Trinidad officers fire on migrant boat, baby dies

CARACAS (AP):

A Venezuelan baby died and the mother was injured over the weekend when Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard officers fired at a boat transporting migrants, authorities from the Caribbean nation said.

The shooting happened on Saturday during “security operations” at sea involving the coastguard and human traffickers, Prime Minister Keith Rowley said in a statement on Sunday. The agency, in a news release, said the officers fired at the vessel’s engines in self-defence after it was repeatedly ordered to stop and it attempted to ram the coastguard vessel.

“The vessel eventually stopped, and only then was it discovered that there were illegal migrants on board, who had remained hidden and were therefore not seen before,” according to the coastguard. The mother then told officers she was bleeding, and the baby “was found to be unresponsive”.

The agency said the woman was stabilised and then transported to a hospital. Her condition was not immediately known on Monday. The agency did not say how the baby died.

Venezuela has been going through a deep political, social and economic crisis for years, attributed to a drop in oil prices last decade and mismanagement by socialist governments. Millions of people have fallen into poverty, initially amid a severe shortage of food and medicines, and followed by the inability to buy them when stores were restocked, due to their diminished purchasing power. The minimum monthly wage is about US$2, which inflation continues to eat up.

The crisis has driven people to migrate. The United Nations has estimated that more than six million Venezuelans have left the country in recent years, more than 10 per cent of the population.

Millions have migrated to neighbouring Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, but the number of Venezuelans making the treacherous journey further north to seek refuge in the US is rising. In December, US authorities encountered Venezuelans crossing the Mexican border illegally nearly 25,000 times, the second-highest nationality after Mexicans. The number was more than double that of only three months earlier and up from only about 200 a year previously.