Two Men Linked to MS-13, a Gang Canada and Washington Now Brand a Terrorist Group, Charged in Sweeping Toronto-Area Human Trafficking Case

The two accused MS-13 associates were pictured in a Peel Police statement.

MISSISSAUGA — Two men police describe as associated with MS-13 — the transnational Latin cartel that both Ottawa and Washington designated a terrorist organization last year — have been charged with running a human trafficking operation across the Greater Toronto Area while one of the accused was serving a lengthy prison sentence, a rare Canadian prosecution tying a transnational terror entity to the domestic sex trafficking economy.

Peel Regional Police announced the arrests Wednesday at the close of an investigation they called Project Mermaid, launched in November 2025 after allegations that a woman was being trafficked and sexually exploited across the region. Investigators worked with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC).

The case carries an unusual detail. Police allege that one of the accused, while serving a lengthy prison sentence in a federal institution, used a contraband cellphone to communicate with both the victim and his co-accused, directing her exploitation from behind bars. The two men, police allege, relied on intimidation, manipulation and threats of violence to control the woman while profiting from her exploitation.

Officers executed four search warrants in Mississauga and the Collingwood area. Marcos Ariel Marinoni, 42, of Mississauga, faces the most serious slate of charges: trafficking in persons, receiving a material benefit from trafficking, advertising sexual services, communicating to obtain sexual services, exercising control, assault with a weapon, two firearms counts, and withholding or destroying documents for the purpose of trafficking.

Carlos Gutierrez, 30, of Toronto, is charged with trafficking in persons, receiving a benefit from trafficking, advertising sexual services, communicating to obtain sexual services, deriving a material benefit, and exercising control, direction or influence. Both men remain in custody. Investigators believe additional victims have not yet come forward. The charges have not been tested in court.

What lifts the case above a routine trafficking file is the affiliation police attached to the accused. On February 20, 2025, the government of Canada added MS-13, formally Mara Salvatrucha, to its Criminal Code list of terrorist entities, alongside six Latin American cartels including Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The same day, the United States designated the same seven groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

A terror listing is not merely symbolic: it hands police expanded powers, exposes anyone who knowingly deals with a listed group’s property to terrorism-financing offenses, and can render associates inadmissible to Canada. It has not been common for a Canadian municipal force to publicly attach a listed terror entity to a sex-trafficking prosecution.

Peel’s vice investigators have documented the convergence before.

In its 2023 annual report, the force said investigators from its Vice Bureau, assisted by the New York Police Department, conducted a yearlong investigation involving organized crime members belonging to MS-13 and Mexican cartels who were trafficking women from the Dominican Republic into the sex trade. The same investigation identified 60 migrant workers as victims of labour trafficking who were found living in unsanitary conditions and relocated with assistance from the Red Cross and Toronto Victim Services.

Police said three sex-trafficking survivors were rescued, two people were arrested and 18 charges were laid. Two vehicles were forfeited and more than $34,000 in Canadian currency was seized as proceeds of crime. Project Mermaid suggests that transnational organized-crime footprint in the Toronto region has not receded.

The arrests land squarely on terrain The Bureau has been mapping.

In an October 24, 2025 op-ed, these pages traced how Ottawa’s own border-intelligence analysts warned years ago that policy choices would ease the entry of Latin American criminal networks — cartels, human smugglers and foot soldiers — and argued that the Carney government inherited a threat picture its predecessors were warned about and discounted.