Four more people were killed in Caribbean waters on Sunday. Washington will not say where, will not say who, and will not show what. Our fisherfolk – and our governments – deserve better than a press release without coordinates.
MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, -Calvin G Brown | Somewhere in the Caribbean Sea on Sunday, October 4, a small boat burst into flames and four human beings ceased to exist. That is the sum total of what the United States has chosen to tell us.
US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) announced that its Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere had carried out a “lethal, kinetic strike” on a “go-fast vessel” operating along “established narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean.” No coordinates. No nearest landfall. No names. No nationalities. No cargo shown. Even Reuters, which distributed SOUTHCOM’s footage, said the location and date could not be verified.
Sunday’s attack takes the Trump regime’s maritime campaign, branded Operation Southern Spear, to at least 235 dead across 70 strikes since September 2025. That is 235 people, and not one of them was brought before a court.
Who were they? Prove it.
Washington calls every one of the dead a “narco-terrorist.” It has never shown us why: no seized cargo, no names released to grieving families, no evidence placed before any court. Without proof, no Caribbean person is obliged to accept that label. And every one of us is entitled to ask whether the four killed on Sunday were men who went to sea for fish, as our people have done for centuries.
That question is not plucked from the air. We have been here before.
From Las Cuevas to Canouan
In October 2025, Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo of Las Cuevas, Trinidad, were among six people killed in a strike off Venezuela. Their families say the two men had been fishing off the Venezuelan coast and working on farms there, and were simply coming home. Joseph’s mother and Samaroo’s sister are now suing the US government in federal court in Boston, the first case of its kind.
On February 13 this year, the strikes came closer still. The St Vincent and the Grenadines Coast Guard says one took place about 32 miles east of Canouan, inside SVG’s own Exclusive Economic Zone. Prime Minister Godwin Friday said two Saint Lucian nationals died, and his government admitted it had received no official information on the circumstances. Burnt hulls drifted ashore, and families recognised the boats of relatives who never returned.
When SOUTHCOM says only “the Caribbean,” that is not reassurance. The Caribbean is everywhere our fisherfolk go.
The Caribbean is the Pedro Bank. It is the fish aggregating devices of the Grenadines. It is the water off Negril, Lucea and Morant Point.
Painting targets on our own boats
Consider the advice SVG’s Coast Guard has been forced to give its people: file float plans, stay in contact, and paint your vessels in bright colours. Read that again. Caribbean fishermen are being told to make themselves visible to someone else’s missile and hope it hesitates.
Fishermen in Trinidad and St Vincent report staying ashore or hugging the coast, and Trinidad’s fishing-charter bookings have fallen. Every day a boat stays in harbour means a day without wages and less fish on Caribbean tables. For coastal communities this is food security, not foreign policy.
Washington’s case, and why it fails
Fairness demands the other side be heard. President Trump says the United States is in an “armed conflict” with cartels and that the strikes save American lives from overdoses. It would be dishonest to pretend no Caribbean boat ever carries contraband; poverty pushes some fishermen into the trade.
But that is exactly why interdiction, arrest and trial exist: to separate the guilty from the innocent. A missile cannot do that. For decades the US Coast Guard has stopped, boarded and prosecuted smugglers in these waters under shiprider agreements, including Jamaica’s. Last month, UN experts warned that the strikes violate international law and may amount to crimes against humanity. A regime confident of its evidence would publish it.
CARICOM’s divided voice
CARICOM has answered with one phrase, repeated like a prayer: the Caribbean must remain a “Zone of Peace.” Heads of Government said so in October 2025, with Trinidad and Tobago alone reserving its position. In February, at the 50th summit in St Kitts, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar openly rejected the idea, standing by her earlier call for traffickers to be killed “violently.”
Seventy strikes later, the communiqués have saved no one.
What CARICOM must demand
Silence and vague formulas are no longer neutrality. They are complicity. CARICOM’s Heads of Government should, collectively and publicly, demand:
- Prior notice to regional coast guards, and disclosure of the location of every strike in Caribbean waters.
- The identities and nationalities of everyone killed, and the evidence against them.
- A regional fisherfolk safety protocol, coordinated through the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism.
- A unified CARICOM position at the OAS and the United Nations, backing an independent investigation.
Our forebears fished these waters long before there was a Southern Command. The sea is our inheritance, not Washington’s firing range. If CARICOM cannot find its voice for 235 dead, it should ask itself whom it speaks for.
WiredJA
