“It’s like these people don’t exist,” he said of the victims.

In Port of Spain, the bar owner who said he was bringing one of the women aboard the boat continues his business unperturbed. One night in May, at the bar he runs in the capital, he flipped through pictures of underage Venezuelan girls on a cellphone, sent to him over the messaging service WhatsApp.

He explained the arrangement he had with the Venezuelan women conscripted to work under him: He pays a fee to the boatman for their passage, confiscates their passports and returns them only after the women paid several times what he spent to have them smuggled, he said.

The arrangement worked with the help of the Port of Spain police and the Trinidadian Coast Guard, both of which received payments, he said.

The Trinidad government did not respond to written questions or requests for comment. Three commercial boat owners in Trinidad and a fourth in Venezuela confirmed that they had either made payments to smuggle prostitutes from Venezuela, or had witnessed such payments by other boatmen bringing women to Trinidad.

At the Port of Spain bar, police officers approached the owner, in plain view of several Venezuelan women who worked under him, and greeted him in front of a reporter.

“These are my friends, I know them well,” the owner said of the officers, smiling.

Relatives of the suspects in the human trafficking ring said their family members had been falsely accused by the surviving women; none of those jailed could be reached through the Venezuelan prison system.

For all his anger, Mr. Díaz now seemed most consumed by the question that had led his daughter to leave: how to get food. Hyperinflation has continued. The food shortages remain. And no one in the family has dared to cross the waters again.