200 Bodies

 As of yesterday, the Trump administration's campaign of extrajudicial murder in the Caribbean and Pacific has now claimed the lives of more than 200 people. 

The New York Times, in a haunting story yesterday, investigates one of the under-examined aspects of this ongoing atrocity: its impact on the livelihoods of coastal communities that fish in these same waters. 

According to the Times article, whole fishing villages have been depopulated and had to give up their ancestral trade—because it is no longer safe to take a small fishing boat onto the water without being targeted from the skies. 

People across a whole region of the earth's surface, plying a humble and eternally hard way of life, now cannot go out for the morning's catch because a U.S. military drone might execute them from above in a rain of fire. 

We are not even at war with these nations. There is not even an armed party on the other side. We are just executing people without charge and trial on the vague, unsubstantiated accusation that these boats might be carrying cocaine. 

As one Ecuadorian woman told the Times: "Fishermen endure the forces of nature: wind, rain and sun. But they also face pirates, and on top of that, now there is this bombing thing."

I thought of J.M. Synge's play Riders to the Sea, with its immortal portrayal of the hard battle against the elements and the threat of death at sea waged by every fishing community. 

In the poem, a poor Irish family slowly loses every one of its members to the murderous elements of the ocean. 

Imagine if, in Synge's day, there had also been killer robots swarming the skies, picking off a few of those Irish fishermen who managed to survive the sun, waves, and storms? 

What our government is doing to these communities is so completely evil it appears to elude even the imagination of most Americans. 

You might think, after murdering 200 people on civilian crafts, this would still be the most hotly-debated political issue in our country every day. But no; it often falls off the radar—even, I confess—for me. 

Every one of these deaths is an accusation to us. Every one of these corpses we are making cries out for justice and demands an answer—even when we have no idea who they are. 

"Colombia’s state-run forensic agency said [...] that they still had the bodies of the two people that washed ashore in December [....], but that they had not been able to 'establish the identities,'" writes the Times. 

These bodies demand answers of us. 

We should be haunted every day by the same questions Harold Pinter posed—in a poem about unidentified corpses that he read aloud in his Nobel lecture, to protest against civilian casualties in the Iraq war: 

Where was the dead body found? 

Who found the dead body?

Was the dead body dead when found?

How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother

Or uncle or sister or mother or son

Of the dead and abandoned body?