Raphael John-Lall

Free­lance Con­trib­u­tor

A mere two days af­ter call­ing T&T’s Gov­ern­ment “shame­ful” af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar promised to al­low Unit­ed States mil­i­tary to use T&T as a base if Venezuela in­vades Guyana, Venezuela’s Jus­tice Min­is­ter Dios­da­do Ca­bel­lo has hit out at T&T again.

In his lat­est ac­cu­sa­tions against T&T, Ca­bel­lo said two T&T na­tion­als, along with crim­i­nals from oth­er coun­tries, were ar­rest­ed on Wednes­day in the Venezue­lan state of Delta Amacuro, which bor­ders T&T.

This comes af­ter an in­ci­dent two weeks ago where three Tri­nis were among five men ar­rest­ed at sea by Venezuela’s Guardia Na­cional on Au­gust 15.

Speak­ing on his week­ly TV pro­gramme, “Con el ma­zo dan­do,” on Wednes­day night, Ca­bel­lo said of­fi­cials have dis­cov­ered some things that can on­ly come by boat from T&T.

“We have found some things in our Delta Amacuro re­gion that can on­ly be brought in by boat from Trinidad; we have found them. To­day, we ar­rest­ed 12 peo­ple in that area; eight are Colom­bian, two are Venezue­lan, and two are Trinida­di­an,” Ca­bel­lo said.

Ca­bel­lo al­so lashed out at US Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio’s lat­est state­ment on the US de­ploy­ment of mil­i­tary as­sets in the Caribbean, and crit­i­cised T&T for join­ing the cam­paign.

Read­ing a let­ter live on air, Ca­bel­lo not­ed that “an ex­am­ple is oc­cur­ring with our Trinidad and To­ba­go neigh­bours. Mar­co Ru­bio is ob­sessed with Venezuela and that is why he has been mak­ing moves in the Caribbean for months.”

He added, “Part of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean hasn’t re­alised that the sup­posed an­ti-drug war led by Mar­co Ru­bio isn’t aimed at cre­at­ing a re­gion free of il­lic­it drug abuse, but rather at at­tempt­ing to im­pose US gov­ern­ment con­trol and ma­nip­u­la­tion on the larg­er Latin Amer­i­can ge­o­graph­ic neigh­bour­hood.”

Ca­bel­lo al­so claimed that Ru­bio sees T&T as the “pawns” of the Caribbean, re­fer­ring to the failed Drag­on gas deal be­tween T&T and Venezuela.

He al­so said T&T’s re­la­tion­ship with the US is like “sell­ing its soul to the dev­il.”

“The US State De­part­ment sab­o­taged the Drag­on gas project for two rea­sons. If it had ma­te­ri­alised, T&T’s in­come could have ex­ceed­ed $2 bil­lion an­nu­al­ly in the first phase. This would have strength­ened the po­si­tion of T&T as the en­er­gy hub of the Caribbean and helped T&T to de­pend less on the Unit­ed States,” Ca­bel­lo said.

“In the sec­ond place, Ru­bio is play­ing hard ball so that the British com­pa­ny (Shell) in charge of the project left Trinidad in this way to favour the US com­pa­ny Exxon­Mo­bil, the prin­ci­pal fi­nancier.”