Jesse Ramdeo

Se­nior Re­porter

jesse.ramdeo@cnc3.co.tt

The fall­out from a US drone strike that de­stroyed a ves­sel off Venezuela’s coast has deep­ened, as con­flict­ing nar­ra­tives con­tin­ue to emerge be­tween of­fi­cial gov­ern­ment state­ments and re­ports from in­de­pen­dent me­dia in that coun­try.

On one side, Venezue­lan of­fi­cials have dis­missed the wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed footage of the at­tack, shared by US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, as an AI-gen­er­at­ed fab­ri­ca­tion.

In­te­ri­or Min­is­ter Dios­da­do Ca­bel­lo told state broad­cast­er VTV the footage ap­peared to be AI-gen­er­at­ed and was be­ing used by Wash­ing­ton to ma­nip­u­late pub­lic opin­ion.

But re­port­ing from in­de­pen­dent Venezue­lan out­let El Pita­zo yes­ter­day paint­ed a stark­ly dif­fer­ent pic­ture. Jour­nal­ists there spoke with griev­ing rel­a­tives and neigh­bours in San Juan de Unare, Su­cre state, who con­firmed that 11 men were killed when their speed­boat was de­stroyed on Sep­tem­ber 2 while en route to Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Fam­i­lies have shared pho­tographs, names and trib­utes to the de­ceased on so­cial me­dia, and coun­tered the claim that the strike vic­tims were fic­ti­tious.

“How you left us my broth­er, you left me with my heart in a thou­sand pieces,” read one of sev­er­al mes­sages post­ed to Tik­Tok, where im­ages of the dead are be­ing wide­ly shared.

Ac­cord­ing to the Di­rec­tor of El Pita­zo, César Ba­tiz, the ves­sel, a 12-me­ter-long “flip­per” with four 200-horse­pow­er en­gines, left San Juan de Unare on the night of Sep­tem­ber 1. Eight of the men on board were from the town, with three oth­ers from near­by com­mu­ni­ties.

Guardian Me­dia at­tempt­ed to reach out to jour­nal­ists at­tached to El Pita­zo for fur­ther in­for­ma­tion but there was no re­sponse to our emails or calls.

Ac­cord­ing to sources, two oth­er boats car­ry­ing drugs passed along the same route ear­li­er that night with­out in­ter­cep­tion. The pub­li­ca­tion al­so cit­ed in­ves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Ron­na Rísquez, who has doc­u­ment­ed or­gan­ised crime in the re­gion, not­ing that San Juan de Unare has long been iden­ti­fied by US au­thor­i­ties as a hub for nar­co-traf­fick­ing op­er­a­tions.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, dig­i­tal an­thro­pol­gist and cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty ex­pert, Daren Dho­ray, not­ed that ver­i­fy­ing the con­tro­ver­sial video may be hard­er than one thinks.

"It could be a re­al video that was run through an AI gen­er­a­tion tool, and then when you run it to check if it was AI-gen­er­at­ed, it would say yes. So, be­cause we don't have the orig­i­nal video from the key source, there is no de­fin­i­tive way of stat­ing that hey, this video is AI-gen­er­at­ed or not, and that is the un­for­tu­nate thing, we can't say yes or no based on the tech­nol­o­gy that is avail­able."