I know boats. Catamarans where water laps at your legs. Fishing boats with bright colors and splintered seats. Even though I grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley in San José, California, I come from a line of Venezuelans who were fed by the ocean. And, like all the fishermen before him, my father’s sun-worn skin smelled of salt.
My father was born on Margarita, the largest of Venezuela’s hundreds of islands. As a kid, I’d sit on the shore watching my dad and his brothers disappear with empty boats and reappear with a bounty of fish of all kinds. They would cook on the beach on an open fire, in giant pots, surrounded by family and loved ones, listening to llaneras and playing tambor.
In the United States, the current administration would have you believe that the only use for boats is drug trafficking. President Donald Trump and his allies are exploiting the fact that most Americans have no idea what people in Venezuela are like. They are betting that their descriptions of drug gangs, rapists, and criminals will be enough to justify extrajudicial murder.
Yes, murder. That is what it is and what we should call it. Once again, our government is using our tax dollars to kill people far from us, lying about it, and getting away with it.
Carmen Rojas
The author’s dad (red shirt)
My dad left Venezuela in 1957 because he grew up under a different dictatorship, one that ended with the leader, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, living in Miami, Florida, for years until he was finally extradited. My father came to the United States to escape the danger he was in and to seek opportunities for a better life.
All over the world, including here in the United States, people use boats to deliver food, make a living, and visit family. From my own time in Venezuela, I know that boats are how people who live on the ocean stay alive. They are our freeways, our subways, and our cars.
The Trump Administration has cruelly assumed—without evidence or investigation—that each and every Venezuelan boat is part of the drug trade. It has directed attacks that have killed more than 100 people based on those assumptions, people whose lives, jobs, and intentions none of us can know, all in service of a vague and convenient war on drugs.
But if this administration is so concerned about how drugs have ravaged cities, communities, and families in our country, why have they cut $345 billion from addiction and overdose protection services?
And if Trump was really interested in curbing drug trafficking, why did he pardon the former President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, sparing him from a forty-five-year prison sentence for his role in bringing 400 tons of cocaine north through Honduras into the United States?
The truth is that Trump has been inching toward war with Venezuela, including the recent targeting of fishing boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, for one, sadly predictable reason: oil. He has ordered the killing of people on boats as part of an effort to gain control over the nation with the largest oil reserves in the world.
When you watch this administration and its spokespeople tie themselves in knots to describe the why and whatnot of the murders they’ve committed with our tax dollars, remember that when they had the chance to address the opioid epidemic here in the United States, they instead cut programs and pardoned drug dealers.
When they’ve had the chance to create a more robust safety net to keep people healthy, they’ve hoarded all the resources for themselves and their friends. When they’ve talked about protecting people from danger, it’s never people like me and you. And it’s never people like my father.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.