Findings counter Trump’s narco-terrorist claims

One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver.

- By Regina Garcia CANO

JOE RAEDLE Getty Images FISHERMEN work off Icacos Point in Trinidad, a hub for drug smuggling.

The men had little in common beyond their Venezuelan seaside hometowns and the fact all four were among the more than 60 people killed since early September when the U.S. military began attacking boats that the Trump administration alleges were smuggling drugs. President Trump and top U.S. officials have alleged the craft were being operated by narco-terrorists and cartel members funneling deadly drugs into American communities.

The Associated Press learned the identities of four of the men — and pieced together details about at least five others — who were slain, providing the first detailed account of those who died in the strikes.

In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.

Most of the nine men were crewing such craft for the first or second time, making at least $500 per trip, residents and relatives said. They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers.

The men lived on the Paria peninsula, in mostly unpainted cinder-block homes that can go weeks without water service and regularly lose power for several hours. For drug runs, they boarded open-hulled fishing skiffs that relied on powerful outboard motors to haul their drugs to nearby Trinidad and other islands.