Interior minister says ‘murder has been committed’ amid rising tensions over US military strike on boat in Caribbean
None of the 11 people killed in a US military strike on a boat in the Caribbean last week were members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s interior minister has said, as the South American country deployed troops amid heightened tensions with the US.
The administration of Donald Trump has said the boat was transporting illegal narcotics, but has provided scant further information about the incident, even amid demands from members of the US Congress for a justification for the action.
“They openly confessed to killing 11 people,” the interior minister and ruling party head, Diosdado Cabello, said on state television. “We have done our investigations here in our country and there are the families of the disappeared people who want their relatives, and when we asked in the towns, none were from Tren de Aragua, none were drug traffickers.
We know they probably weren’t just speedboat enthusiasts but blowing the boat up sets a precedent for extrajudicial killing without first establishing guilt.
Of course, this had nothing to do with justice, it was only about sending a very visual message to the other cartels that only US backed cartels are allowed.
Given that Venezuela has chronic shortages of almost everything, these days…it’s entirely possible they were smugglers. But they could have been smuggling anything from mail-order packages, to cash, or even medicine. We’ll never know now.