Mystery grips Caribbean as bodies wash ashore after US strikes

Since then, the bodies have emerged as part of the puzzle involving the US military deployment in the region. The Trump administration publicly says the mission is to combat drug trafficking out of Venezuela, which is a relatively minor player in the global drug trade compared with Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia and Peru.

But American officials have privately made clear that the objective is to drive President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela from power. The campaign has led to the largest US deployment in Latin America in decades, and it has expanded from the Caribbean to the Pacific Ocean, with the official death toll from the strikes standing at 37.

Trinidad and Tobago, with about 1.5 million people, has faced various ramifications from the US campaign, including attacks that may have killed its own citizens and heightened tensions with Venezuela.

Separately from the unidentified corpses, authorities are investigating reports that two Trinidadians were among those killed in a US strike this month. Relatives of the men, identified as Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, have disputed claims that they were involved in drug trafficking.

Condemnation of the attacks is spreading, based on the assessment of legal specialists and independent United Nations experts that it is illegal for militaries to target in international waters civilians who do not pose an imminent threat.

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, at the weekend, accused the United States of murdering a Colombian fisherman in an attack on a boat that US authorities claimed had been carrying drugs. President Donald Trump responded by halting aid to Colombia and saying that Petro, a leftist, had a “fresh mouth toward America”.

Persad-Bissessar has adopted a starkly different strategy. Aligning with Trump, she is framing her position as a way to shield her country from drug violence.

“I much prefer seeing drug and gun traffickers blown to pieces than seeing hundreds of our citizens murdered each year because of drug-fuelled gang violence,” Persad-Bissessar told reporters when the US campaign began.

Regarding the mystery in Cumana, she said that Trinidad would not use state resources to search for the bodies of those killed because of US military action and that the country’s duty ended with recovering any corpses that wash ashore.

Persad-Bissessar’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Some analysts in Trinidad say she has legitimate reasons to support the US campaign. Trinidad needs US support to bolster its natural gas production, putting its economy on a stronger footing.

And while much of the world’s cocaine is produced in Colombia, it is sometimes smuggled through Venezuela into Trinidad, which serves as a hub where bulk shipments are received, stored, repackaged and prepared for movement to Europe, West Africa and the United States.

“Trinidad serves as a staging ground within a larger, well-structured trafficking chain,” said Garvin Heerah, a Trinidadian security expert.

Still, by supporting the US deployment, Persad-Bissessar has set Trinidad apart from other countries in CARICOM, an organisation of more than 20 Caribbean nations.

In mid-October, all CARICOM members except Trinidad reaffirmed the group’s position that the Caribbean should remain a “zone of peace” in which disputes are resolved without foreign military intervention.

As a result, Venezuela has grown increasingly antagonistic towards Trinidad. Venezuela’s Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López vowed to respond with “legitimate defence” if an attack on Venezuela is conducted from Trinidad’s territory. (Before the US strikes in the Caribbean, Persad-Bissessar said she would give American forces access to Trinidadian territory to defend neighbouring Guyana, which has been threatened by Venezuela.)

After the reports of two potential Trinidadian victims in the US attacks, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez of Venezuela said the strikes supported by Trinidad’s leader had “also extrajudicially murdered humble citizens of her country”.

Amid the feuding, Trinidadians are grasping for answers.

After the bodies showed up in Cumana, the Trinidadian police commissioner, Allister Guevarro, noted they had “washed up with apparent injuries”. He said his force would try to investigate where the bodies had come from, but that it could be complicated by the corpses’ state of decomposition.

But at the public forensics centre in the capital, Port of Spain, confusion reigned. Some employees said that no autopsies on the two corpses had been done, since bodies must be identified first. No one in a senior position could be reached to confirm this information.

So far, no one has claimed the bodies, and no foreign government has requested that they be repatriated. The bodies were being held at funeral homes in the Port of Spain area.

Several residents said this was the first time in memory that mangled bodies had drifted ashore. What is more, the corpses appeared to belong to men with ethnic backgrounds that are different from most Trinidadians, who descend largely from enslaved Africans and indentured servants from India.

“They seemed to be Latinos – my guess is from Venezuela,” said Branil Lakhan, 23, who lives in a wooden shack near the beach where the first corpse was found. “This is a quiet place where things like this don’t happen.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.