San Juan de Unare was a small fishing village that rose in the middle of the night to load their boats to the shore and enter the Calmo del Caribe. This was what their parents and the parents of their parents did. More than 20 years ago, however, it became a place of drug traffic and everything changed. Disputes arrived, the rivalry between clans and death. First a murder, then two and then, in two days of which no one forgets, 78 at once. At the beginning of the week, according to Venezuelan media, a few boys from the town got on a boat and
The fatal fate of the residents of San Juan de Unare and other surrounding places has increased the tension between the United States and Venezuela, two nations that are spoken right now in warlike terms. The White House used its military force deployed in international waters, on the border with Venezuelan territory, to launch a missile against the boat and annihilate the eleven people on board. According to US authorities, they transported drugs to Trinidad and Tobago. Donald Trump ensures that it is a new way to face drug cartels through the use of weapons of war, but Nicolás Maduro, president of Venezuela, is convinced that it is nothing more than the previous step the invasion of his country. He assures that he will get eight million Venezuelans to grab a rifle and join the armed forces.
Everything happened in moments. The boat furrowed the sea when something unidentified pointed it from the sky (some experts believe it is a drone). Seconds later, a projectile sprayed it. The United States has declass the video of the moment, but has not offered many more details. The Chavista government said, at first, that it was a video created by artificial intelligence, but nothing makes it suspect. In private, a Chavista leader, close to Maduro, calls the Trump government of “criminal.” “They want to end this country to a missile,” he adds.
Washington’s theory is that Maduro is a narco -president who directs the Los Soles cartel, a local criminal organization (there is no evidence that it is true). To which it adds that the successor of Chávez did not accept his defeat in the presidential elections at the hands of the opposition, which in the eyes of Washington and practically the entire international community makes him an illegitimate president. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, insists every day that it is a drug trafficker who must be taken before the justice of his country.
The crisis has placed San Juan de Unare on the map. This is the last population with land access for a maltrecha road crossed by several military controls, in the direction of the Paria Peninsula. Beyond, the tropical forest, almost the last border of Venezuela. Here are some of the most beautiful beaches on the planet. But he often looks more like hell. The state of Sucre is one of the poorest and most violent throughout the country. Videos of this area governed by organized crime have flooded these days Tik Tok, since the attack was produced. “San Juan de Unare in mourning, who rest in peace those parents who enter that world out of necessity, so that their family lives a little better,” reads one of the videos. In the answers, users have commented that the aggression was real, not done by artificial intelligence. The victims are real.
Chavismo has now reacted that this information is announced and has militarized the people, according to witnesses to this newspaper. The whistle, a Venezuelan medium, explains that the fast and 12 meters long boat, with 11 men on board and a shipment of narcotics, would have left on Sunday, August 31 to Trinidad and Tobago and was destroyed early Monday. Before, according to this version, two drugs loaded with drugs that were not intercepted sailed. The Prime Minister of the Caribbean country, Kamla Persad-Bissssar, celebrated the operation: “The pain and suffering that the cartels have inflicted on our nation is immense. I have no compassion for the traffickers; the United States army should kill them all violently.”
Bands of drug traffickers have operated in this region for two decades. In recent years, when the exodus of Venezuelans began to intensify, criminal gangs also ventured into people traffic. The shipwrecks of Venezuelan migrants who tried to reach Trinidad and Tobago became common. The journalist Ronna Rísquez, author of the book Aragua Train: The band that revolutionized organized crime in Latin America (Dahbar, 2024), points out that in that area the presence of this band has been identified. She herself did research work in San Juan de Unare, material she used in her book. “I saw with my own eyes that it was a town taken by drug trafficking,” says Rísquez by phone.
The specialized environment in organized crime, Insight Crime, revealed in 2019 the increase in ship piracy in East Venezuela as a strategy to clear the routes of cocaine and marijuana traffic produced in Colombia to the Caribbean, in particular in the maritime strip between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago. A year earlier, a few kilometers from San Juan de Unare, in San Juan de las Galdonas, one of the large centers of drug trafficking operations, there was a brutal confrontation between criminal gangs. According to inhabitants and witnesses of the sector, according to local media, 78 men were killed and dismembered for two days of shootings. Venezuelan police authorities denied the massacre. Then there was no artificial intelligence.
