Disappear
in the sea:

In two boats that set sail just 23 days apart, 60 people disappeared.  The boats had to leave the Venezuelan coast to reach the coast of Trinidad and Tobago, but they never arrived.  A 16-year-old girl drowned in the sea.  Nine survivors who prefer silence.  Two captains alive and rescued, one behind bars and the other on the run.  Nine detainees waiting for a new presentation hearing postponed four times in eight months.  A file that rests on some desk of the Venezuelan Attorney General's Office, while entire families continue to clamor for a search that has been paused for a year.

It is a story that could have been avoided, if the authorities had heeded the alarms.  But it didn't happen, despite warnings.  The two fishing boats - the Jhonaily José and the Ana María - share the story of having been wiped off the map on a route that left the same port and converged towards a common fate, on different days.

A State that, at all levels, turns its eyes to the departure of boats that travel illegally beyond their capacity, under the acquiescence of institutions and authorities that govern the docks, in exchange for between 300 and 500 dollars per boat, according to the accounts of relatives of several of the victims.  The omission of mayors and governors who admit to having been overtaken by a parallel power of which they do not mention the name aloud.  And, beyond that, the apparent complicity that points time and again to police and military officials who negotiate with the lives of women, men, adolescents and entire families who left in search of a fast migration route by sea from the coast of Güiria, in Venezuela, to Trinidad and Tobago.

A case that has been going on for a year with impunity, in the face of the silence of the Attorney General Tarek William Saab and the other authorities of the Nicolás Maduro government.

This story begins on land nine days before the fishing boat Jhonaily José even touched the sea to set sail on April 23, 2019, at about 11:00 p.m. from La Salina dock, known as "La Playita", in Güiria, Sucre state, one of the last coastal towns in eastern Venezuela.

Three teenagers were last seen together on Sunday, April 14, at 10:00 p.m. on a little-traveled street in Cumaná, the capital of Sucre state, 260 kilometers from that dock. They were Luisiannys Betancourt, 15; Unyerlin Vasquez, 16; and Omarlys Velasquez, 17.

Ana Arias, Luisiannys' mother, remembers that two girls knocked on the door of the house to look for her daughter and go to her grandmother's house. One was studying with the young woman, the other did not know her. Luisiannys left dressed, without documents, with a nightgown, without a bra and in sandals from home. He never saw her again.

"Her daughter left for Colombia," Ana heard on the phone on Tuesday 16. She did not know it, but it was still a week before the young woman disappeared into the sea.

The next day she went to the Romanian headquarters of the National Anti-Extortion and Kidnapping Command (Conas), which is part of the National Guard (GN). The first face of the State she would see, whose grimace of disinterest would be repeated for months.

She gave the officials the cell phone number that had called her. "This phone is in Guiria, ma'am, but wait 72 hours, your daughter probably went on a rumba," they answered. 72 hours in addition to the hours that had already passed.

On Thursday, April 18, at 4:00 p.m., Ana received another call. Someone who identified herself as Luisiannys told her she was on the border with Colombia. She was crying. "Mom, I'm on speakerphone. Better write me." Through text messages she explained that she wanted to go back home, but they wouldn't let her. "They are charging me $200 to leave because that's what they spent on me," she said. The girl didn't say where she was and then stopped writing. Similar messages arrived the next day.

Very early on Friday morning, Ana returned to Conas. For the second time in three days, the tracing of this call dictated that it was also made from Guiria. But the uniforms washed their hands: "Here is the address and name of the owner of the phone, ma'am. Go and look for your daughter," a commander named Marquez handed him the paper on which he scribbled a name: Hector Torres.

Güiria is four hours away from Cumaná. Ana did not have a vehicle, and the mere mention of her destination caused drivers to turn down petitions because she was in territory controlled by drug trafficking and smuggling mafias.

She did not know anything else until 24 April, the day after the departure. "I received a call from another phone. A girl who said her name was Maria asked me my name and let me go: 'your daughter drowned'. I couldn't say anything and she hung up on me. Then the number was never active again”.

"The ship sank
and they drowned"

Unyerlin Vasquez and Omarlys Velasquez are cousins. Amarilis Velasquez, the mother of the first one, saw them enter her house together with a teenager she did not know and in her nightgown. "Her name is Luisiannys and she studies at the high school," her daughter mentioned.

In the morning she realized that none of them had spent the night, and that her daughter had vanished without any documents. During the following days she received text messages, the same days and from the same phone number that she contacted Ana Arias, whom she did not know then either.

Velasquez did not file a complaint with the authorities because every time Unyerlin contacted her she tried to reassure her: "I'm going to travel but I'll be back in three months, so don't worry," she said.

On 24 April, Amarilis Velasquez received a call from a young woman who introduced herself as Maria. "Didn't you know that your daughter was going to Trinidad? Well, the ship sank and they drowned," she told her without anesthesia, without the slightest crack in her voice.

The next day he went to the Prosecutor's office in Cumaná to file the complaint for the first time. Before traveling to Guiria, he did the same before the Prosecutor's Office in Carúpano, the second most important city in the state.

"My eldest daughter started checking the girl's (Unyerlyn) social networks from the day she disappeared. Two days after the shipwreck was published in the media, she found that this Maria - the same one who had called me - put on her Facebook wall that the girls had drowned and named my daughter. I said all this to the Prosecutor's Office when I filed the complaint," says Amarilis.

If a police force had activated the search protocols in the nine days before the departure from their mothers' claim, they would have found that the girls posted photos on their respective Facebook walls on 20 and 22 April. Although some publications carried the story that they had gone to Colombia, the photos could detail some streets and older men accompanying them.

