Wars of Convenience in a Zone of Peace – The Cost of Collaboration
Grace Notes Essay
In a region that styles itself a “Zone of Peace,” the Caribbean now wakes up to videos of boats being blown out of the water – grainy clips edited like a video game, pushed for ratings on cable news and fed into the endless scroll of social media.
In one of those segments, Rachel Maddow walks viewers through something that should stop every Caribbean government, every law-trained leader, in their tracks. She explains that the Trump administration’s sudden “war” with Venezuela appears to have been reverse-engineered from a domestic deportation scheme: they wanted to use the Alien Enemies Act to expel people from the United States who were not otherwise deportable; that statute requires a state of war; so a “war with Venezuela” was declared, and only then did they scramble to invent a justification about drugs on the high seas.[source]
While that legal fiction plays out in Washington, U.S. forces are firing on small boats in Caribbean waters – some not even confirmed to be carrying drugs, not aimed toward U.S. shores, not pursued with the usual Coast Guard process of interdiction, seizure, arrest and trial. Instead, people are being killed at sea under an improvised “war power” whose origin story sounds like a law school exam gone mad.
The Pardon That Exposes the Hypocrisy
On the very same day that this manufactured war is sold as a righteous stand against narco-trafficking, Donald Trump signs a full pardon for Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was convicted in U.S. federal court of conspiring to import roughly 400 tons of cocaine into the United States and running his country as a “narco-state.”[source] Other reporting notes that Hernández had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for those crimes before being freed by Trump’s signature.[source]
For years, U.S. prosecutors laid out how Hernández and his allies turned Honduras into a corridor for cocaine, while publicly posing as tough-on-crime partners of Washington.[source] Now, in a single act of clemency, the supposed architect of a brutal Caribbean “war on drugs” chooses to free one of the most notorious political traffickers of the era.
That is not a minor contradiction; it is the tell. It shows that these boat bombings are not about principle. They are about power, optics and distraction.
Kamla Persad-Bissessar: A Legal Pedigree, a Dangerous Sentence
Here in Trinidad and Tobago, this story lands on the shoulders of a leader whose legal and academic credentials are not in dispute. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar is no novice: she holds a BA and Diploma in Education, an LL.B. in Law from the University of the West Indies, and a Legal Education Certificate from the Hugh Wooding Law School, where she graduated at the top of her class.[source][source] She practiced as an attorney-at-law, served twice as Attorney General, and now returns as a second-term prime minister leading a complex, violence-weary state.[source]
Precisely because of that pedigree, her recent words land with more weight than a casual sound bite. In reacting to a U.S. strike on a boat that left Venezuela, Persad-Bissessar said she had “no sympathy for traffickers” and that the U.S. military should “kill them all violently.” This was reported in international coverage of the strike and repeated across global outlets.[source][source][source]
Those are not off-the-cuff words from a random commentator. They are a public endorsement, by a senior lawyer and head of government, of lethal force not bounded by due process, evidence, or jurisdiction – and they are being uttered at the very moment a U.S. president is freeing one of the hemisphere’s biggest political traffickers from prison.
When the region hears that, the question is not whether we “sympathise with traffickers.” The question is whether our leaders are now willing to trade away the most basic principles of law – proportionality, evidence, trial, accountability – for proximity to U.S. power.
What Maddow’s Analysis Means for Us
Rachel Maddow’s argument is not a Caribbean partisan attack; it is a constitutional one. She spells out that by concocting a war in order to use the Alien Enemies Act, the administration has put the commander of U.S. Southern Command, every senior officer and every service member involved, in the zone of potential liability for murder and war crimes until statutes of limitation run out.[source] When bombs fall on unproven targets, and civilians die in peacetime waters, the law does not simply shrug.
If that is true for the officers following orders, what about the leaders who celebrate the strikes and invite them closer to our shores? What about the Caribbean governments that provide political cover, docking facilities, radar installations and intelligence under the banner of “co-operation”?
Once U.S. actions are scrutinised as potentially unlawful, any local leader who publicly cheers, legitimises or facilitates them may find that they have walked their own countries into the story. Not perhaps as defendants in a courtroom, but as accomplices in the wider court of history.
The Zone of Peace, or a Theatre of Convenience?
The Caribbean has long tried to present itself as a Zone of Peace – a space where conflicts are resolved diplomatically, where small states resist being drafted into proxy wars. But what we are watching now looks less like a zone of peace and more like a theatre of convenience.
- A “war” declared not because Venezuela invaded the United States, but because a war was legally convenient for a deportation agenda.
- Boat strikes justified as anti-drug crusades, while a major political trafficker is pardoned in Washington.
- Caribbean leadership, armed with impressive legal credentials, blessing a doctrine of “kill them all violently” in our waters.
This is not a coherent security policy. It is a collage of talking points, stitched together to distract domestic audiences, intimidate migrants, and project toughness – at the expense of real human lives and regional stability.
Questions for Trinidad and Tobago’s Leadership
From a citizen’s standpoint, there are some basic questions we are entitled to ask:
- What intelligence briefings were provided before our prime minister endorsed the U.S. strike and called for traffickers to be killed “violently”? Were those briefings independently assessed by our own legal and military advisors?
- Were alternatives considered? For example, enhanced Coast Guard interdiction, joint investigations, or targeted financial sanctions against cartels – tools that respect due process while still confronting organised crime.
- What protections exist for innocent people on the water? Fisherfolk, migrants, or refugees who may be misidentified as traffickers when politics demands a dramatic video.
- How does Trinidad and Tobago intend to uphold international law when partnering with a foreign power whose own legal experts are warning of war-crimes exposure?
These are not anti-government questions. They are pro-Constitution questions. They are what any law-respecting society should ask when lethal force is normalised just beyond our beaches.
Reclaiming Dignity in a Season of Cynicism
I began this reflection by acknowledging Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s achievements: her rise from rural Siparia to top student at Hugh Wooding Law School, her legal practice, her pathbreaking status as Trinidad and Tobago’s first woman Attorney General and first woman prime minister.[source] Those facts remain. But precisely because she knows the law, her embrace of a “kill them all violently” doctrine should trouble us more, not less.
Justice is not a slogan for television. It is a painstaking commitment to facts, evidence, proportion, and the hard work of building systems that can survive any one strongman or any one administration. When we abandon that in favour of theatrics – whether Fox News visuals, TikTok clips, or a few applause lines at home – we are not just killing suspects at sea. We are eroding our own dignity.
For those of us in the Caribbean, and for the many in the United States who still believe in constitutional limits and human rights, the message must be clear:
When our leaders cheer “kill them all violently” in a Zone of Peace, the wound is not just to the dead.
It is to our dignity.
— Grace Notes
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