San Juan de Unare was once a quiet fishing town where families went out to sea at night, like their parents and grandparents before them.
More than twenty years ago, it became a hub for drug trafficking, and violence followed. Murders escalated, and at one point in 2018, 78 people were killed in just two days. This week, several young men from the town boarded a speedboat headed out to sea. They never came back.
The boat, carrying 11 men and a load of drugs, was destroyed by a U.S. missile in international waters near Venezuela. The United States says the men were traffickers heading to Trinidad and Tobago, a staging point for smuggling into the U.S.
President Donald Trump called it a new way of fighting cartels with military force. Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro said it was the start of an invasion plan and vowed to arm millions of citizens.
A short video released by Washington shows the strike: the boat moving across the water, then a projectile obliterating it. Caracas first dismissed the footage as artificial intelligence trickery, but many Venezuelans online believe it is real, with real victims. Locals in San Juan de Unare are mourning fathers who joined the trade out of poverty.
San Juan de Unare lies at the edge of Venezuela’s Sucre state, accessible only by a rough road with military checkpoints. It is one of the poorest and most violent parts of the country, where drug cartels and armed gangs dominate. The region has also become a route for human trafficking, with many Venezuelan migrants attempting dangerous sea crossings to Trinidad.
Journalist Ronna Rísquez, who investigated the town for her book on the Tren de Aragua gang, said she saw with her own eyes how traffickers had taken it over. Insight Crime reported years ago that piracy was on the rise in the area, used to clear drug routes to the Caribbean. In nearby San Juan de las Galdonas, 78 men were killed in a brutal gang war. At the time, officials denied the massacre.
Now, the U.S. missile strike has drawn San Juan de Unare into a larger clash between Washington and Caracas. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls Maduro a drug kingpin, though there is no proof.
Most of the world recognizes him as an illegitimate head of state anyway, since he refused to concede a lost election.
Meanwhile, Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister praised the strike. “I, along with most of the country, am happy that the US naval deployment is having success in their mission,” Kamla Persad-Bissessar said in a statement late Tuesday. “The pain and suffering the cartels have inflicted on our nation is immense. I have no sympathy for traffickers; the US military should kill them all violently.”
Source: El Pais.