Margelys Gonzalez, Omarlys' mother and Amarilis Velasquez' sister-in-law, followed those traces which were dismissed by the police agencies. A friend of her daughter told her about the group's plans to go to Trinidad. She would be the fourth girl to travel, but she got sick with malaria and couldn't. "They sent some pictures to this girl. My daughter and my niece were seen there in party dresses and heels. They were like in a bar. Some acquaintances there assure me that they saw them the night before the boat left (Monday, April 22) and that they were with a man named Hector Torres (one of the disappeared and the same identified by Conas) who bought them food and drink," she says.

The "blindness" of the authorities

It was not easy to conceal a departure at 8:00 p.m. with 38 people on board in a boat with capacity for a maximum of 20, without luggage. Eight minors stood out among the 27 women who filled the boat: they were traveling without passports or representatives, and some did not even carry identity cards.

The accesses to the docks are guarded because it is a safety zone. For example, the Maritime Customs Office of the National Integrated Customs and Tax Administration Service (Seniat) operates at pier No. 8. A few meters away is the Port Captain's Office, an entity attached to the National Institute of Aquatic Spaces (INEA), which has a panoramic view of the place. There is also night watch by the National Guard.

After a request for information made to both institutions in the port of Güiria, the officials said they were not authorized to respond if there was an official document listing the people on board that night on the boat Jhonaily José, registration number ARSI-CA0067.

The first list with the registration of the passengers and crew was a minute circulated on April 24 by the Zonal Command of the National Guard (CZGNB) No. 53 when reporting the "shipwreck. It refers to Julio Carrión as the captain of the boat. The paper quantifies 35 people, but only shows names of 23.

"Information was received from several citizens belonging to the population of Güiria, municipality of Valdéz, that yesterday (April 23), a boat named Yonaily José, captained by the Cddno, left. Julio Carrión with destination to the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, boarding the amount of thirty-five (35) passengers, where the boat turned due to the strong waves near the Isla de los Patos, wrecking the crew, being rescued two (02) of them in the area of Boca de Dragón. The boat is being coordinated to rescue the missing passengers", says the minute.

The version offered by GN Detachment 53 indicated that the boat turned over due to the waves and excess weight. But the records of the National Organization for Safety and Rescue (ONSA) reveal the weather conditions that night: it was partially cloudy; the sea swell was only 0.5 meters; and the wind was heading northeast at 12 knots (about 22 km/h), which according to the Beaufort scale could not have enough force to turn a boat loaded with almost four times its capacity.

The list of passengers was consolidated to between 35 and 38 as family members arrived at Civil Protection, including those who boarded at other docks along the route, including the Rio Salado beach.

The ONSA report specified that the coordination of the rescue protocol was in charge of the Atlantic zone Coast Guard and for Saturday, April 27, they had 96 hours of the rescue mission activated. But its effectiveness was questionable. That is why fishermen from the area went out in private boats to "comb the area" and look for survivors. It was they who found the first two and also found the body of Dieglismar Betancourt. Altogether, nine people had been found alive.

Since Friday, April 26, the Chief of Operations of the Strategic Region of Integral Defense (Redi) East, William Serantes, was in Güiria, but there was still no air support. The next day, the rescue teams said: "The deployment of airborne elements is required to cover the SAR (Search and Rescue) in a fast and efficient way. Make calls to vessels on the SAR to be on the lookout for shipwrecked persons or wrecks".

National Assembly deputy Robert Alcalá, a member of a special commission investigating the case of the missing, explains that a helicopter and a small plane were added to the search effort on April 27. The former only operated for one day. "The mayor (Ander Charles) said that a helicopter cost $8,000 for an hour and since no one could pay for it, it had to be stopped," said Jhonny Mattei, father of 22-year-old Jhodelvis Mattei, one of the missing persons.

The governor of Sucre state, Edwin Rojas, only responded to the family members that he could not conduct an investigation because he did not have "jurisdiction to do so. He did not appear in the area nor did he mobilize resources for the search from the regional entity.  

The operation officially ceased on 3 May, the tenth day of the search. Twenty-eight people were still missing, but the Commander of the Atlantic Zone Coast Guard Station, Navy Captain Angel Sisco Mota, and Vice Admiral Freitas in charge of the Integral Defense Operating Zone (Zodi) in Sucre state refused to explain to the relatives why the efforts had ceased.

Two weeks later, another unauthorized departure from the same dock led to the disappearance of the boat Ana María, with 33 people on board.

History repeats itself

The boat Ana María, skippered by Alberto Abreu, left from pier No. 8 in Güiria at 4:00 in the afternoon on 16 May 2019. Authorities have not shown the official list with the travel protocol that authorized the departure of the Ana María to know who was in charge of the boat, according to the Port Captain's Office, but relatives agree that Abreu was not originally the captain, but took over the boat in a last minute change. They also know who the four initial passengers were because they called their relatives before leaving and notified their location: Silvia Cortés, Jesús Brito, Andy Villegas and Yodelvis Mattei, the only one without a passport.

The Salina was the first stop. The boat stopped to pick up passengers also at five informal docks along the coast: La Ceiba, Juan Diego, Playa Salada, Uquire and Macuro, the last town before going out to the open sea, where the 33 people on board completed.

The boat Ana Maria was half an hour away from reaching Trinidad and Tobago when it was last seen at sea. Passengers on a boat returning to Venezuela from Trinidad spotted her when they passed her, witnessed by a foster uncle of Silvia Cortes, 23, and Jesus Brito, 26, quoted by Rosa Rodriguez, mother of the former.

The search protocol for the Jhonaily José had just been deactivated 13 days earlier, and the relatives of the passengers on the Ana María chose not to wait for the authorities. Since the early hours of May 17, they went out to sea to look for their loved ones, led by Isidro Villegas, an experienced merchant seaman in the area, father of the missing Andy Villegas, also a sailor.

