Around midnight on February 23, Eulalio Bravo, a marine electrician, was dozing in his rack aboard the San Ramon, an oil tanker anchored off the coast of Venezuela. Suddenly, he heard footsteps pounding along the passageway outside. His captain, Jaime Herrera, cried for help. “Be still!” an unfamiliar voice ordered. A gun fired.
By the time Bravo and eight other shipmates emerged to see what had happened, the captain lay dead, a gunshot in the back of his head. Herrera’s stateroom had been pillaged, drawers flung open, his bunk overturned. The killers were gone, as were thousands of dollars the captain kept under lock and key, according to crew members interviewed by Reuters.
The murder, one of a growing number of violent incidents that have roiled Venezuelan waters in recent years, is an extension of a bloody crime wave that has beset the country since its economy collapsed last decade.
But it is also part of a troubling trend in which state agents, from military officers to police to senior government officials, have been accused of complicity in the very crimes they are meant to prevent. After an investigation of the Herrera killing by forensic police at the nearby port of Puerto La Cruz, a state court in March ordered the arrest of three sailors from the Venezuelan Navy and four soldiers from the National Guard.
Some of those arrested had spent time aboard the tanker in the weeks before the crime, according to six crew members who detailed the episode to Reuters. The accused face charges including murder, aggravated robbery and illegal possession of firearms for their alleged roles in the death of the captain, a 59-year-old Colombian.
Crime, both petty and organized, has been one of the most dire consequences of the social meltdown under President Nicolas Maduro. Gangs and paramilitary groups run much of Venezuela’s black-market economy. Now, the public sector is in on rackets ranging from drug trafficking to bribes and kickbacks that grease the wheels of Venezuela’s crucial oil industry.
Maduro himself has been indicted in the United States for charges that include narcoterrorism. His wife, as Reuters reported in May, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for her alleged role in drug trafficking, an accusation the government called “slanderous.”
Further down the government payroll, police and military officials have grown infamous for theft and violence. Last week, a United Nations report said the country’s security forces have systematically committed extrajudicial killings, torture and other human rights abuses, likely under orders from senior government officials. “The state is complicit in everything,” said Omar Gonzalez, an opposition lawmaker from Anzoategui, the eastern state where Puerto La Cruz is located.
Piracy off the coast has surged after Venezuela entered recession, While attacks have tailed off more recently as cargo traffic has dropped off, Venezuelan authorities appear unable or unwilling to manage them. Incident reports compiled by the International Maritime Bureau, an industry organization, show that the Puerto La Cruz port authority, after two separate tanker heists in 2018, failed to respond to captains’ calls for help.
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