The Caribbean sea and coast of Latin America have recently seen a dramatic rise in piracy, as economic woes and corrupt officials plague Venezuela and other countries in the region.
While the region has seen various traffickers use ports in Trinidad to move drugs from Colombia and Venezuela to North America in the past, the new pirates are ratcheting up the violence to levels that haven’t been seen by mariners in the region since the time of Blackbeard.
Political and economic crises are exploding from Venezuela to Nicaragua to Haiti, sparking anarchy and massive criminality. As the rule of law breaks down, certain spots in the Caribbean, experts say, are becoming more dangerous than they’ve been in years.
An economic crisis in the South American countries has sent inflation soaring, making food and medicine scarce. Malnutrition is spreading; disease is rampant; water and power grids are failing from a lack of trained staff and spare parts. Police and military are abandoning their posts as their paychecks become nearly worthless.
The conditions are compelling some Venezuelans to take desperate action.
Earlier this year, in April, a gang of pirates attacked four Guyanese fishing boats. Only five of the 20 crew members of the fishing vessels survived. The others were doused with hot oil, attacked with machetes and thrown overboard.
Jeremy McDermott of Insight Crime, a nonprofit that studies organized crime in the region said, “It’s criminal chaos, a free-for-all, along the Venezuelan coast.”
Although there hasn’t been much research into piracy in the Caribbean, one study from the nonprofit group Oceans Beyond Piracy found that pirate attacks in the region rose by 163 percent between 2016 and 2017.
Without a calculation of the total economic impact of piracy in 2017, it estimates that about $949,000 of goods were stolen by pirates in the region last year. Some experts fear that pirate activity and other crimes in the Caribbean Sea will increase as conditions in the socialist country continue to deteriorate.
Trafficking and piracy, locals say, have recently been expanding and becoming more violent. Five Trinidadian fishermen in the southern port of Cedros, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fear for their safety, said in interviews that they had witnessed a burst of Venezuelan boats arriving in recent months smuggling military-issue guns as well as drugs, women and exotic animals.
“Sometimes, those Venezuelans are willing to trade the guns and animals for food,” said one 41-year-old fisherman.
Roodal Moonilal, a lawmaker from Trinidad and Tobago’s opposition United National Congress party, told the reporter that the situation reminds him of what previously happened off the coast of eastern Africa. A few years back, there was a sharp increase in Somalian pirates terrorizing the coast of the region.
“What we’re seeing—the piracy, the smuggling—it’s the result of Venezuela’s political and economic collapse,” Moonilal said.
For those who make their living plying the warm waters of the Caribbean, piracy is a new source of fear. These days, locals are fishing closer to shore, and sometimes at night, to avoid the risk of attacks.
Source: Financial Times