The rumor that was gaining strength was that an engine had been damaged and that they were waiting for help while the boat remained near Cariaquito, more than 44 kilometers from Güiria. Migledis Díaz, mother of Frank Hernández, one of the missing persons from the first boat, assures that the owner of the Jhonaily José's engines is the brother of Alberto Abreu, the captain of the second boat.

That first version was received from different sources by almost all the family members interviewed by TalCual. Ramón Franco Martínez, alias "Moncho", who had coordinated and charged for several of the trips, reported it through WhatsApp to Yodelvis Mattei's husband who was waiting in Trinidad. A family member of Silvia Cortés and Jesús Brito heard him at the dock. Carmen Jiménez, mother of Anthony Montserrat, was told at the market where she works.

The hypothesis that the boat was crashed in Cariaquito lasted two days without a patrol inspection of the area. The fishermen who had gone out to look for the Ana María were returning without finding it. Already on May 18, there was talk of a disappearance, but formally there was no response from the authorities.

Yoselyn López, Giovanny López's sister, arrived in Güiria from Caracas on Sunday, May 19, and showed that "only Civil Protection was helping the community, since it was the fishermen themselves who were looking for the people.

On the fifth day, the official search was finally activated. The ONSA report recorded an emergency message on Monday, May 20, at 10:27 am, in which the Civil Protection coordinator, Manuel Gustavo Acuña, reported "that since Thursday, a boat named Ana María set sail, where apparently, according to information from family members, a total of 25 crew members were bound for the island of Trinidad and Tobago, which must have touched Trinidadian soil on Thursday night, being negative on entry of this boat and without any report of it, for this reason, it is presumed that the boat was shipwrecked.

In an interview with TalCual, a supervisor (reserved identity) of the INEA located in Carúpano assured that this agency never received the warning call or the SAR activation order, neither on April 23 with the Jhonaily José boat - although there was evidence of possible shipwreck and rescue - nor after May 16 when the Ana María was lost. "We did not have enough rescue vessels, in addition to the fact that the area of Güiria is very far away and it was more effective to leave the small boats that were already in the area," the official explained.

Jhonny Mattei, father of Yodelvis, remembers that he was able to speak with "Moncho" on the night of Friday 17, when the man changed his story and told them that the travelers had been arrested by Trinidadian authorities. He has not responded since.

That same day the only one rescued from the Ana María was found. Robert Richards, a fisherman who lives in the Virgin Islands, was sailing 30 nautical miles from Trinidad when he saw a man in the water, floating in a life jacket and hugging a diesel pimpina. He helped him and took him to Grenada, where he was admitted to a hospital.

The man turned out to be Alberto Abreu, captain of the Ana María, who claimed to be Venezuelan and to have been saved by being an expert diver, he told Grenadian authorities. On May 20, Congressman Carlos Valero distributed a photograph of Abreu being rescued at sea and condemned the "insulting lack of official information.

While in the hospital, Abreu asked for political asylum, claiming to be a persecuted person. But Grenadian officials discovered that the man had a reporting regime to Venezuelan courts after he was imprisoned in Guiria on human trafficking charges. On May 25, Trinidad and Tobago's Minister of National Security, Stuart Young, reported that Abreu had escaped from the hospital.

The silence of the survivors

None of the 27 women traveling on the Jhonaily José boarded alone. They went in groups of six, three or in pairs. Most of them knew each other because they lived in Guiria, except for the three teenagers who had come from Cumaná.

Anabelle Aguilera traveled with Daniamis Medina, Angelica Mata and the sisters Ruth, Melany, Zulma and Yusmarys Patinez. In another group were Yocselis Rojas, Estéfani Flores and Dieglismar Betancourt. Yubreilis Merchán, one of the survivors, assures that it was her friend Yocselis who gave her the tip to leave together that night, and she joined the group.

Yeukaris Sifontes had arranged to leave with Francelis Blandin. Her mother says that that morning a boy who worked on the dock arrived with a bag of food that she gave him on behalf of her daughter "for me and the child," recalls Eukaris Alcalá, who was unaware that her daughter was leaving for Trinidad and left the three-year-old in charge. The food was a kind of "advance" of the money that a local collector had helped him get to Yeukaris to leave.

Those who accompanied the women who boarded at the dock in front of Guacharaco remember that when one of the boatmen arrived he told the captain "here are 12 women in the name of Beatriz Alcalá".

Yoskeili Zurita was approached by a guy nicknamed "Nano" who was detained by the Prosecutor's Office and identified as Deyson Alleyne Pimentel, 28 years old and linked to Beatriz Alcalá. A 19-year-old relative of Pimentel also served as a captor. The offer for Yoskeili to leave was that when he arrived on the island he could buy a lot of food and send it to his family.

The family members were reconstructing what happened in order to put together the pieces that the Prosecutor's Office has not finished putting together. Yanira Medina, Daniamis Medina's older sister, was one of those who tried to enter the Guiria Hospital to talk to the main witnesses of what happened because the contradictions were more and more evident.

But the custody of the prosecutors, the municipal police and the Dgcim prevented them from even approaching the rescued. "One morning we met the mother of one of the survivors but the lady avoided us. She was going to look for her daughter. The girl approached us and told us that the boatmen had turned off their engines in the sea and some jet skis had surrounded them. Some men arrived with long weapons, speaking in English and threatening them, and in the shouting they threw themselves into the water," Medina details from the story told by the survivor whose name they do not know.

