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Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Activist gets Venezuelan help to ID Central murder victims

by

17 days ago
20250629
Local Venezuelan activist Yesenia Gonzalez

Local Venezuelan activist Yesenia Gonzalez

VASHTI SINGH

Free­lance Con­trib­u­tor

Venezue­lan hu­man rights ac­tivist Yese­nia Gon­za­lez is now work­ing close­ly with mem­bers of the Venezue­lan com­mu­ni­ty both here and in that coun­try to help iden­ti­fy the bod­ies of two His­pan­ic women who were killed and buried in a shal­low grave in Cunu­pia last week.

The women, be­lieved to be in their 20s, were stran­gled to death and dumped on agri­cul­tur­al lands off Ram­saran Trace, War­ren Road. Po­lice ex­humed the grave around 11.30 pm on Wednes­day and re­moved the bod­ies to the Foren­sic Sci­ences Cen­tre, where au­top­sies were per­formed. The au­top­sy found that the women, be­lieved to be in their 20s, died as a re­sult of man­u­al stran­gu­la­tion and as­phyx­ia due to smoth­er­ing.

Gon­za­les yes­ter­day de­scribed the mur­ders as ex­treme­ly trou­bling and called for jus­tice. She said she has en­list­ed the help of Venezue­lan me­dia to pub­li­cise the case and ap­peal for in­for­ma­tion.

She warned of a dis­turb­ing trend in Trinidad, where women are be­ing traf­ficked from Venezuela and forced in­to pros­ti­tu­tion. She said many are lured by false promis­es of a bet­ter life through so­cial me­dia, on­ly to find them­selves sold in­to sex work up­on ar­rival—of­ten based on their age, phys­i­cal ap­pear­ance, and even their vir­gin­i­ty sta­tus.

Ac­cord­ing to Gon­za­lez, some vic­tims are held un­til a ran­som—some­times as high as TT$40,000—is paid. She not­ed that she has worked along­side the TTPS Counter-Traf­fick­ing Unit and high­light­ed the res­cue of over 100 women from a traf­fick­ing ring ear­li­er this year.

Mean­while, res­i­dents of Ram­saran Trace re­port­ed that the area has pre­vi­ous­ly been used as a dump­ing ground for mur­der vic­tims. They called for in­creased po­lice pa­trols, not­ing that the nar­row, poor­ly lit roads lead­ing in­to the agri­cul­tur­al lands tend to at­tract crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

Ch­agua­nas West MP Dr Neil Go­sine de­scribed the dis­cov­ery as “deeply trou­bling.”

“It high­lights the se­ri­ous crime chal­lenges we face as a na­tion. At this time, I do not wish to com­ment fur­ther, as I am not the po­lice and would not want to spec­u­late or in­ter­fere with any on­go­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion,” Dr Go­sine said.


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