Venezuela’s Navy yes­ter­day broke up three hu­man traf­fick­ing camps on the coun­try’s Orinoco Delta and res­cued 79 peo­ple, in­clud­ing 25 mi­nors, whom they said were be­ing traf­ficked to crim­i­nal gangs in T&T.

Through its Twit­ter ac­count, the Ar­ma­da Bo­li­var­i­ana said a pa­trol in the Orinoco Riv­er Delta, a vast jun­gle and riv­er area, in­ter­cept­ed an il­le­gal op­er­a­tion “ded­i­cat­ed to hu­man traf­fick­ing” and al­so ar­rest­ed 39 in­di­vid­u­als and seized two boats.

The Orinoco Delta, which cov­ers all of Delta Amacuro State and parts of Mon­a­gas State and Su­cre State in east­ern Venezuela, has for decades been a cen­tre of il­le­gal hu­man and drug traf­fick­ing. A vast delta of the Orinoco Riv­er, it com­pris­es a net­work of trib­u­taries which emp­ty in­to Gulf of Paria and the At­lantic Ocean.

Yes­ter­day’s raid comes amid re­ports of a ma­jor hu­man traf­fick­ing net­work op­er­at­ing be­tween T&T and Venezuela. An in­quiry spear­head­ed by Venezuela’s op­po­si­tion-con­trolled Na­tion­al As­sem­bly has linked the dis­ap­pear­ance of scores of mi­grants at sea to this crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

Robert Al­calá, a deputy in the Na­tion­al As­sem­bly, said ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100 peo­ple have dis­ap­peared since 2018 in ship­wrecks of boats bound for T&T and oth­er Caribbean is­lands such as Cu­raçao and Aru­ba.

COVID-19 trav­el re­stric­tions have not stopped the move­ment of peo­ple flee­ing de­te­ri­o­rat­ing po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic con­di­tions in Venezuela.

This re­port­ed­ly prompt­ed COVID-19 se­cu­ri­ty talks be­tween Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and Venezuela Vice-Pres­i­dent Del­cy Ro­driguez dur­ing her vis­it here in March.

A 2019 Traf­fick­ing In Per­sons Re­port (TIP) Re­port des­ig­nat­ed T&T as a tier 2 coun­try and said traf­fick­ers op­er­at­ing here “are in­creas­ing­ly tar­get­ing vul­ner­a­ble for­eign young women and girls be­tween the ages of 15 and 21.”

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, boats trans­port­ing sex traf­fick­ing vic­tims to T&T earn be­tween US$3,000 and US$12,000 per trip. Most are teenage girls and young women from coastal com­mu­ni­ties, in­clud­ing Cumaná, Carú­pano, Maturín and oth­er near­by towns. How­ev­er, woman and girls from oth­er parts of the coun­try are reg­u­lar­ly trans­port­ed to Güiria, a port city lo­cat­ed a short boat ride away from Trinidad’s north-west coast, which has been iden­ti­fied as the main op­er­at­ing base for hu­man traf­fick­ers, a Na­tion­al As­sem­bly re­port said.

There has been a huge in­flux of Venezue­lans to T&T in re­cent years and about 24,000 are be­lieved to be in this coun­try. In a May 14 re­port, the Unit­ed Na­tions Of­fice of Drugs and Crime (UN­ODC) said there has been an in­crease in mi­grant smug­gling and hu­man traf­fick­ing. The UN­ODC warned “the spread of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and its con­se­quences will prob­a­bly en­dan­ger the lives of these peo­ple even more.”