When they wanted to find out more, a group of officials took her away from the group and took her to the car where her family was waiting. The young woman did not say her name and they did not recognize her as someone from the village. "Then a policeman came up to us and said not to pay attention to her because she was very upset. They said, 'La loquita, la loquita. And she wasn't crazy at all, she spoke very coherently," adds Melitza Montaño, mother of Yocselis Rojas.

In that group of survivors was a first-hand witness for one of the families: Daniamis Medina's niece, Angelica Mata, who was rescued because she swam with Yubreilis Merchan to the rocky outcrop on Isla de Patos. There they were found by the father of Merchán's children, a local fisherman, on Thursday, April 25, around 8:00 in the morning.

Since Angelica left the hospital, she has avoided telling what she experienced. After more than a year of those events, she agreed to talk to TalCual. Her version - although brief - coincides with that of the other women rescued: a first wave rocked the overloaded boat, which caused the engines to shut down. Then a second wave flipped them over and they all fell into the water. There is no explanation why there are no traces of other bodies, and his hypothesis is based on a hunch: the girls drowned and died.

Angelica says that in desperation she tried to swim away from the rest as people were sinking to try and save themselves. She says the women took off their clothes because the jeans and shoes made it difficult for them to stay afloat. None of this was found.

She also didn't heed the captain's cries telling them to go with the flow. "I could hardly see a shadow in the sea, but I swam there. I didn't know that was an island. If I went with the current, where would they find me?"

The girl says she just followed her instinct and walked away until she reached the point where she was rescued two days later: the Isle of Ducks. She denies having seen or heard any other boats or jet skis.

Her story does not stop at details. She only reiterates that she is alive "thanks to the mercy of God". Of the suspicions that the women who accompanied her were being taken to Trinidad as victims of trafficking, she says she knows nothing.

Yubreilis Merchán, for her part, recalled what she had experienced in two interviews months after the events. Although she initially agreed to talk to TalCual, she later changed her mind and refused to attend the scheduled interview.

Merchán and Mata's versions that the boat was capsized by the waves resemble those of two other rescuers, Oriana Katherine Díaz and Yoskeilis Zurita, who claim that they were boarded in the village by a man who offered to take them to Trinidad in exchange for food and money. The latter identified him as "Nano," who would have taken her to a hotel in town the night before she traveled, where she was locked up with other young women.

The rescue workers got the survivors of the Jhonaily José near pieces of anime, wood and some gasoline pimples. But not the rest of the boat, and no bodies of the missing 28.

An INEA worker at the Carúpano headquarters explained to TalCual that the current in Boca de Dragón enters and leaves the Gulf of Paria approximately every six hours. At that point, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea converge. If the rest of the people on board who fell into the water could not survive, the bodies must have been carried away by the current in places like Cabo Tres Punto, and would have reached the shores of Carúpano.

Congressman Robert Alcalá puts it bluntly: "This boat (Jhonaily José) had its engines knocked out calling the people who were going to receive the women in Trinidad and something went wrong. In the case of the Ana María, the deputy points out that the greatest indication that it is a case of trafficking is the complete disappearance of the boat of which not even physical evidence remained.

Never safe

Just as Melitza Montaño lost sight of her daughter Yocselis in the same streets of the town of just 598 km2, Yoskeilis Zurita and her cousin Inés Araujo were hidden the night before the departure in hotels located a few meters from their homes.

Zurita, then a 16-year-old teenager, was one of the nine rescued to whom fortune smiled. But only for a year. When her luck changed, for the second time the authorities looked the other way.

"Her mother points out that subjects entered her house on Thursday, March 19, and took her 17-year-old daughter, in addition to beating the rest of the family. The area where they live is known as La Colombina," said Congressman Robert Alcalá, who made the kidnapping public on May 13, 2020 through his Twitter account.

Alcalá told TalCual that Keyla Cedeño, the young woman's mother, had received death threats since her daughter was rescued, and that Carlos Laffont's brother - a passenger of the Jhonaily José who was rescued and later imprisoned for trafficking - came to Yoskeilis' house from time to time to invite the girl to come to the National Guard (GN) headquarters because the detainee wanted to talk to her. Zurita never attended the invitation of the messenger, who is an officer of the GN.

In December 2019, a woman from the sector nicknamed "La Chicha" beat Keyla in her own home. Keyla filed a complaint with the Guiria prosecutor's office but no one paid any attention to her. On March 19, 2020, four men, including one nicknamed “Oscarito," arrived at her home and started a brawl. In the midst of the beating, Cedeño ran to the GN command to ask for help. When she returned accompanied by uniformed personnel, Yoskeilis was gone. Some neighbors informed her that a girl nicknamed "La Flaca," a friend of the disappeared, had taken her away with the men.

For hours she wandered around the village looking for her, without success. At night, he heard that she was hiding in a house belonging to "Oscarito's" sister in the Sol Paraíso sector, but he couldn't locate her either. The next day, Friday, March 20, 2020, he was told that the teenager had been seen boarding a boat at the dock.

For the third time Cedeño went to the authorities, but they did not even take her statement because they claimed that the young woman "had left because she wanted to. When she went to the prosecutor Julián Azócar, the response she got was "Keyla, let's leave it at that.

A week later, he says, in a Cicpc operation, three of the men who took Yoskeilis were killed. Only "Oscarito" was left alive.          

The young woman's mother no longer sleeps in her house, where the intimidation does not stop. She confesses that she has been able to talk to her daughter only twice since March. They were brief conversations, almost in monosyllables, with loose words. In one of these conversations, Yoskeilis was able to tell her: "I'm fine, I'm eating. But I was sold, Mom. They sold me for $300 and I have to pay it if I want to leave."

