Less than two weeks after the U.S. destroyed a suspected drug boat off the Venezuelan coast, killing almost a dozen onboard, a U.S. naval destroyer stopped a Venezuelan fishing boat over the weekend to search it for drugs.
But as the U.S. military's new anti-narcotics mission in the Caribbean carries on, independent Venezuelan crime experts tell WLRN the U.S. needs to exercise caution — or risk harming, if not killing, innocents whom Venezuela's criminals often traffic alongside drugs.
One of the U.S. warships recently deployed to the Caribbean by President Trump — a Navy guided missile destroyer, the U.S.S. Jason Dunham — detained the Venezuelan tuna-fishing vessel late last Friday, but it found no drugs.
Venezuela's left-wing dictatorship — which the Trump administration has labeled a narco-trafficking terrorist organization that's "invading" the U.S. with drugs and criminal migrants from the Tren de Aragua gang — condemned the incident, which it said occurred inside Venezuelan waters, as a military provocation.
One U.S. official told ABC News that the Dunham intercepted the fishing boat in international waters.
Either way, it again heightened tensions between the two countries after the Sept. 2 strike against the suspected narco-fast boat that the U.S. says left 11 Tren de Aragua members dead.
READ MORE: Trump confirms U.S. strike on alleged Venezuelan drug boat
In the aftermath of that attack, however, Tren de Aragua experts, including Venezuelan investigative journalist Ronna Rísquez, are cautioning the U.S. about using deadly military force in instances like that — largely because non-criminal persons, such as desperate migrants fleeing Venezuela's humanitarian crisis and sex-trafficking victims, can get caught in the firestorm.
"I'm certainly no proponent of going soft on drug traffickers, and especially not on Tren de Aragua" said Rísquez, author of the 2023 book El Tren de Aragua: The Gang That Revolutionized Organized Crime in Latin America.
"But we can't really know if those killed onboard [in the Sept. 2 strike] were Tren de Aragua, because Tren de Aragua doesn't really control the actual drug trafficking in that part of Venezuela where that boat was coming from.
"They help the larger and more powerful cartels with logistics and warehousing the drugs for transport, but that doesn't mean Tren de Aragua members were necessarily on the boat.
"To determine that you have to stop the boat and detain them — with police work, not bombs, because even drug traffickers have legal rights under international law."
The Trump administration insists it can engage Latin American drug-trafficking gangs like Tren de Aragua with military force, because it has now designated them as foreign terrorist organizations.
Justified military force?
Many legal experts, however, point out that even if a person or group is marked as terrorists, they still have to be at war with the U.S. — as Al Qaeda is, for example — to justify using military force against them. And few but the Trump administration itself contend that criminal gangs like Tren de Aragua are actually at war with the U.S., even if they do traffic drugs to the U.S.
After the Sept. 2 strike, Rísquez was one of the first experts to identify the impoverished fishing village of San Juan de Unare, on Venezuela's eastern coast, as the site taken over by Tren de Aragua seven years ago.
It's a strategic launching point for narco-cartel vessels heading to Caribbean locations, like Trinidad and Tobago, for further drug transshipment to destinations like the U.S. and Europe.
The Sept. 2 fast boat, Rísquez said, almost certainly embarked from San Juan de Unare. But one risk, experts like her point out, is that as a result its driver and crew may well have been not Tren de Aragua members, but local "mules" — fishermen and other destitute workers eager to make money piloting contraband to nearby Trinidad.
And that contraband, Rísquez cautions, more often than not includes people: "Migrants and women migrants being sexually trafficked.”
"The U.S.," Rísquez said, "as a result runs a risk of civilian casualties if it's not more careful. Its military needs to make sure its intelligence about who it's targeting is solid if it's going to pursue these operations."
It was perhaps indicative of the U.S.'s realization of that risk that when the Dunham stopped the Venezuelan fishing boat last Friday, it had Coast Guard personnel — in effect, the U.S. maritime cops who are designated to interdict drugs on the high seas — search the vessel.
