How English-speaking Colombian islands have been caught up in Trump’s ‘drug war’ airstrikes

Walking among brightly painted wooden houses raised above the ground and lined with verandas – architecture more reminiscent of the Caribbean and the southern US – the language most commonly heard is Creole, a distinct variety of Caribbean English.

Yet the same emerald waters that provide fish for local communities and attract tourists from around the world have become “mass graves” for local fishers.

Because of the islands’ strategic location north-west of mainland Colombia between South and North America, young seafaring-skilled men have for years been recruited by groups moving cocaine produced in Colombia northwards, often as far as the US.

They are members of the Raizal people, shaped by different waves of settlement over the centuries, but above all, defined by their African heritage.

Although the involvement of young Raizal men in drug trafficking is not new, residents agree it is growing and has acquired a dramatic dimension since the US began bombing speedboats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. The airstrikes have killed 215 people since September in what the UN has condemned as “extrajudicial killings”.

At least 16 fishers from San Andrés and Providence have gone missing since January, according to Edgar Jay Stephens, 58, the president of the main local association of fishers, I-Fish. He said some of them might have been carrying drugs, but “certainly” not all.

The disappearances have also been a decades-long problem on the islands – whether because the men were killed, arrested by other countries or fell victim to harsh conditions at sea – but Stephens said the current pace was unprecedented.

A spokesperson for US Southern Command, which conducts the airstrikes, said it “does not comment on specific operational details”, but added: “We have no information of any strikes, operations, seizures, or arrests involving residents of San Andrés or Providence.”

Given that the US has recently denied responsibility for other bombings in accounts that lawmakers, experts and academics have criticised as inconsistent, Stephens does not rule out the possibility it were involved.

“How many people could have died without us knowing what happened to them?” he asked, echoing a frequent criticism made by human rights activists about the bombings: the US does not release information about the victims, making their identification a difficult task that has been accomplished in little more than a dozen cases, thanks mainly to the efforts of lawyers and journalists.

The sister of one of the 16 missing men said her brother had been trafficking drugs alongside two other Raizal men. “He accepted the job because it was easy money and he wanted to buy a plot of land and build a house,” said the sister, who asked not to be identified.

When she saw the news of a US airstrike on a speedboat carrying three men near Costa Rica, she sent his documents to Colombia’s embassy in the neighbouring country, hoping he might be identified among the three. He was not.

Meanwhile, Raizal fishers point to another consequence of the attacks: a direct impact on their livelihoods, as has happened in other traditional communities across the region.

“We’ve changed our routines,” said Ling Jay Robinson, 38, explaining that there have been days when he chose not to go out to sea.

“Those people [the US military] could mistake us for traffickers and bomb us. We’re living with fear,” said Robinson, who is the son, grandson, great-grandson and great-great-grandson of fishers. “It goes back through our ancestors.”

The islands of San Andrés and Providence lie closer to the coast of Nicaragua – 260 miles (420km) away – than to mainland Colombia, which is 450 miles distant.

After being initially claimed by Spain, they were permanently settled when English Puritans arrived in 1629. Pirates also passed through, and although Spain later reasserted control, it did not expel the English settlers. Enslaved Africans were subsequently brought to work on plantations, particularly cotton estates.

Following Colombia’s independence, the islands agreed to become part of the new nation. But it was only from 1912 onward that the state began to exert significant influence, imposing Catholicism and Spanish as the official religion and language in place of Protestantism and Creole.

To this day, however, many Raizales prefer to call Providence by its older name rather than the official Spanish one, Providencia.

“I would say that the Raizal people are trilingual. We speak English, Spanish and Creole,” said the political scientist Sally Ann García Taylor, who was born in San Andrés and whose mother is from Providence.

The Raizal people, she said, were the product of the interactions between all the peoples who had passed through the islands, although “Afro-descendant heritage is a major element in the formation of our identity”.

Another profound change came in 1953, when the government declared San Andrés a freeport – exempting imported goods from taxes – and encouraged large-scale migration from mainland Colombia.