Inquiries by authorities could lead to the teenager's whereabouts, as her recent history on the social network Facebook shows that on March 27, 2020, eight days after she was forcibly removed from her home, she registered that she was in Trinidad. She even responded to a friend on the island in a posted comment. Then, on April 8, Yoskeilis Zurita repeated her location in a reply given to another friend.

Since that date he has not interacted through social networks. But his public profile has received successive "Like" and comments from accounts of men identified as Trinitarios and users of platforms that offer sexual services from Facebook and Instagram @Trinidad_million_mafia accounts.

Complaints, leaks
and threats with saltepre

On May 13, 2019, Kelly Zambrano arrived in Güiria from Rubio, Táchira state, in the opposite end of the country, following the instructions of Romy María Martínez Rodríguez, who convinced her to go to Trinidad to take a job paying more than $1,000 a month. Ramon Franco Martínez, alias "Moncho," had coordinated the trip to board the Ana María boat, registration ARSI-CA0029, which set sail three days later.

From the coastal town, Kelly called his brother Jeison Gutierrez to inform him that he was at the Hotel Plaza. He confirms that it was Ramon who was transferred $200 to pay for the trip as he was in charge of coordinating with Alberto Abreu, the captain of the peñero.

Zambrano was at the Plaza Hotel, with other young women who were going to travel, and who were forbidden to leave. Then they were moved to the Timón de Máximo Hotel, as she was able to tell her brother when she managed to call him. A motorbike was taking their food to their room, and they were prevented from talking to their families. When Kelly spoke to him, he said he wanted to leave "because he was afraid," recalls Jeison Gutierrez.

The last time they spoke was before they left on the afternoon of May 16. The hours passed, more than they should have according to the route. Then Jeison called Romy. The woman's response was blunt: "I don't know anything about her, the boat sank and everyone died.

Gutiérrez, 29, collected money from friends and family to travel to Guiria, where he arrived on Tuesday, May 21. He immediately went to the Coast Guard office to report what he knew.

Until then he had not spoken to anyone else about the matter. But when he went to the dock where his sister was, two subjects approached him and threatened him. He was able to photograph them.

"They told me that they were going to put a lead shot in me (a gunshot) because I was hindering their work, and that they would throw my body into the sea, because the loudmouths were silenced like that. They told me they would give me a day to get out of town," he says. Already in Guiria there was a lot of commotion. National Assembly deputies Robert Alcalá, Milagros Paz and Carlos Valero were asking questions in the town.

Jeison went to the Plaza Hotel where he learned that the reception books never registered Kelly. He then contacted Mayor Ander Charles. "I got in the car to talk to him and we were chased by a car that then intercepted us. An escort from the mayor himself helped me out and I had to be taken to the Laguna Azul Hotel to spend the night with a lot of security people because the mayor was afraid we would be killed," he said.

According to Gutiérrez, the municipal chief himself confessed that he could not help much "because he himself had received more than ten threats. Ander Charles did not respond to interview requests made by TalCual in November 2019.

On May 22, a prosecutor from the Public Ministry sought Gutiérrez out and took him to the dock with the coast guard, where the deputies who make up the NA's investigative commission were meeting: Robert Alcalá, Carlos Valero, Milagros Paz and Denncis Pazos.

"We convinced Jeison to leave town because he was in danger, and that's why we took him out of the place the next day," recalls Alcalá, who knows firsthand that threats are not a minor matter in this case. "I myself have received threats through my social network accounts and on my phone from a person who owns one of the hotels that is linked to these mafias, and yet he has not even been charged even though we know who he is.

The threats prompted Kelly Zambrano's brother to request protection measures from the Attorney General's Office in Caracas. A year later they have not been granted.

Meanwhile, the air in the village continues to weigh as much as the threatening glances at outsiders. In a few minutes, any question that removes the facts, makes people uncomfortable and closes doors. In the bowels of the mentioned hotels silence is repeated. No employee agreed to talk to TalCual about the accusations of being places to "keep" women and minors.

As it was showed that the Plaza Hotel - mentioned in the prosecutor's file - is about 100 meters from the headquarters of the National Guard, the windows of both buildings face the same corner, the military facility has frontal visibility to one side of the parador, and is only separated by a road and two sidewalks that can only be traveled on foot because it is a security zone.

The irregularities that led to the sinking of the Jhonaily José boat prompted an investigation by the Public Prosecutor's Office (MP) that began two days after the event. On Friday, April 26, the Third Regional Prosecutor's Office ordered 18 arrests, including the owners and employees of the Miramar, Timón de Máximo and Plaza hotels, which were designated as places to "keep" the young women.

Most of the employees were released and on Tuesday, April 30, nine people were transferred to the Carúpano Judicial Circuit, before the 5th Control Court. From the first moment, the charges were trafficking in persons and criminal association.

The detainees were Beatriz Elizabeth Alcalá, 46 years old; Deyson Alleyne Pimentel, 28 years old; Daniela Luces Pimentel, 19 years old; Ornella Martínez Marcano, 26 years old; Yaritza Morales Romero, 22 years old; Dignora Romero Zapata, 40 years old; and Ingrid Martínez Marcano, 28 years old.

Adrián Eduardo Pacheco Gómez and Carlos Laffont were on board the boat and had been rescued, but while they were in the Andrés Gutiérrez Solís Hospital in Güiria, members of the Military Counter-Intelligence Directorate (Dgcim) took them away because they were accused of having been "caretakers" of the young women.

Contradictions surround the identity of those involved. Yubreilis Merchán, one of the survivors, told journalist Nairobis Rodríguez three months after the shipwreck that she had met Yocselys Rojas by chance on the morning of Tuesday 23 April. "If you want to take advantage, go to the middle dock at 6:00 in the afternoon and ask for Julio, the captain," he would have told her.

