Speaking Oct. 24 at the 86th annual conference of Barbados’s Labour Party, Prime Minister Mia Mottley delivered a stinging indictment of the Trump administration’s war deployment in the Caribbean region against Venezuela. No CARICOM (Caribbean Community) country, she said, “should accept without evidence the extrajudicial killings” carried out by the U.S. Navy against alleged drug traffickers. “This is not a time of pirates anymore,” she warned, the Jamaica Gleaner reported her saying. Several other Caribbean leaders were in attendance to hear her speech.
If the U.S. has intelligence claiming it is under threat, it “has a duty” to share that intelligence with Caribbean nations, Mottley warned. Then it should take its case to the UN, which is the proper venue to deal with such threats; the UN is responsible for defending international peace. “We respect the rule of law.” The Caribbean, which is a zone of peace, is facing a multiplicity of threats, she said, with warships, the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, and other “menacing vessels, military vessels from the United States across the Caribbean Sea.”
And while this is happening, she continued, Hurricane Melissa, “one of the most dangerous storms of the 2025 Atlantic season, is bearing down on our brothers and sisters” in the northern Caribbean, threatening them with destruction.
