The New York Times reports:

The first body washed ashore on Trinidad’s northeastern coast soon after the United States carried out its first strike in September on a boat in the Caribbean. Villagers said the corpse had burn marks on its face and was missing limbs, as if it had been mangled by an explosion.

The tides deposited another corpse on a nearby beach days later, drawing a wake of vultures. Its face was similarly unrecognizable, and its right leg appeared to have been blown off.

The bodies have fueled a mystery that is gripping parts of Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean nation that is within sight of Venezuela’s coast: Who were they? Did a U.S. strike kill them? Will more bodies appear on Trinidad’s beaches?

The intrigue lays bare how the fallout from the U.S. military campaign targeting Venezuela has reached Trinidad. In contrast to other Caribbean leaders, Trinidad’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, is explicitly supporting the strikes on boats that U.S. officials say are carrying drugs.

But as the attacks draw claims in Latin America that the United States is violating international law by killing dozens of people who don’t pose an immediate military threat, some in Trinidad are questioning whether Ms. Persad-Bissessar’s hesitance to cross the Trump administration is keeping them from getting answers about the corpses being stored by their government.

“There’s no question in my mind that these men are casualties of war,” said Lincoln Baker, 63, an employee of Trinidad’s water and sewage company in Cumana.

Like many others in Cumana, a sleepy outpost with an Anglican school, food stores and Christian and Muslim houses of worship, Mr. Baker said he was convinced that the two corpses came from the first attack, on Sept. 2, that left 11 people dead.

Since then, the bodies have emerged as part of the puzzle involving the U.S. military deployment in the region. The Trump administration publicly says the mission is to combat drug trafficking out of Venezuela, which is a relatively minor player in the global drug trade compared to Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia or Peru.

But American officials have privately made clear that the objective is to drive President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela from power. The campaign has led to the largest U.S. deployment in Latin America in decades, and it has expanded from the Caribbean to the Pacific Ocean, with the official death toll from the strikes standing at 37.

Trinidad and Tobago, with about 1.5 million people, has faced various ramifications from the U.S. campaign, including attacks that may have killed its own citizens and heightened tensions with Venezuela.

Separately from the unidentified corpses, the authorities are investigating reports that two Trinidadians were among those killed in a U.S. strike this month. Relatives of the men, identified as Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, have disputed claims that they were involved in drug trafficking.

Condemnation of the attacks is spreading, based on the assessment of legal specialists and independent United Nations experts that it is illegal for militaries to target in international waters civilians who do not pose an imminent threat.

Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, over the weekend accused the United States of murdering a Colombian fisherman in an attack on a boat that the American authorities claimed had been carrying drugs. President Trump responded by halting aid to Colombia and saying that Mr. Petro, a leftist, had a “fresh mouth toward America.” [Continue reading…]