In the official list of the minute appears Julio Carrión, who is identified as the captain and there is another Julio by the name of Pacheco, which would be another identity of the same person. None of those arrested by order of the Public Prosecutor's Office was called Julio.

The authorities did apprehend someone with the surname Pacheco but whose first name was Adrián, whom they identified as one of the boatmen, and who also said, when he arrived at the hospital, that his name was Ángel José, without giving his surname. He was not the only one to use false names.

The first one rescued had been Francisco Martínez, whose real name is Ramón Franco Martínez, alias "Moncho", who according to the investigations carried out by the Prosecutor's Office was the real captain of the boat. He is one of the defendants in the case file to which TalCual may have had access.

The second one rescued appears under the name of Yusmary Lezama. No one had claimed her and the victims' families claim that she is Yuleidy Lezama, alias "La Yulita", who never boarded the boat and remained in Guiria until almost a month after the alleged shipwreck, when she put her house up for sale. Since then nobody knows of her whereabouts. A police source in Guiria pointed to her as "a hairdresser involved who ran away.

Lezama was not arrested despite being directly accused by Melitza Montaño, who claims that this woman demanded $200 to return her daughter 24 hours before the boat sailed. Also by Anyibel Aguilera, Anabelle's younger sister, who claims that a week after the shipwreck, "La Yulita" told her "they can also buy you at a good price because you are pretty and skinny, you have a good body. If they buy you, you can get some good reals". These relatives were interviewed by the Prosecutor's Office.

The prosecution in its maze

The relatives of the 60 people formed a single Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Guiria. During 2019, they met with the 3rd regional prosecutor in Carúpano in charge of Eunilde López; with the superior prosecutor of the state of Sucre, based in Cumaná, in the hands of Danny Zambrano, and finally with prosecutor 79 Romny Osorio and national prosecutor 82 with competence in the defense of women, Pedro Luis Rojas Caraballo; the last steps before arriving at the office of the Attorney General of the Republic designated by the constituent assembly, Tarek William Saab.

On November 26, 2019, the creation of specialized prosecutor's offices for trafficking in women, children and adolescents was announced. The concise data provided that day by Saab indicate that from 2017 to 2019 there were 71 people accused of trafficking in persons in the country.

What could be interpreted as a breakthrough ended up being a trip in a circle. When the Committee went to Interpol headquarters in Caracas in December 2019 to ask why Alberto Abreu was still free and unwanted, they were notified that the Prosecutor's Office had not shared the information necessary to activate the corresponding alerts.

Eight months without the yellow alert for missing persons Seven months without the red alert for Abreu that added up to two arrest warrants.

Internal sources in the Prosecutor's Office revealed to TalCual that, in the case file, Alberto Abreu is the second defendant charged with human trafficking after Ramón Franco Martínez, "Moncho", who remains in detention at the GN Command in Güiria.

Another person involved in the case, who is listed in the file as a defendant and detained, is a minor, identified as María, who is in a detention center in Carúpano. The nine initial detainees have been held in the same place of detention since April 2019: they never left the GN Güiria headquarters, the same centre where the mafias operate, says Deputy Alcalá.

"The investigation is still not moving. It is still in the control phase. The preliminary hearing must be held 45 days after the presentation and that is when it is decided whether to go to court, but that has not happened. There has been no political will to address this case," says Alcalá regarding the status after one year.

Beyond this group of detainees, the Prosecutor's Office file does not include alias "Noelito" or Héctor Torres, who is on the list of missing persons and was tracked by Conas as the owner of the phone from which the calls in the case of the Jhonaily José girls were made; nor does it include alias "Richard" who knew details of the alleged sale of the boat. There is no mention of "La Yulita's" involvement.

There's an easy trail to follow from the alias "Noelito". He was the contact for Luisa Marín (29) and Deiker Marín (19), aunt and nephew, to go to Trinidad where Luis Montaño, a relative who two months earlier used the same route to leave Venezuela after coordinating the trip with the same boatman, was waiting for them.

The family contacted "Noelito" because he was supposed to be "trustworthy". Since they could not afford to pay the $300 that a post in the peñero cost, they negotiated with him, as Luis Montaño had done before: valuing objects. For Luisa and Deiker's trip they gave a sound power plant and five bugles.

Neria Marin, Luisa's sister and Deiker's aunt, says that the departure took place at the last minute because Fran Hernandez, the friend with whom they were travelling, told them on 23 April 2019 that he would not be travelling because there was no one to receive him that night in Trinidad.

However, "Noelito" called at 6:00 in the afternoon. Neria Marín says she offered Deiker and Fran Hernández a house on the island where they could stay for two days. That's why they accepted to sail.

Daniela Fuentes, another sister of Luisa, accompanied them to the dock they call "the one in the middle", where they boarded. She says she was with them until 10:00 at night, and that "Noelito" was there, as well as National Guard officers.

After several hours of the trip, there was concern about the fate of the boat. Then Luisa Marin's relatives called "Noelito", who at first told them that he did not know anything and that he would try to communicate with people in Trinidad to find out if the peñero had arrived.

"Cónchale, Neria, there's a boat in jail and another one that sank. God willing, ours is the one that's imprisoned. I'm calling there. Let's go to the dock," the man told Deiker's aunt after noon on April 24. It had been 12 hours since the departure.

At that time Daniela Fuentes was already on the same dock she had visited before, where Neria went shortly after. INEA officials had reported that the rescue was being set up to search for the boat, and the women saw the first two rescued arrive. They cannot specify the identity of any of them, but they remember the first version that they said when they stepped on land: "that the captain approached the island but the policeman who was going to wait for him was not there, he turned around while he called the person who was going to give him the entrance to Trinidad, through Boca de Dragón he turned off the engine and the water was getting in", Neria tells.

