising to find that people who practice extreme violence, murder and are involved in criminal activity are not atheists but satanists.

Tren de Aragua (TdA) and other gangs originating in central and South America caused chaos in their home country. Now that they've infiltrated the United States, especially under the Biden regime, America is being victimized. These gangs facilitate human trafficking, sex abuse and financial crimes.

Only a few months ago Tren de Aragua took over an apartment building in Colorado, and became mini warlords of the building, collecting rent and terrorizing the occupants.

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Mara Salvatrucha (MS) Goat Head Symbol Graffiti (Source-Ramon “Mojo” Montijo (former LAPD Officer) c. Jan. 1993

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele recently attended the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. He told the attendees: "Many people don’t know that our enemy was not just the flesh and blood, but spiritual as well. The gangs didn’t just murder, rape, extort. They also worship Satan. It’s straight up. Literally. When we went to their homes to arrest them, we discovered altars that were used for satanic rituals."

​Satanic altars were also found on raids for MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) members.

​Over 45% of Venezuelans deported at the beginning of 2025 were Tren de Aragua gang members. Present day they can be found in 16 states, and always tied to extreme violence. No doubt they deserve being named a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.

Before becoming a gang, the group started in 2012, as a local trade union in the state of Aragua. Then in 2014, Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, alias "Niño Guerrero," and two other convicts inside Tocorón prison (Aragua State) organized what was to become Tren de Aragua. They extorted other prisoners for food and protection from violence.

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Arrested for attempted murder and other charges in Aurora, CO, all have ties to TdA c. July 2024

Three years later TdA became known as "megabanda" which referred to their growth from street gang to an organized criminal group. Their main practice has always been extortion coupled to a lesser extent with selling street drugs.

Disparate gangs whether inside the prison or on the street shared information about their crimes, which strengthen their enterprises.

TdA took over the prison completely, to the point the government was unable to manage it at all.

After 2014, under Maduro's regime, Venezuela suffered an economic collapse. In the following four years over 3 million people left the country.

Tren de Aragua took advantage of the exodus from the country and facilitated human trafficking and exploitation of female migrants for sexual slavery in Chile, Colombia and Peru.

They expanded after socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro emptied Venezuela’s prisons in late 2023.

The Venezuelan socialist prison policies allowed control of the prison under a system known as Pranato (Pranate). In order to garner votes during 2024, the government claimed to disband the gangs running the prisons, but in truth the pranes (criminal leaders) escaped along with their belongings, and none were recaptured.

Among those who escaped was Hector Guerrero Flores, who sought refuge in the mining town of Las Claritas. Yohan Jose Romero a.k.a. Joha Petrica one of the gang's founders accompanied him.

Once these pranes fled, the police and military officials took over the criminal enterprise and got money from the prisoners for phone, drugs and other packages.

The veneration of the Santos Malandros, Venezuela's Holy Thugs cult started in the late 1980s.

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Arrival of inmates belonging to MS-13 at Salvadoran prison

President Bukele has extensive experience with the Salvadoran gang MS-13. In 2022, he initiated a country-wide crackdown which led to the arrest of over 85,000 people with gang affiliation, drastically reducing homicide rates and earning widespread domestic support. 

MS-13 started out in the 1970s as the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners. They were Salvadoran youths living in L.A. who got high and listened to heavy metal music.

Thomas Ward, an anthropology professor at the University of Southern California who studied the gang wrote: "A few of its members were hard-core Satanists who worshipped the devil and went so far as to practice gruesome animal sacrifices." One MS-13 member told him his initiation involved going to a cemetery, swearing an oath by drinking each other's blood. They cut their hands with a knife and drained the blood into a cup. They smoked pot and opened a cat.

In 2017, two construction workers were held at gunpoint when they found an MS-13 "destroyer house"  in Montgomery County, Maryland that was slated for demolition to make way for a rail project. The workers were conducting a pre-demolition inventory when they found a gang member who pulled a gun on them. Inside authorities found graffiti, assorted drug paraphernalia, and a shrine to Santa Muerte (Holy Death) with burning candles at the altar and a skeleton idol hanging from the ceiling.

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Beyond its journey from a local street to a transnational power-seeking gang, the overlapping ideological themes and cultural narratives underlying Mara Salvatrucha’s evolution have been built upon a foundation of satanism, occultism, brutality and torture, and rampant criminality. While some gang cliques and their members are still primarily secular in their orientation and view satanism and occultism from more of an ideological perspective many others embrace a violent magico-religious cosmology in a sense becoming ‘true believers’ that now adhere to amoral or even evil spiritual values that invite sacrifice and torture. ​

Tren de Aragua gang members

In 2017, MS-13 was connected to murders, involving high school students. These were underage girls sacrificed in "satanic rituals". 

A 14-year-old girl held hostage almost 3 weeks at a Houston apartment told police she was given drugs and alcohol, raped by a gang member and held down while an image of Santa Muerte was tattooed on her leg from her knee to her foot.

While being held she met another girl named Genesis, which she recounted was later murdered for insulting a satanic shrine one of the gang members had set up. 

Gang member Alvarez-Flores nicknamed "Diabolico" (Diabolical) said that satan was no longer satisfied with material objects and instead "the Beast wants another soul."

The next morning Genesis had vanished.

Genesis Cornejo disappeared from her home in Jersey Village, Texas on January 19, 2017 after running away. She was found a month later with a bullet hole in her head, and another in her chest, both of which appeared to have been fired at close range

Miguel Alvarez-Flores and Diego Hernandez-Rivera the MS-13 gang members charged with her murder were convicted. Both were illegal immigrants from El Salvador to the United State where they were living for an undisclosed time. Hernandez-Rivera pled guilty and received a 40-year sentence, while Alvarez-Flores was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2021. 

