Venezuelan Ambassador reports decline in illegal migration

Raphael John-Lall

Free­lance Con­trib­u­tor

While de­clin­ing to com­ment on the res­cue of three Venezue­lan women who were about to be il­le­gal­ly trans­port­ed to Trinidad and To­ba­go this week, Venezue­lan Am­bas­sador to T&T, Ál­varo En­rique Sánchez Cordero, says he be­lieves there has been a de­cline in the num­ber of Venezue­lans ar­riv­ing in the coun­try il­le­gal­ly.

On Tues­day, Venezue­lan po­lice re­port­ed that they had suc­cess­ful­ly res­cued the three young women be­fore they were tak­en to T&T by hu­man traf­fick­ers.

While Sánchez Cordero ad­mit­ted that the mi­grant flow be­tween the two coun­tries is “dif­fi­cult to tell,” he said, “Gen­er­al­ly, since I’ve been here from 2022, I have seen those num­bers de­creas­ing, year af­ter year, and that in­cludes 2026. But that’s just my em­pir­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion, not sci­en­tif­ic at all,” he told Guardian Me­dia in a brief What­sApp mes­sage yes­ter­day.

Guardian Me­dia al­so reached out to Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der on the lat­est case re­port­ed by Venezue­lan po­lice, but re­ceived no re­sponse up to press time.

Of­fi­cials of Venezuela’s Sci­en­tif­ic, Crim­i­nal and Foren­sic In­ves­ti­ga­tions Corps (CI­CPC) said the women, aged be­tween 17 and 18, were res­cued dur­ing an op­er­a­tion in the La Ve­ga parish of the Lib­er­ta­dor mu­nic­i­pal­i­ty in Cara­cas, fol­low­ing an in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to an In­sta­gram post by CI­CPC Di­rec­tor Dou­glas Ri­co, three Venezue­lans—two men and a woman—were ar­rest­ed af­ter al­leged­ly keep­ing the vic­tims un­der guard while prepar­ing to trans­fer them to T&T un­der false job of­fers.

Venezue­lan au­thor­i­ties are con­tin­u­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions to lo­cate and ar­rest the re­main­ing mem­bers of the al­leged crim­i­nal or­gan­i­sa­tion.

The de­vel­op­ment comes as au­thor­i­ties in T&T con­tin­ue to crack down on hu­man traf­fick­ing rings.

On Ju­ly 6, Guardian Me­dia re­port­ed that 50 il­le­gal mi­grants, in­clud­ing ten chil­dren, were de­tained dur­ing co­or­di­nat­ed po­lice op­er­a­tions tar­get­ing sus­pect­ed hu­man traf­fick­ing and broth­el ac­tiv­i­ty in Port-of-Spain and San Fer­nan­do.

Ac­cord­ing to that re­port, a 75-year-old busi­ness­man, whom po­lice said pre­vi­ous­ly faced charges for lur­ing women in­to a trap be­fore sex­u­al­ly as­sault­ing them, was al­so de­tained dur­ing the in­tel­li­gence-led ex­er­cise. In­ves­ti­ga­tors sus­pect he owns two es­tab­lish­ments be­lieved to be op­er­at­ing as broth­els.