Raphael John-Lall

Free­lance Cor­re­spon­dent

Law en­force­ment agen­cies in the Venezue­lan state of Delta Amacuro are con­duct­ing an in-depth in­ves­ti­ga­tion to ar­rest in­di­vid­u­als mak­ing il­le­gal trips to T&T, ac­cord­ing to gov­er­nor of the state, Lize­ta Hernán­dez.

Venezue­lan dai­ly news­pa­per El Ul­ti­mas Noti­cias re­port­ed on March 12 that Hernán­dez said po­lice au­thor­i­ties are on the trail of crim­i­nal gangs or­gan­is­ing il­le­gal trips to T&T with­out any safe­ty mea­sures, such as the use of life jack­ets.

She made these com­ments af­ter a small boat il­le­gal­ly car­ry­ing 25 Venezue­lans on its way to T&T cap­sized on Feb­ru­ary 20. Ac­cord­ing to ini­tial re­ports, sev­er­al peo­ple were res­cued but many re­main miss­ing and four were con­firmed dead.

There have been sev­er­al sim­i­lar in­ci­dents over the last few years be­cause of Venezue­lan cit­i­zens flee­ing the eco­nom­ic and po­lit­i­cal tur­moil the coun­try has been suf­fer­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to the El Ul­ti­mas Noti­cias re­port, the gov­er­nor of Delta Amacuro is work­ing day and night to lo­cate the peo­ple in­volved in these trips and will soon of­fer pos­i­tive an­swers on this mat­ter, “no mat­ter who is in­volved.”

Mean­while, Richard Rondón, com­man­der of the In­te­grat­ed De­fence Op­er­a­tional Zones (ZO­DI) in Delta Amacuro state, al­so stat­ed that they are work­ing hard to re­solve the prob­lem of il­le­gal de­par­tures to T&T.

Rondón men­tioned that they are not on­ly on the trail of the peo­ple who or­gan­ise the trips, but al­so those in­volved in hu­man traf­fick­ing in Delta Amacuro, who seek to trans­port them to T&T.

“We are pur­su­ing or­gan­ised gangs and will pro­vide an­swers to this mat­ter,” he stat­ed.

In re­cent weeks, fears have in­creased that there could be a greater in­flux of il­le­gal Venezue­lan mi­grants, giv­en the lat­est round of sanc­tions that elim­i­nat­ed the li­cence of US oil com­pa­ny Chevron which op­er­ates in Venezuela and con­tributes bil­lions to its econ­o­my.

Last week, crim­i­nol­o­gist Dau­rius Figueira told Guardian Me­dia about the pos­si­ble con­se­quences of in­creased Venezue­lan mi­gra­tion to T&T and its neg­a­tive so­cial im­pacts like crimes that ac­com­pa­ny hu­man traf­fick­ing and il­le­gal mi­gra­tion.

“This il­lic­it mi­gra­tion will in­ten­si­fy the war be­tween transna­tion­al or­gan­ised crime busi­ness mod­els, as those il­le­gal­ly en­ter­ing T&T will bring with them the con­flicts rag­ing in Colom­bia, Ecuador, Pe­ru and Venezuela. Learn from Haiti to­day, which is a con­flict in­volv­ing the two busi­ness mod­els at war in the is­land of His­pan­io­la and now Puer­to Ri­co. The Caribbean will then be­come jump-off points for hu­man smug­gling to Eu­rope and the USA es­pe­cial­ly as Trump 2.0 shuts down Mex­i­co and the US bor­der with Mex­i­co. The jam­ming has now start­ed,” Figueira said.