This article investigates the 2025 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. By using digital ethnography to synthesise social media discourse and combining it with heritage research, we demonstrate how the manipulation of fishermen’s identities served to legitimise a military intervention primarily driven by oil interests, and we propose the idea of “Schrödinger’s Fishermen” to illustrate both the agency of local fishermen and the propensity of the fishermen’s identity for use by both political narratives. The analysis reveals that these identity politics obscured regional agency and facilitated extrajudicial violence, resulting in 51 fatalities across the region.
