Above photo: People watch the USS Gravely, a U.S. Navy warship, departing the Port of Spain on October 30, 2025. The warship arrived in Trinidad and Tobago on October 26, 2025, for joint exercises near the coast of Venezuela. Martin Bernetti / AFP via Getty Images.
The US has now struck 18 vessels and killed 70 people.
In its ongoing onslaught in the Caribbean and Pacific.
The tiny Caribbean island nation of Barbados — with a population roughly the size of Anchorage, Alaska, or Lincoln, Nebraska — might not be the country one would first imagine taking the lead to stand up to U.S. military actions and ambitions in the region. But as the Trump administration continues to attack boats, first in the Caribbean Sea and now in the Pacific, leaders in Barbados have been vocal.
“As a small state, we have invested tremendous time and energy and effort in establishing and maintaining our region as a zone of peace,” Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said at a conference in late October. “Peace is critical to all that we do in this region, and now that peace is being threatened, we have to speak up.”
Mottley called on other leaders in the region to denounce the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and the U.S. strikes on more than 18 vessels that, as of November 7, had killed at least 70 people in the Caribbean and Pacific.
U.S. officials say these boats are carrying dangerous drugs like fentanyl and cocaine to the United States. They say the people killed on these boats are drug traffickers. They provide no evidence for these claims, and in fact, administration officials have also admitted that the military doesn’t identify the individuals on the boats before hitting them.
Ben Saul, the UN Special Rapporteur for the protection of human rights while countering terrorism, has called the attacks a “crime against humanity.”
Family members of the victims who have been found say the people on the boats are just fishermen. They accuse the United States of flouting international law to push its military agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“I believe that the time has come for us, therefore, to be able to ensure that we do not accept that any entity has the right to engage in extrajudicial killings of persons that they suspect of being involved in criminal activities,” said Mottley. “We equally do not accept that any nation in our region or the greater Caribbean should be the subject of an imposition upon them of any unilateral expression of force and violence by any third party or nation.”
Mottley is one of many of Caribbean leaders who have condemned the Trump administration’s actions. But there is also division, particularly due to the outsized role of the U.S. in the region.
On October 18, Mottley met with the leaders of the other Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member nations. They released a joined statement reaffirming the need for peace, dialogue, and the “unequivocal support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of countries in the Region.”
“The fact that they’re speaking up is highly significant,” Alexander Main, the Director of International Policy at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Truthout. “These Caribbean governments are very reliant on the U.S. in a number of ways, economically, and have been in a vulnerable position, particularly since the passage of Hurricane Melissa in that area where U.S. help is badly needed.”
This week the U.S. State Department said the United States would provide $24 million in assistance to the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica, following the destruction wrought by the hurricane.
One CARICOM country, however, did not endorse the declaration against the U.S. strikes — Trinidad and Tobago. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has openly supported U.S. President Donald Trump and his actions in the region. She says Trinidad has been impacted by drug violence and Trump’s attacks are trying to make their country safe.
“He is committed to the fight against drug trafficking within our region. My Government will continue to support the US military drug interdiction exercises within the region,” Persad-Bissessar told the Trinidad Express.
The island of Trinidad is just off the coast of Venezuela — only 6.8 miles at its closest point.
The atmosphere in Trinidad is “tense,” Trinidadian journalist Soyini Grey told Truthout.
“We’re not accustomed to this type of war-like language and these actions,” she said. “So, narco strikes in the Caribbean is odd and bodies washing up on shores or citizens being killed — we had two of our citizens killed in, I believe, strike five. So, that has been very disquieting. And then, when we reach out to the prime minister for comment, she’s very evasive.”
Grey says schools were closed in the capital on October 31 and grocery stores were overrun with people trying to stock up when news reports suggested that U.S. strikes on Venezuela were imminent. Grey says the Trinidadian military went on high alert and troops were called to bases across Trinidad.
While the attacks expected in those reports have yet to occur, recent actions from the U.S. besides the boat strikes have still given plenty of reason for an abundance of caution. In mid-October, Trump authorized the CIA to carry out covert action in Venezuela. He told reporters the U.S. was considering direct strikes on Venezuela.
“We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” Trump said.
The United States has amassed an unprecedented number of ships and military assets in the region — reportedly the largest military buildup in the Caribbean since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. When the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford — the largest warship ever built — arrives in the Caribbean, there will be over a dozen ships and more than 10,000 military personnel.
