Hours af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar warned of a surge in hu­man and drug traf­fick­ing—fu­elled by Venezue­lan na­tion­als and in­volv­ing lo­cal gang mem­bers—po­lice un­cov­ered a traf­fick­ing ring in Tu­na­puna, res­cu­ing 12 women, in­clud­ing three vic­tims.

It was con­fir­ma­tion of what the Counter Traf­fick­ing Unit (CTU) has been track­ing for years: a grow­ing, or­gan­ised web of ex­ploita­tion stretch­ing from Trinidad to Colom­bia, fed by des­per­a­tion, cor­rup­tion, and porous bor­ders.

The CTU res­cued 102 hu­man traf­fick­ing vic­tims in T&T be­tween 2013 and 2022. In 2019, the high­est num­ber of vic­tims res­cued was 40. The low­est was two in 2022.