The impact is still felt today in the island’s overcrowding. San Andrés, whose airport has daily flights to Bogotá and even Panama, covers 26 sq km (10 sq miles) and is home to 56,000 people. Providence, which has flights only to the neighbouring island, spans 17 sq km and has just 6,000 residents. Many local people say that, with its lack of hotels, fancy restaurants and duty-free shops, it is “like San Andrés 50 years ago”.

The difference is also reflected in the islands’ ethnic makeup: while Raizales account for about 91% of Providence’s population, they now make up only 35% of San Andrés’s.

The contrast is also visible in the architecture. Providence, although still recovering from Hurricane Iota, which devastated more than 90% of its infrastructure in 2020, has largely preserved its traditional Caribbean architecture, while in San Andrés it is largely confined to the island’s southern areas, where most Raizales live.

“If you ask how many Raizales own hotels in San Andrés, I don’t think there are even two or three,” said Jairo Rodriguez Davis, the secretary of the Raizal Council, the community’s main representative and deliberative body, adding that most of the money generated by the island’s tourism industry ended up in the hands of non-Raizales.

To determine whether someone is Raizal, he relies on family trees tracing lineages back to the 1700s. “If they have a traceable root back then, you are considered Raizal,” he said.

Davis’s office is located in what used to be the first and only Raizal university, created on the initiative of the community and a Baptist minister. The institution operated briefly – teaching in Creole – between the late 1990s and early 2000s, but closed for lack of government and private support. Today the building, stripped of most of its windows, railings and boundary walls, but facing the sea and surrounded by an endless grove of mango trees, serves as a community space for meetings and events.

“We dream of having the university here again one day,” said Davis.

Davis’s more immediate concern, however, is the violence. “Neither coca is grown here nor cocaine produced here, but many of our young people have been used by traffickers to carry drugs on those boats,” he said.

Trafficking has passed through the islands since at least the 1970s: first marijuana heading north, then weapons moving south to fuel Colombia’s armed conflict; later cocaine flowing north again and, more recently, people attempting to reach the US.

“Everyone has a relative who has been killed or disappeared at sea,” said Miguel Angel Castell Cano, San Andrés’s government secretary, who previously worked as a lawyer for Providence’s fishers’ association.

His own father has been missing for 10 years after becoming involved in a drug-trafficking trip near Honduras. “It is neither something I am ashamed of nor proud of … But no one deserves to disappear, regardless of what they have done,” he said.

Being missing does not necessarily mean being dead. Hooker Cabeza Ignacio Agenor, 40, was arrested by Costa Rican authorities in 2021 and sentenced to 10 years in prison for international drug trafficking. He has been eligible to apply for parole since February. His family has submitted a formal repatriation request to the Costa Rican government so that he can serve the remainder of his sentence in Colombia, but they have yet to receive a response.

Families are often reluctant to speak out about their missing loved ones. “The islands are deeply religious. When people disappeared, even if they had simply been fishing, no one wants a relative to be subjected to moral judgment,” said the writer and lawyer Maríamatilde Rodríguez.

Between the 1990s and 2000s, she led an investigation drawing on documents and interviews with dozens of relatives that arrived at the staggering figure of nearly 700 disappeared people across the two islands over the preceding 30 years. She said updating that count would require a similarly extensive effort. There is no official data from the Colombian authorities about it.

“Our sea contains mass graves, and its beauty is matched only by the scale of the tragedies it has witnessed,” she said.

Rodríguez said the Colombian state did not treat the issue with the seriousness it deserved. “There is both ignorance and a tendency to minimise the issue – people assume that because the islands are small, the problems must also be small.”

The government did not respond to requests for comment.

Stephens said that if such a large number of people had gone missing anywhere else in the world, “that would set off alarm bells. Yet here nobody pays attention, and young men continue to disappear.”

He believes that, despite the US bombings, the number of drug-trafficking trips in the region is increasing – many analysts have already argued that the airstrikes have had little effect on the volume of drugs reaching the US – and this has led to greater recruitment of fishers.

Beyond drug legalisation – “prohibition is what fuels the business” – the solution lies with the Colombian state, he argues. “We need more jobs for young people. Because they have so few opportunities here, some of them end up taking that path.”