One victim was a fisherman struggling to survive on $100 a month. A second was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet, while a fourth was a bus driver who had fallen on hard times.
The men had little in common beyond their hometowns, which were all beside the Venezuelan sea.
The other thing they had in common: All four were killed in the past two months when the U.S. military attacked boats which President Donald Trump’s administration says were smuggling drugs.
In total, more than 60 people have died since September.
Trump and top U.S. officials have alleged that the boats were being operated by narcoterrorists and cartel members and were bound with deadly drugs for American communities.
The Associated Press learned the identities of four of the men – and pieced together details about at least five others – who were killed, providing the first comprehensive 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 narcoterrorists 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 cinderblock homes that can go weeks without water service and regularly lose power for several hours a day. They awoke to panoramic views of a national park’s tropical forests, the Gulf of Paria’s shallows and the Caribbean’s sparkling sapphire waters.
When the time came for their drug runs, they boarded open-hulled fishing skiffs that relied on powerful outboard motors to haul their drugs to nearby Trinidad and other islands.
The residents and relatives interviewed by the AP requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals from drug smugglers, the Venezuelan government or the Trump administration. They said they were incensed that the men were killed without due process.
In the past, their boats would have been interdicted by the U.S. authorities and the crewmen charged with federal crimes, affording them a day in court.
The U.S. government “should have stopped them,” a man’s relative said.
