U.S. strike off Venezuela disrupts fishing areas

The attack reduced a flow of money that helps impoverished communities.

- By Rrecina Garcia CANO

A FISHERMAN prepares his net in the fishing community of El Morro de Puerto Santo, Venezuela.

On Venezuela's Paria Peninsula, an idyllic stretch of Caribbean coast, it is an open secret that boats departing from its ports transport both drugs and fish.

Residents claim not to know who owns the illegal cargo, but they can tell when business is doing well because people eat out, get their hair and nails done and buy expensive meat. They also admit that none of this has happened since the U.S. military struck one of those boats earlier this month.

Few details are known about the deadly Sept. 2 strike on a boat the Trump administration claims departed Venezuela carrying drugs and Il members of the Tren de Aragua gang. But fishermen in the peninsula say they do not entirely blame those who enter the illegal trade, as living off fishing alone in Venezuela is to accept a life of poverty.

Fishing boats in the breathtaking — peninsula have been repurposed to smuggle migrants, traffic humans, wildlife and fuel. These “other businesses” have flourished since Venezuela’s economic collapse a decade ago.

“There is no revolution here,” said retiree Alberto Diaz, referring to the self-described socialist movement that the late Hugo Chavez launched in Venezuela in 1999 with the promise of improving the lives of the poor. “What there is here is hunger, sacrifice, pure pain.”

Walking through the Gitria neighborhood of one of the strike’s victims, Diaz lamented the decline of the local fishing industry, which once offered jobs with living wages and a way for people “to be happy.”

Speculation over strike abounds