Abstract

This presentation investigates the ongoing U.S. bombing campaign in the Southern Caribbean and the contested identity of its victims. Situated between Washington’s “narcoterrorist” branding and Caracas’s “humble fisherman” idealisation, the study employs a long-term archaeological and historical perspective to critique these binary tropes. Using digital ethnography to synthesise social media discourse and combining it with heritage research, we show how the manipulation of fishermen’s identities has served to legitimise the first steps of a military intervention eventually justified by oil interests. We propose the concept of ‘Schrödinger’s Fishermen’ to centre the agency of local fishermen within the conflict. This work reveals that these identity politics instrumentalized regionally and historically important practices to justify extrajudicial violence, resulting in 51 fatalities across the region thus far.