The Trump administration has labeled drug groups in the region as “foreign terrorist organizations,” in what legal experts say is an attempt to justify military action. Meanwhile, Trump has accused — again, without evidence — Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro of being a narcotrafficking kingpin. He doubled a bounty on Maduro’s head to $50 million in August.
Maduro has denounced Trump’s threat of military operations in the country and accused Washington of “fabricating a war.”
The Venezuelan government was outspoken against the first boat attack. “But since then, it hasn’t exactly reacted,” Ricardo Vaz, a journalist in Venezuela with Venezuelanalysis told Truthout. “I think the government is really trying to avoid any kind of falling for provocations or unnecessarily escalating the rhetoric.”
For good reason — Trump has shown himself to be unpredictable. And the U.S. government has hit back against Latin American leaders who have denounced its campaign in the Caribbean and Pacific.
In late September, the Trump administration revoked the U.S. visa of Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The revocation came after Petro spoke to protesters in New York City, encouraging U.S. soldiers to refuse orders from Trump. Last month, the United States further sanctioned Petro and his family. Trump has promised to cut off all U.S. aid to Colombia.
Petro has been one of the most outspoken voices against the U.S. military actions in the region, calling the boat attacks “murder.”
“U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial water,” Petro posted on social media. He named one Colombian man, Alejandro Carranza, who was killed in a U.S. attack, calling him a “lifelong fisherman.”
In mid-October, Petro called on Latin American countries to “unite now to reject and react, beyond mere rhetoric, against any aggression against the homeland of Bolívar and the Latin American and Caribbean territory. Venezuela belongs to Venezuelans.”
“We’ve seen some really promising rhetoric and arguments expressed by Petro, but it’s not enough,” Alexander Aviña, an associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University and an expert on the drug war, told Truthout. “Historically, the only way that Latin America has managed to stave off catastrophic U.S. intervention is to come together as a region, and we haven’t seen enough of that beyond rhetoric.”
“I think also Mexico needs to be a lot stronger, more forceful in pushing back against what the U.S. is planning to do in the Caribbean, because eventually, it’s going to boomerang on them,” he said.
That boomerang now seems to be in motion. On November 3, news outlets reported the Trump administration was drawing up blueprints to send U.S. troops to combat drug cartels in Mexico— with or without the support of the Mexican government.
“The United States is not going to come to Mexico with the military,” President Claudia Sheinbaum had previously said in August. “We cooperate, we collaborate, but there is not going to be an invasion. That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out.”
Sheinbaum has also denounced the U.S. boat attacks, some of which have been hitting closer to Mexico.
On October 28, U.S. forces killed 14 people in four alleged “drug boat” strikes in the Eastern Pacific, roughly 400 miles from the Mexican city of Acapulco. Sheinbaum dispatched the Mexican navy to search for survivors.
“We do not agree with these attacks,” she said during her regular morning press conference. “We want all international treaties to be respected.”
But Main says Mexico is in a difficult position.
“Sheinbaum has definitely expressed her strong disagreement with these extrajudicial killings in the region,” said Main. “But they’re about to enter into renegotiation of the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement. They’re also negotiating the security cooperation with the U.S. and doing everything they can to avoid the U.S. violating their sovereignty in a significant way.”
The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) was Trump’s renegotiation of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. USMCA rolled out in 2020, but the trade deal goes under review every six years, and analysts say Trump is likely pushing for a hefty renegotiation ahead of the July 2026 deadline.
The Cuban and Brazilian presidents have also condemned the strikes. In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has offered to help mediate between Venezuela and the United States even as his own country is negotiating over its own trade war with the United States, after Trump slapped Brazil with a 50 percent tariff for bringing his ally former president Jair Bolsonaro to trial for plotting to carry out a coup.
Aside from leaders, there is popular movement across Latin America against the lethal U.S. actions in the Caribbean. People have protested in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela.
But the U.S. military push into the Caribbean comes at a time when the region is far from united. Trump allies like Argentina’s Javier Milei, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa have staunchly backed the U.S. lethal attacks on supposed “drug boats.”
Bukele and Noboa have alleged ties to drug groups and narcotrafficking.
“The problem is that, unlike the Pink Tide at the beginning of the 2000s, we now we have a South America that is not so ideologically cohesive,” Brazilian International Relations professor Camila Feix Vidal told Truthout, referencing the shift toward left-wing governments emblematic of that era. “So, it will be very difficult to have a regional unity to denounce this type of action.”
“I think that, once again, as we have seen throughout history, this shows that the United States is not reliable, and that it acts by force for its own ends.”
