LEILA FADEL, HOST:
President Trump says he is stopping all subsidies to Colombia and promising to add new tariffs after Colombia's president said Trump's attacks on boats coming from Venezuela amount to murder.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
U.S. forces have destroyed boats in open waters in what the US government describes as a counternarcotics operation.
FADEL: NPR's Eyder Peralta is in Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago to report on this story. Good morning, Eyder.
EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning, Leila.
FADEL: OK. So catch us up. What do we know so far about the Trump administration's strikes on boats in the Caribbean?
PERALTA: I mean, Leila, these strikes - they've happened in the open waters, so there have been no independent witnesses. A lot of what we know comes from the U.S. And what they're saying is they've struck at least seven vessels, which they allege were loaded with drugs coming to the U.S. Last week, U.S. forces attacked a semi-submersible. A U.S. official told NPR that it appeared to be headed toward Europe. Two were killed and two were taken into custody in that incident. The two survivors were sent back home to Colombia and Ecuador.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said another strike had occurred on Friday and that that boat belonged to a leftist Colombian guerrilla group. Three were killed in that attack, and Colombia's president said what the U.S. blew up was a fishing vessel. I think the big picture here is that it has been decades since the U.S. military has taken this kind of posture in the Americas, so the region is tense.
FADEL: OK. So you're in Trinidad on land, not far from where the U.S. says strikes are occurring. What's it like there?
PERALTA: It's tense. Over the weekend, the U.S. embassy issued a warning telling American citizens to stay away from American facilities because of a threat that they did not elaborate on. I was at a fishing village here, and the fishermen are scared. I spoke to Renute Roberts. And he says when he's out at night, he can hear drones circling, so he just heads back to shore. He told me that his daughter was dating one of the young men who was believed killed in one of these strikes, and he says he was just a fisherman. I asked him what he would tell President Trump if he could talk to him.
RENUTE ROBERTS: He trying to do something good because the drugs is really a problem. But the way how he going about doing it, where he bombing the boats and them - and we know he could do better than that.
FADEL: So what he's saying - right? - is he knows the U.S. can do better than bombing boats out of the water.
PERALTA: Yeah. I mean, and these guys - they've spent their whole lives in the water. They know what drug boats look like. And he says some of the videos released by the U.S. of the strikes - they don't look like drug boats. He says those boats don't carry more than three people. They have bigger engines. And he says what scares him is that sometimes they make trips with medicine, food and toiletries to Venezuela. And when you pack all that up, the packages can look the same as drugs.
FADEL: What have you heard about the people aboard these boats that have been struck?
PERALTA: You know, I spoke to the family of Chad Joseph. He's 26, and his family says he's a fisherman who went to Venezuela for work about six months ago. He had told his family he was coming back to Trinidad on the same day a U.S. strike happened, and since then, they've had no contact with him. I spoke to his grandma, who says she hopes that one day the phone rings and it's him. But in her heart, you know, she knows that he's very likely dead, so much so that they're going to have a funeral service without a body on Wednesday.
It's worth noting that the government here says that no Trinidadians have died in any U.S. attack, but I think that is the tough part of this story. Those boats and those attacks are in open waters. And the U.S. has released limited information, and so it leaves all these families filling in the details. The only thing they know is that their family members went out into the Caribbean and they never came back.
FADEL: That's NPR's Eyder Peralta reporting from Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago. Thank you.
PERALTA: Thank you, Leila. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
