Venezuela’s De­fence Min­is­ter, Gen­er­al Vladimir Padri­no López, is ac­cus­ing “Trinida­di­an mafias” of at­tempt­ing to desta­bilise Venezuela through hu­man traf­fick­ing and the smug­gling of prod­ucts in and out of the coun­try.

Padri­no López made the ac­cu­sa­tions yes­ter­day fol­low­ing mil­i­tary drills tar­get­ing il­le­gal drug op­er­a­tions.

Just last week, with­out pro­vid­ing fur­ther de­tails, Venezuela’s Jus­tice Min­is­ter Dios­da­do Ca­bel­lo an­nounced that two more T&T na­tion­als had been ar­rest­ed in Venezuela.

Padri­no López in­struct­ed the Bo­li­var­i­an Armed Forces of Venezuela to re­main alert not on­ly to “Trinida­di­an mafias” but al­so to “Guyanese mafias”.

He al­so re­port­ed that crim­i­nal or­gan­i­sa­tions op­er­at­ing out of T&T and Guyana pose a di­rect threat to na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty and re­quire an im­me­di­ate re­sponse from op­er­a­tional com­mands.

“From be­yond our ju­ris­dic­tion­al wa­ters, we must be very vig­i­lant against the Trinida­di­an mafias, the Guyanese mafias. This is a ter­ri­to­ry sus­cep­ti­ble to false pos­i­tives, and I an­nounce this to the peo­ple of Venezuela, be­cause these Trinida­di­an mafias in­volved in hu­man traf­fick­ing, smug­gling, fu­el and oth­er prod­uct smug­gling, as well as those that ex­ist in the ter­ri­to­ry of the Co­op­er­a­tive Re­pub­lic of Guyana (...) are spe­cial­ists in build­ing boats and se­mi-sub­mersibles,” he stat­ed.

He stressed, “These are clear signs that these mafias op­er­at­ing there must be per­ma­nent­ly con­front­ed, con­front­ed with the Con­sti­tu­tion in hand, our laws, and our rules of en­gage­ment and com­bat.”

Padri­no López un­der­scored the im­por­tance of Venezuela’s mil­i­tary main­tain­ing an ac­tive pres­ence in the area.

“We all know the in­ten­tions of US im­pe­ri­al­ism, its ves­sels, the cur­rent Guyanese gov­ern­ment, and US en­er­gy com­pa­ny Exxon Mo­bil to block our ac­cess to the At­lantic, and they are ex­ploit­ing oil in wa­ters yet to be de­lim­it­ed. This is an­oth­er ma­noeu­vre, an­oth­er im­por­tant front that the Strate­gic Op­er­a­tional Com­mand must mon­i­tor,” he warned.

On Au­gust 19, lo­cal po­lice of­fi­cials, in­clud­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro, con­firmed the ar­rest of five na­tion­als who were al­leged­ly en route to col­lect a ship­ment of guns and il­le­gal drugs bound for T&T. They were de­tained by the Guardia Na­cional. The in­ci­dent, which oc­curred around Au­gust 13 or 14, is now be­ing linked to broad­er transna­tion­al crim­i­nal net­works un­der scruti­ny as part of the on­go­ing State of Emer­gency (SoE).