Family seeks answers after fisherman killed in US anti-drug operation

It has been more than four months since Ricky Joseph left his home for the last time.

His partner, Lucille Charles, and their chidren were still asleep at home on the Caribbean island of St Lucia, when Joseph, 35, set out to sea early in the morning on 13 February to fish for tuna, ballyhoo and snapper.

When Joseph failed to return hours later, Charles grew increasingly worried, calling and messaging his phone with no answer.

“I started calling people and asking if they had seen him. I kept trying to reach him,” she said. “I sent messages. I kept telling myself he would come back, but then I began to feel that something had happened to him.”

The truth emerged in bits and pieces: media reports, rumours of an explosion – and then the news that the boat he was on had been blown up in the Trump administration’s military campaign against vessels allegedly transporting drugs to the US.

For Joseph’s family – who knew him as a son, a brother and a father, a man who made time to play with his children at the beach – the reports were as confusing as they were devastating. Joseph had no criminal record, said Charles, adding: “I never knew him to be involved in anything like that.”

To date more than 200 people are thought to have been killed in more than 60 strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific – the latest on 21 June.

Human rights organisations, national governments and the UN have condemned the attacks as “extrajudicial killings”, and argue that even if people on the boats were involved in smuggling – as Donald Trump claims without evidence – drug trafficking was not an offence punishable by death in the US or under international law.

Analysis from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a US-based NGO, found that news coverage of the attacks was dropping off as media interest waned.

“It’s so normalised now that it doesn’t even get much attention when there is a new strike … I think people are getting somewhat numb to it,” said Adam Isacson, the director for defence oversight at WOLA. After Joseph disappeared, the police came by the family home to take statements and collect a photograph, but they did not give the family much information, said Charles, who finds it hard to speak about her loss.

Although the family was told that Joseph’s remains had been found, they still do not have his body. Without a body to bury, without a clear explanation of his death, and without a trial to contest the accusations against him, they said they were suspended in raw grief.

The family is asking for clarity and support.

“I had to tell [the children] that their father was gone,” said Charles. “That was very hard … they never got the chance to see him, to say goodbye, or to have closure.”

For Joseph’s brother Titus, the pain hit when he saw the charred remains of the boat that his sibling had been on. “When I got close to that boat, I felt like my brother was still there. I felt his spirit. It hurt me badly. I started crying. I could not even really handle it,” he said, adding that he was struggling to come to terms with the loss.

“What reminds me of him most is passing by the sea … I would remember seeing him walking from the sea or going to the sea. Every time I pass there, I think about him. I still feel like I am seeing Ricky … that is how much he is missed.”

He said his brother was not a criminal: “If the boat was carrying so much cocaine and then it exploded and caught fire, where is the evidence? Where is the cocaine? That is what I want to know. I know Ricky. He was a fisherman. That was his life.”

Ricky Joseph was one of 13 people killed in Trump’s boat attacks to be identified in a joint investigation by 20 journalists led by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism. The report found that several of the victims showed no indication of involvement in drug trafficking.

US Southern Command (Southcom), which oversees US military activities in Latin America, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Cameron Taliam, the owner of the boat that Joseph was on, said he did not know the fisher but knew the captain, who was known locally as “Nafi”.

“I never knew him to be anything out of the way, no problems with the law … one of the nicest guys,” Taliam said of the captain.

No official accounts have been given of the attack on the boat, which took place in the waters of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Taliam said he was left to piece together scanty reports from authorities and accounts from witnesses who described seeing a US drone circling then hitting another vessel then going towards his boat.

Taliam, who operates a fleet of fishing vessels, said fishers were afraid to take his boats out. “They’re asking me to change the colour of my boats because almost all my boats are in green and black … They feel like my boats are being targeted.”

In St Lucia, an investigation was launched, said the prime minister, Philip Pierre. But in May – three months after the attack – he said he had yet to receive further information from Washington.

“We cannot insist that the US gives us answers … And the sad thing is that we have had no further information on this matter,” Pierre said.

Isaacson said Caribbean governments were struggling to get answers partly because they might not “have much interface with the part of the US government” that was carrying out the attacks.

He added: “But the bigger reason is that the Trump administration has been very clear that it is going to wield all of its political and economic tools against anybody who challenges these.”

Taliam said he did not feel St Lucia’s prime minister was to blame. “He wasn’t the one who did anything to my boat,” Taliam said. “The world just needs to realise that we have a psycho on the loose … Trump is a psycho.”