This version coincides with what Angelica Mata narrated: the boat was already near Trinidad but the guide had to turn towards Venezuela to call the contact on the island. That's when a wave flooded the boat in which no one was wearing a life jacket and whose profile was very low since it was loaded with contraband copper as well.

A ghost ship

Alberto Abreu reappeared three months after the events in a video, which he posted on his Facebook account, claiming that he took the boat Ana María to Playa El Cocal, where all the passengers would have been. "It was there that she was handed over to Juan Vega, who rented the boat," he says in the video. The authorities did not respond to this information.

Vega is also missing and was the contact who was paid $1,500 by the family of five who were with Marolys Bastardo, eight months pregnant and with her two and four year old children on board.

Abreu mentions a man whom he identifies as "Maracucho", without giving details, and provides an explanation for the distress. "When we were crossing Boca de Dragón, in the crossing between Isla de Los Patos and Chaca Chacal, two waves of three or four meters flooded our boat and then turned it around. That happened at about seven o'clock. A cousin of mine and I held on to the pimps; in the darkness it was impossible to see what was going on. While we were there, two boats passed by, we shouted at them and whistled, but they didn't see us. So we set out to straighten the boat and started to bail out, but we never could. The Venezuelan National Institute of Meteorology's (Inameh) report for that day indicates that the swell was moderate and did not exceed 1.8-meter waves.

An informant who requested anonymity told TalCual, in an interview granted in June 2019, that he was on board the Ana María and that the agreement to take him to Trinidad was that he would get 15 women. "The boat didn't turn over, the engines were turned off and jet skis and a bigger boat arrived to take the people away. A group followed it to Trinidad and I was going there.

Several relatives of the disappeared reside in Trinidad and claim to have seen Alberto Abreu in fast food restaurants in Port of Spain. They claim he leads a normal life on the island, although it was the country's security minister who reported his escape in Grenada.

With this and other details repeated over and over again in their heads, in February 2020, the families of the 60 disappeared re-organized their folders. Again, there was a "first meeting", this time with the new appointees in the case: Assistant Prosecutor 84 Charlis Frias and Edmisajal Guillen, a prosecutor with competence in human rights.

In the past year and with all the protests at the entrance of the agency, the noise still seems not to have reached the top of the building, where the attorney general Tarek William Saab, who has never spoken publicly about it, is dispatching.

Close in diplomacy, but far in cooperation. The government of Trinidad and Tobago is one of the few in the region that still recognizes Nicolas Maduro's as legitimate. This relationship, however, has been of no use to the relatives of the 60 missing persons who in both countries have exhausted official channels to find the whereabouts of their loved ones, obtaining nothing but silence and omissions.

All this despite the fact that there are traces to be followed. In February 2019, in the midst of several raids, Trinidad and Tobago Police Commissioner Gary Griffith led an operation in which 19 young Venezuelan women who had been kidnapped from two houses in the areas of Westmoorings and Diego Martin were rescued, along with another group that was in a Chinese restaurant in the Woodbrook sector, all in the Trinidadian capital, Port of Spain.

The oldest of the young women found was 19 years old, the others were between 15 and 18 years old. They were found locked in rooms where they were forced to take drugs in order to have sex for money. Trinidad and Tobago's Minister of National Security, Stuart Young, called it "the largest human trafficking and sex slave operation ever detected in the country," he said at a news conference.

At first, the authorities were unaware that they were Venezuelan. They did not speak English and identified them as "Spanish-speaking" and undocumented. In determining their nationality, the young women were held at the country's immigration detention center, where Venezuelans have been held in overcrowded conditions since they were caught entering the country illegally. Young said the Immigration Division and the Children's Authority had intervened in the proceedings.

"There is a suspicion that some (non-Trinitarian citizens) are the ones who attract young girls from Venezuela," the minister said, clarifying that not all those arrested were victims. They also apprehended 18 other suspects linked to a Chinese man identified as Jinfu Zhu and a 23-year-old Venezuelan woman named Solient Torres, who were charged with 43 counts under that nation's Sexual Offences Act.

Although the Trinidadian authorities at the time pointed out that there was sufficient evidence of a trafficking and sexual slavery scheme and that minors were involved, several of the young women were arrested for the crime of prostitution, as recorded by several media outlets on the island that reported the event.

TalCual may have known that in Trinidad and Tobago the authorities' argument is that there are many brothels disguised as hotels with young people from Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and when the police carry out raids "the women say as a defense that they are there against their will, but that is not always the case," explained a police source.

A group of the 19 young women were directed to safe houses in state custody. But the information published in the media in that country indicated that others went to the Immigrant Detention Center, although the report indicates that this center has been full for two years, so these detainees are placed next to Trinitarian prisoners, in common detention centers.

Caracas and Port of Spain
shake hands

A three-month investigation published in May 2019 by journalists Mark Bassant and Hema Ramkissoon of the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian revealed how human traffickers took advantage of the migration context to target teenagers and Venezuelan women seeking economic survival.

The journalistic work was published when the case of the missing persons from the boats that left from Güiria, in the state of Sucre, Venezuela, was only days old.

According to the findings, after the rescue of the 19 young women, another 24-year-old Venezuelan woman had escaped from human traffickers and was also found in the area of Diego Martin. Police chased the men down the Solomon Hochoy Highway in the Claxton Bay sector until they were stopped and found Akeem James, a 28-year-old police officer, and Kevin Houlder, a 39-year-old truck driver.

The police had a record, from October 2018, of a video posted on social networks showing another 19-year-old Venezuelan woman being beaten in a house, which was later located in the area known as Debe. The assailant's name was Avalon Callender, and the building was in Diego Martin.