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Enrique Portillo (mugshot) Nisa Mickens, bottom left inset, and Kayla Cuevas, bottom right inset.

In 2016, best friends Nisa Mickens, 15, and Kayla Cuevas, 16, were beaten with baseball bats and hacked with a machete. The attack was allegedly in retaliation for a derogatory remark Kayla made about MS-13 being at Brentwood High School in Long Island where they both attended.

The men accused of the crime, are all illegal immigrants from El Salvador or Honduras. One of them was deported in 2010 and sneaked back into the United States four years later. He murdered his co-worker at a landscaping company.

In 2023, Enrique Portillo pled guilty to his role in the murder. Jairo Saenz a leader pled guilty in January, 2025 to racketeering and multiple murders including those of Mickens and Cuevas. 

​The violence led to a major federal crackdown on MS-13 in Suffolk County, with several gang members convicted or sentenced. 

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Jose Ochoa Del Cid

Jose Ochoa Del Cid entered into the United States from El Salvador illegally in 2012. He was 16 years old and already a killer.

His mother kicked him out when he was nine years old. The Park View Locos Salvatrucha (PVLS) found him sleeping by a river. They took him in, and then gave him a shotgun and ordered him to go and kill his mother. He followed orders, and the woman was saved after the shotgun he was aiming at her face misfired.

For two years he served as an errand boy. When he was 13, he became a full-fledged member when they captured an 18th Street gang member and instructed him to slash at the man with a machete. The cut up body was thrown in a bag and dumped into a river. After a third murder he decided to go to the United States, where he joined a local PVLS clique in Alexandria. He was involved in various violent attacks.

In 2013, he was 17 when he helped to murder another gang member believed to be a snitch. They dismembered the body with a machete to make it fit into the shallow hole they had dug. A few months later he participated in the murder of another member suspected of stealing and sleeping with another member's girlfriend. He was decapitated and buried in a shallow grave also in Holmes Run Park.

Del Cid was arrested in 2014 and pled guilty to two murders he committed as an 18-year old. He testified against 12 other members. He explained in court: "When you [are involved in MS-13], you feel that the devil is helping you, and sometimes the devil asked you to do things for him."

In exchange for his testimony he was placed in a witness protection program and early release from prison.

He was arrested again in 2019, for a separate gang-related assault where he was sentenced to five years in prison.

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Uplifting Journey a halfway house on Bonita Road in Lake Oswego which harbored illegal criminal immigrants

In early 2025, Alexander Moises Arnaez-Gutierrez and Kevin Daniel Sanabria-Ojeda, members of Tren de Aragua were arrested and charged with kidnapping, robbery and attempted murder of 58-year-old Maria Guadalupe Hernandez Velazquez. She was taken at gunpoint outside her Tukwila apartment after returning home from work. They forced her into a car and "used a power drill to drill into her hand to get access to her cell phone and bank accounts." This is according to the charging documents pertaining to their arrest.

The criminals took her to Kittitas County, Washington where they shot her and dumped her on the side of I-90. Aiming for her head, they actually hit her in the shoulder, so she played dead. She managed to flag down help after climbing over a retaining wall. 

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) placed detainers on both illegal aliens from Venezuela.

Arnaez-Gutierrez was living in a halfway house located at 5431 Bonita Road, Lake Oswego, Oregon that received $2.3 million in taxpayer subsidized Medicaid funds from 2024 to 2025. It seems its true purpose was to harbor illegal criminal immigrants. There were reports of open drug use and drug sales occurring at the property. Groups of women seen at the house could also indicate prostitution was taking place.

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Jeff Eager, the former mayor of Bend, Oregon, told the outlet (Real Clear Investigations) that the owners of Uplifting Journey LLC, the recovery provider, had ties to men indicted in Arizona for setting up a $60 million Medicare fraud ring. The men were accused of laundering money by sending it to Rwanda.

omeone going by “Julius Maximo” founded two Oregon companies that applied for an received Medicaid reimbursements. (Photo: Facebook)

Uplifting Journey shut down this property in March 2025, and its Portland offices in August, after the kidnapping of Velasquez. Prior to this police had responded 17 times to the house for reports of screaming and illegal activity. Calls to this house required police to send at least three units.

Oregon Housing Authority (OHA) did not conduct criminal background checks or site visits for the company’s owners, citing federal rules that do not require such scrutiny for outpatient behavioral health providers.

A related company, Restorative Journey, was formed by the same individual, Julius Maximo, and received a single $159 Medicaid payment the day after the alleged murder attempt.

In the Restorative Journey enrollment paperwork, "Maximo" listed himself and two other "managing employees" of the business: Anisha Bukenya and Phiona Y. Johnson.

Restorative Journey’s OHA documents include information about a Dallas, Texas-based nurse practitioner named Njideka Domrufus, who works for a telehealth practice there named Ziks Health Services. The Oregon Nursing Board shows Domrufus as holding an Oregon nurse practitioner license.

According to Oregon Roundup: "Included in the OHA records is a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency controlled substance registration certificate, bearing Domrufus’s name. However, the address on the card is for 511 SW 10th Ave., Suite 601 in Portland, not the Ziks address in Dallas. The Portland address is, the Internet tells me, the home of Healthcore Psychiatry Associates PLLC, a Texas professional limited liability company based, according to Oregon Secretary of State records, in Irving, TX."

The tentacles of international gangs like Tren de Aragua, MS-13 and others wrap themselves around or are part of the inner core of a multi-level criminal enterprises.

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