Pirates again prowl the Caribbean and Latin America
Piracy was once the scourge of the high seas from the Caribbean to Africa’s Barbary Coast. But according to a recent report, buccaneers are back with a massive spike in attacks in the Caribbean, Latin America and the coast of South America.
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Piracy was once the scourge of the high seas from the Caribbean to Africa’s Barbary Coast.
Wars have been fought over it and pirates continue to live in the imaginations of little boys everywhere.
But according to a recent report, buccaneers are back with a massive spike in attacks in the Caribbean, Latin America and the coast of South America.
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According to Oceans Beyond Piracy, 2017 saw a whopping 163% spike in attacks. About 59% of the pirate attacks involved robbing yachts.
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“Pirate activity in 2017 clearly demonstrates that pirate groups retain their ability to organize and implement attacks against ships transiting the region,” report author Maisie Pigeon told Reuters.
But the pirates plying the ancient trade in the warm tropical waters aren’t loveable characters out of the Pirates of the Caribbean series.
Blood is in the water.
According to the report, the bad-assed buccaneers raided the waters off the coast of Suriname. During April, at least a dozen fishermen were reported missing or dead following a big attack, labelled a “massacre” by the president of Guyana.
In one incident, pirates shot dead a fishing boat captain after attacking his ship. His crew were spared.
There appears to be no safe port.
Attacks have been reported in Venezuela, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Colombia and St. Lucia. It’s estimated the pirates escaped with more than $1 million in stolen loot.
The coast of East Africa has also been plagued by pirates for more than a decade, a bizarre gumbo of greed and Islamic ideology.
In 2017, four vessels were hijacked out of 54 incidents. The Horn of Africa has been particularly susceptible to pirate attacks with the U.S. sending in their Navy SEALs on a number of occasions.
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However, the price of piracy along the continent’s Indian Ocean coast was $1.4 billion in 2017. That’s a long way from the $7 billion bounty the bucs earned in 2010.
“There is now a wide range of threats to shipping near the Horn of Africa that have been complicated by the conflict and instability in Yemen,” said Phil Belcher, marine director with the association INTERTANKO, which represents the majority of the world’s tanker fleet.
Elsewhere, there was a spike in piracy along the coast of West Africa with 97 attacks in 2017. There were 95 the year before, including 21 kidnappings.
About 100 crew members were taken hostage by pirates. Two were killed.
“Kidnap-for-ransom continues to plague the region, which is a trend that has unfortunately continued from 2016,” Pigeon said.
The seas of southern Asia also remain a hotbed of pirate activity, particularly in the Yellow Sea.
Twelve Chinese pirates and one Indonesian were strung up and executed for piracy-related crimes. They hijacked a ship and murdered the crew.
So far, there have been 13 reported incidents of piracy in the Yellow Sea between the start of 2015 and the end of the first quarter of 2018.
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