In May 2019, Trinidad & Tobago Guardian was told by Trinidad & Tobago police authorities that the problem of human trafficking associated with sex slavery was massive and presented evidence of how the networks operated: Trinidadian and Venezuelan traffickers who capture, transport and abduct women, usually minors and undocumented, who enter the island with the complicity of corrupt police and immigration officials. Asian criminal gangs also appear in the scheme that triangulates the captured women.

However, for more than a year, even before the disappearances of the boats that left Guiria, the Trinidadian government had names and locations of the human trafficking mafias. In March 2019 there were reports of a "sex camp" operating in the district of Los Iros, an agricultural area of the island.

At that time, an Erin Police Task Force team searched 22 camps in Los Iros looking for a makeshift brothel with Venezuelan women because residents of the area reported to authorities that five immigrants were being prostituted for $400 and $500 an hour in clandestine camps. But the uniformed officers got nothing. The police report noted that the complainants said the victims were savagely beaten when Erin's police were notified.

In May 2019, the name of Vaughn Mieres, alias "Sandman", appeared in an investigative report by island authorities as the leader of a criminal network involving high-level officials from both countries involved in the trafficking of migrant women, adolescents and children for sexual exploitation by gangsters who cross from one coast to another. Each vessel left behind profits of between $3,000 and $12,000.

Two months later, "Sandman" was killed in his home, along with his wife and two escorts, by a group of gunmen who ambushed them and then fled in a boat.

There are data but no results

Melanie Teff, UNICEF UK policy and advocacy advisor, told the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian that she had interviewed some 50 Venezuelan victims who told how the traffickers operated.

This information and more had been collected by the Trinidad & Tobago Ministry of National Security, which has an anti-trafficking unit that was set up seven years ago but has resulted in only 56 people being charged and none convicted.

On the Venezuelan side, the Public Ministry created a division specializing in the crime of trafficking in November 2019, when the attorney general appointed by the constituent Tarek William Saab stated that there were 71 people detained for these crimes between 2017 and 2019. "This is an unprecedented fight within this institution, which in the past made this scourge invisible, and which unites Venezuelan society," the official said.

The Venezuelan Attorney General's Office does not allow to delve into the data. Nor does it allow questions in the statements of those who head it. The management reports and the reports and accounts of the ministries were no longer made public in 2015. The Public Ministry's report was censored in 2017 when Saab took over.

Carmen Mercedes González, director of the National Office against Organized Crime in the Ministry of the Interior and Justice, told TalCual that the office is handling an increase in the number of trafficking cases. Although she is not authorized to give specific data, she said that between 2017 and 2018 alone, cases rose by 25 percent. It refers only to formal complaints to law enforcement agencies. Of this number, the most significant increase is in the number of children and adolescents: 12% in just one year.

These data do not reflect even half of what is reported by neighboring countries that share the problem associated with the Venezuelan migratory context. The Global Index of Modern Slavery places Venezuela in the first place of prevalence of the crime of trafficking in Latin America, with approximately 174 thousand people with data collected up to 2018.

A visit from the wind

In September 2019, five months after the first disappearance of Güiria's boats, Nicolás Maduro received an official state visit from Trinidad and Tobago's Minister of National Security and Communications, Stuart Young.

Prior to Young's meeting with Maduro, the Trinidadian minister had a private meeting with his Venezuelan counterpart, Justice and Peace Minister Nestor Reverol. Then, the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Jorge Arreaza, and the Executive Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, participated in the presidential office. They had received Captain Douglas Archer, commander of the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard.

None publicly referred to the migration issue between the two nations or to reports of human trafficking. Nor did they talk about Alberto Abreu, the captain of the boat Ana María who escaped from a hospital in Granada and remains in Trinidad, where he has been seen despite an Interpol arrest warrant, Young said earlier.

But in Trinidad and Tobago it is not in demand, as TalCual found on the island. A Trinidadian police report only records Abreu's escape from the hospital where he was taken when American Robert Richards rescued him at sea and brought him to Grenada. A police source added that it is possible that Richards was part of the plan.

The Commission for the Investigation of the Disappeared, made up of deputies of the Venezuelan National Assembly, has also repeatedly requested information from the government of Trinidad. But they have received no response and have not had access to lists of people arrested and rescued in police operations in that country to verify whether any of the missing persons have been located, said Deputy Robert Alcalá.

Alcalá even requested specific information from Trinidadian police authorities about Luisiannys Betancourt, after her mother Ana Arias asked the congressman for support in serving as a liaison and that they could give her the names of a list of Venezuelan women who had been arrested in a raid on the island, because in one of her particular searches, she found a photo published in a Trinidadian media in which she observed a young woman who looked very much like her daughter, although she could not distinguish her completely. 

The information is not shared with Venezuelan officials, but neither is it shared with family members. Those who have relatives on the island and those who have been able to travel to Trinidad on a private basis, such as Kelly Zambrano's brother Jeison Gutierrez, tried to access the names of the detainees and even followed the trail of a group of Venezuelans who were hospitalized at the General Hospital in Port of Spain after a raid. The answer they received was that they only allowed him to see them if they were immediate family members, but no more than a father, mother or children.

The denial of information is part of a policy established on the island. The government of Trinidad did not respond to TalCual's request for official information, and the team found that hospitals do not allow family members to enter, even if they are Trinidadian citizens. The records are also unreliable and hide information.

For example, an attempt was made to verify that a young Venezuelan woman who was pregnant and imprisoned for having entered the country illegally lost her baby because the police were late in bringing her to the health centre. But there was nothing in the hospital books about the case, even though the woman was identified and an NGO knew about the case. The record had been erased.