KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Venezuela’s Am­bas­sador to T&T, Ál­varo Sánchez Cordero, is dis­miss­ing re­ports that a re­cent US mil­i­tary airstrike near Venezue­lan wa­ters killed sus­pect­ed drug traf­fick­ers, de­scrib­ing the in­ci­dent as pos­si­bly fic­ti­tious.

Po­lice of­fi­cers in this coun­try have the­o­rised that two uniden­ti­fied bod­ies that washed ashore last week may have been among 11 peo­ple killed in the Sep­tem­ber 2 strike. The US mil­i­tary claimed it de­stroyed a drug-smug­gling ves­sel op­er­at­ed by the Tren de Aragua, a Venezue­lan crim­i­nal or­gan­i­sa­tion des­ig­nat­ed as a for­eign ter­ror­ist group by the US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion.

How­ev­er, speak­ing on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew yes­ter­day, Am­bas­sador Cordero ques­tioned the va­lid­i­ty of the re­ports. He re­fused to com­ment on Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s con­tro­ver­sial “kill them all vi­o­lent­ly” state­ment in sup­port of the US ac­tion.

“Lis­ten, I can­not com­ment on what­ev­er one per­son has said, what­ev­er an­oth­er per­son has said; it is not re­al­ly up to me to make any com­ments re­gard­ing that. But what I can tell you, again, is specif­i­cal­ly on the sit­u­a­tion that you are re­fer­ring to, is that in sit­u­a­tions like this, which are quite se­ri­ous, we can­not go by wait­ing for de­bris to come here and there,” Cordero said.

He ar­gued that the US nev­er pro­vid­ed co­or­di­nates or sup­port­ing ev­i­dence of the strike.

“We still think it is very pos­si­ble that this nev­er hap­pened, that it is ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence cre­ation.”

If true, Cordero said, the ac­tion would rep­re­sent a breach of in­ter­na­tion­al law in in­ter­cept­ing a drug-car­ry­ing ves­sel.

De­spite the Gov­ern­ment’s sup­port for the US in­ter­ven­tion, Cordero said that bi­lat­er­al re­la­tions be­tween Venezuela and T&T re­main strong, root­ed in “fam­i­ly, his­to­ry, and cul­ture.” He was con­fi­dent that both na­tions would pre­serve their broth­er-sis­ter re­la­tion­ship.

On the loom­ing de­por­ta­tion of 200 Venezue­lan na­tion­als cur­rent­ly in­car­cer­at­ed in T&T, Cordero said he need­ed more de­tails. He stressed that Venezue­lans at home and abroad hold deep re­spect for T&T and that this bond will not be eas­i­ly un­der­mined by pol­i­tics.

He em­pha­sised that most Venezue­lans liv­ing in T&T were hard­work­ing and law-abid­ing.

“We just hope that they are not vic­tims of scape­goat­ing, racism, and dis­crim­i­na­tion be­cause these are in­di­vid­u­als who are hard work­ers, they are good peo­ple who are just do­ing their best.”

Re­gard­ing fur­ther repa­tri­a­tion, Cordero said his gov­ern­ment has faced dif­fi­cul­ties as US sanc­tions pre­vent Venezue­lan air­craft from en­ter­ing T&T. This, he ex­plained, com­pli­cates ef­forts to re­turn cit­i­zens.

Ad­dress­ing strained re­la­tions with Wash­ing­ton, Cordero said there are al­so “friend­ly peo­ple” in the US gov­ern­ment and that Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro con­tin­ues to keep com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels open. He point­ed to on­go­ing dis­cus­sions be­tween Na­tion­al As­sem­bly Pres­i­dent Jorge Ro­dríguez and US Spe­cial En­voy Richard Grenell, who vis­it­ed Venezuela in Feb­ru­ary.

“It was a cor­dial con­ver­sa­tion, and many ne­go­ti­a­tions took place in or­der to ex­change pris­on­ers.”