The agents claimed that they fired at the boat’s engine in self-defense
tragedy in the waters Caribbean Sea. The Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard shot at a peero (small fishing boat) loaded with 20 Venezuelan emigrants, killing one baby of only nine months and injuring his mother. The agents claimed that they fired at the boat’s engine in self-defense.
“All available methods were used, including the use of megaphone, ship’s horn, searchlight and flares, to try to stop the suspect vessel. According to the protocols, then warning shots were fired in front of the boat,” reads the official note on the incident, which occurred on Saturday night off the southeast coast of the island of Trinidad, published by the local newspaper DailyExpress.
The authorities have launched an investigation to clarify the facts, although the coastguard insists that they only knew that there were “illegal immigrants hiding on board” when the ship stopped. That is when “they discovered an adult illegal migrant who I was holding a baby who was bleeding. The woman was also injured.
“It’s a tragedy. An investigation must be opened so that there can be justice. Enough of shooting, shipwrecks and deportations”, protested David Smolansky, commissioner of the Organization of American States (OAS) for the migration crisis.
The sea route to Trinidad and Tobago is one of the escape routes for the Venezuelan diaspora, which already has between six and seven million emigrants, the largest on the planet. The Creoles flee the revolutionary collapse from the Venezuelan coasts, this time from tucupita, capital of Delta Amacuro. the local newspaper Delta Newspaper He assures that the mother was traveling with another son.
Civil organizations and families of emigrants have constantly denounced what they consider to be mistreatment by the authorities of Trinidad and Tobago, even this week it was learned that At least three Venezuelan children have been detained for a year. More than a hundred people have lost their lives in the last four years in the different shipwrecks during the dangerous sea voyage.
“It burns in the soul that Venezuelan migrants continue to die throughout the region when they flee from a dictatorship,” added Smonlansky. In recent weeks, another seven-year-old Venezuelan girl drowned while trying to cross the Big River Come in Mexico and United States.
International organizations count more than a thousand Venezuelans who leave their country every day.
“From the legitimate government of Venezuela we ask for justice. They have no justification, they killed him. Venezuelans on that island have been victims of gunshots, deportations and shipwrecks. Enough of the mistreatment of our emigrants and refugees by an ally of Mature!”, denounced the president in charge, John Guaid.
The Bolivarian revolution maintains good diplomatic relations with Trinidad and Tobago, in fact it is one of its historical allies In the Caribbean. In fact, the government of Caracas has received in the last few hours the new Trinidadian ambassador, Edmund Dillon, “to give continuity to the “relations of cooperation and brotherhood between both countries”.
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