A High Court judge has sentenced seven Venezuelan nationals to nearly 16-and-a-half years in jail after they were convicted of trafficking 72.56 kilogrammes of cocaine in 2016.
The men were held in the waters off the north coast of Trinidad by the Coast Guard in 2016 and while there had been eight of them, Jose Gregorio Marval Salazar died of cancer before the case went to trial last year.
In 2021, his attorney Mario Merritt had successfully obtained a court order for his return to Venezuela for palliative care. But he was unable to access bail and in July 2020, he had emergency surgery at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex here with doctors giving him mere months to live.
On January 30, Victor Jose Careno, Oscar Thomas Ruiz Colmarenaz, Dionys Andres Marval Salazar, Alexis Caldea Lopez, Pablo Rafael Marval Rodriguez, Saul Elia Waldrop, and Jose Florentino Alcala Carrio, were convicted of the crime.
The delay in sentencing involved securing reports from the International Police (INTERPOL) of previous convictions and correcting reports from the prison on their conduct.
In handing down the sentence on Tuesday, Justice Hayden St Clair-Douglas, in the judge-only trial, said the prosecution had informed the court that the state would formally discontinue the case against Salazar, but up until the close of evidence, nothing had been filed. The judge has adjourned that aspect of the case to April 9, 2025.
The sentences of the remaining seven men will begin from the date of their conviction and the attorney for Careno had urged the to exercise leniency due to his end-stage renal disease.
But the court ruled that his current medical care sufficed and declined to impose a non-custodial sentence, with the judge admonising the defence for failing to advance submissions on the law of sentencing, instead telling the court it knew the law.
Justice St Clair-Douglas in highlighing the gravity of the crime, spoke of the smuggling of a “significant quantity of a dangerous drug” into Trinidad and Tobago and the societal damage caused by cocaine trafficking, including the widespread repercussions of drug abuse, the facilitation of gang violence, and the general upsurge in crime.
“This type of activity is usually undertaken for significant financial gain,” he said, adding that the court could not overlook the broader implications of such offences.
The High Court heard that on July 2, 2016, just after midnight (local time), the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard officers were patrolling the waters when they encountered a pirogue, the El Libertador. When they saw the coastguardsmen, the occupants of the boat began throwing white packets into the sea.
The Coast Guard ordered the men to stop, but the pirogue rammed into the Coast Guard vessel three times, leading the coastguardsmen to shoot out three of the pirogue’s four outboard engines.
The El Libertador was commandeered and some of the officers boarded it while the others retraced their route to retrieve the packages that had been thrown out at sea.
The men, the boat and the packages were taken to the Coast Guard base and the police were called in.
Tests identified that the packages contained cocaine. There were 84 packages in all.
The men’s defence was that the white bags which contained the individual packages of cocaine were never on their boat. They claimed they were out at sea looking for a lost boat and the Coast Guard attacked the El Libertador and put the drugs in their pirogue.
None of the men testified at their trial.
Justice St Clair-Douglas said he was satisfied with the guilt of each man, returning guilty verdicts for all except Salazar. (CMC)
