Colin Freeman

Pirates of the Caribbean

Families are scavenging to survive. It’s not quite Somalia – but it isn’t far off

Brian Austin, a fisherman from the small village of Cedros in Trinidad, is struggling to describe the men who robbed him out at sea last year. ‘They had guns, they wore T-shirts and hoods.’ Then he brightens: ‘Have you ever seen Somali pirates? They looked just like that.’

I have indeed seen Somali pirates, as it happens, and rather closer up than I’d have liked. Ten years ago, a bunch of them kidnapped me for six weeks while I was out reporting. That was in Somalia, though, a failed state where anything goes. I never expected to be writing about a plague of pirates here in the Caribbean.

The last lot of Caribbean Blackbeards were hunted down by the Royal Navy about 300 years ago, bringing to a close the so-called ‘golden era’ of piracy. That was also that for buccaneering havens like Tortuga, where, according to legend, outlaws lived in egalitarian harmony, equably divvying up their pieces of eight.

Oddly enough, the pirates that robbed Mr Austin are also denizens of a progressive paradise — or one that purports to be progressive. The new Pirates of the Caribbean are impoverished fishermen from nearby Venezuela, where the meltdown of the socialist regime long championed by Jeremy Corbyn means banditry has become one of the only ways to make a living.

The Venezuelan coastline lies less than ten miles from Cedros, and used to be home to a thriving fishing industry. Today, thanks to hyperinflation and a disastrous nationalisation programme imposed by the late Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s fishing industry is in ruins; most fishermen are jobless and their families scavenging to survive. It’s not quite Somalia, but it isn’t far off.

In lawless ports like Guiria in the Venezuelan state of Sucre, the pirates operate with near impunity, kidnapping Trinidadian fishermen and holding them for ransom.

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