CARACAS - With at least 14 passengers drowned between Venezuela and Trinidad, the number of fatalities from a historic tragedy is growing: Venezuelans are trapped between human traffickers, Maduro's dictatorship and the indifference of the Trinidad government and other governments.
The Caracas Chronicles team writes about it and previously published this article in Cinco8.
Bodies
It's the night of December 12: As countries like the United States and Canada begin distributing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to combat COVID-19, Nicolás Maduro sends a video from the Humboldt Hotel in Caracas and the opposition makes the results of the plebiscite that do not correspond with the information that some media outlets have.
And, on social media, images of the bodies of 11 migrants, including small children, who drowned in the Gulf of Paria that week are circulating. The bodies were picked up close to Güiria, on the northeastern Venezuelan coast, by a Venezuelan army patrol. The government reports the recovery of three more bodies.
The boat with nineteen passengers was reported missing. According to David Smolansky, coordinator for the migration crisis appointed by the National Assembly, the boat could have been returned from Trinidad, as happened not long ago with another boat carrying minors that eventually returned to the island to be trapped there and chained.
"This is another shame that in itself illustrates the extent of our country's collapse," writes the Caracas group. "Another shame that is happening and we know it will keep happening. Another shame that shows the way many Venezuelans succumb, facing vulnerabilities created by the state and its criminal networks."
Accidents
The incidents involving boats transporting migrants bound for the islands near Venezuela began in 2018. The more reasons there are to migrate, the greater the risks migrants take, and the greater the demand for traffickers. They are the criminals who charge a lot of money for the illegal transfer of Venezuelans to Trinidad, or to the Dutch Caribbean islands of Curaçao, Aruba and Bonaire.
And as there is more demand for these smuggling services, more money is involved, more civil servants are joining the business and with fewer and fewer security measures. Migrants who have previously fled and settled on one of the islands pay to transfer their families. Or traffickers recruit girls in the poor communities of Venezuela and offer them legal work in Trinidad and Curaçao, when in reality they are forced to end up working in brothels.
In this context, shipping accidents are increasingly common. Since the start of the migration explosion, dozens of Venezuelan children, women and men have died. Many have also disappeared, so there is no way to determine a reliable number. It is another mystery within the dark reality of the Venezuelan tragedy, such as that of those disappearing in mines in southern Venezuela, or among Colombia's irregular migrant groups.
"Boats that can capsize at sea and the authorities that let the ships go without control look the other way or have been bribed," said the Caracas group. "The Venezuelan military and police, with all their limitations, are simply allowing this to happen and asking for money."
As a result, safeguarding the human rights of migrants belongs to the recipient countries to grant them legal or illegal access to their territory. Whether these countries comply depends on political factors and operational capabilities.
Islands
If managing the influx of Venezuelan migrants of hundreds of thousands has been a major challenge for larger and more organized countries such as Colombia and Brazil, then it is all the more so for the Lesser Dutch Caribbean and for the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, which are not accustomed to immigration and where the government, allied with Maduro, has chosen to respond with xenophobic measures and abuses that add to this shame.
For these islands, the Venezuelan crisis is a major problem: it means the reception of thousands of hungry and sick people; increase in crime due to the influx of drugs, firearms and smuggling from Venezuela.
In these places, as can be seen in Colombia, Panama, Peru and Ecuador, many politicians and citizens, like many Venezuelans in the 1970s and 1980s, respond when they blamed South American immigrants for crime: xenophobia. Just as it happens today in Europe and the United States.
Cause
The first is the economic collapse of the Venezuelan economy. Historically, poor regions such as Sucre State and Delta Amacuro State have reacted for years to the productive devastation caused by two decades of Chavista management.
In the east of Sucre, beyond Cumaná, there is almost no internal or external tourism. Beaches such as San Juan de las Galdonas are now a drug trafficking area. The Atlantic fishing industry, with tuna fishing boats providing many jobs, disappeared and illegal economies flourished in their place.
Millions of Venezuelans in the east of the country are without income: they have no resources or land for agriculture; they have no fuel for fishing or for transporting merchandise or people over land; they can no longer work in oil, tourism, or tuna fisheries.
Many of them have contracted AIDS or malaria in the mining area. Others have been kicked off their farms by gangs who have taken over the region to export drugs to the Atlantic and Caribbean Sea, along with police and military.
It is risky and there is no guarantee of success, but for these people on the coast it seems even more difficult to cross the entire country to enter the Andean countries, or to travel south to the mines in Guayana that are basically hell.
For most of the productive-age adults in the states of Sucre, Monagas, and the Delta, there is almost nothing else to do except try and reach Trinidad. That is a 45-minute boat ride from Macuro, the place where Christopher Columbus thought he found paradise.
The children, the grandchildren, they are all hungry. When they arrive, aid packs are not enough to feed a family. The people need medicine, clothes. Either you go to work with the drug dealer, or you become a criminal yourself, or you try to go to Trinidad.
Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire
Something similar is happening in the state of Falcón. Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire are very close to Paraguaná by boat and, as with Trinidad, centuries of relationships have left behind a strong knowledge of how to get to and from those islands and come back.
In that region, the collapse of the oil economy and the Free Port has created unemployment and despair. As many political dissidents have done, many Venezuelans choose to emigrate through those beaches. Challenging the sea to become an illegal immigrant in Aruba seems like a better scenario than staying in a town in Falcón, as you don't have food for your family there.
The authorities responsible for these coasts know this despair, and they are commercializing it. Like the rest of the state commercializes all the needs of Venezuelans.
Just as there are guards who charge you to give you fuel or bringing food to a relative in prison, so there are soldiers and police officers who charge you for taking a boat full of migrants, even though you do not adhere to the safety measures.
There are no smugglers without desperate migrants or without guards who are part of the company. This happens in the north of Africa, in the north of Mexico and on the border with Venezuela.
Illegal emigration by sea therefore carries the risk of drowning: it has been happening for decades in the Mediterranean with people of different nationalities, and in the Caribbean with Cubans, Haitians, Dominicans and now also Venezuelans.
Solution?
Regardless, as long as the factors compelling so many Venezuelans to try to emigrate are not addressed, only the implementation of security protocols and respect for human rights by the marine authorities in the affected countries can lessen these tragedies.
To do this, all those countries must take political responsibility in fulfilling their duty, ensuring that the officials and the military and police personnel have more reasons to do their jobs than to make money by not doing it.
Human rights NGO Provea explains that when seven United Nations bodies demanded answers from the governments of Venezuela, Trinidad and the former Netherlands Antilles about the disappearance of at least 73 migrants in three boats, only the Netherlands replied to say what it did.
International pressure can help to change policy towards these migrants, but the pressure from citizens of those areas is what counts. It's going to help that the press in the United States and Europe talk about the Venezuelan issue, if no one in the region really cares about the deaths.