Trinidad and Tobago leader praises strike and says US should kill all drug traffickers ‘violently’

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad (AP) — Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, has praised a U.S. strike on a boat suspected of carrying drugs in the southern Caribbean and said that all traffickers should be killed “violently.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that 11 people were killed aboard the boat that had departed Venezuela, which is located near Trinidad and Tobago.

“I, along with most of the country, am happy that the U.S. naval deployment is having success in their mission,” Persad-Bissessar said in a statement late Tuesday. “The pain and suffering the cartels have inflicted on our nation is immense. I have no sympathy for traffickers; the U.S. military should kill them all violently.”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the drugs aboard the vessel were likely headed to Trinidad or elsewhere in the Caribbean.

Persad-Bissessar said that restricting illegal guns, drugs and human trafficking would decrease violence in the Caribbean region and the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, which has imposed two state of emergencies in recent months.

“Our country has been ravaged by bloody violence and addiction because of the greed of the cartels,” Persad-Bissessar said. “The slaughter of our people is fueled by evil cartel traffickers.”

Other Caribbean leaders were more reserved in their remarks.

Barbados Today, a local news site, quoted Barbadian Foreign Minister Kerrie Symmonds as saying that foreign ministers within Caricom, a 15-member regional trade bloc, wrote to Rubio to ensure that future military operations within the Caribbean don’t occur without prior notice or explanation.

“What effectively we are trying to do is to work through the diplomatic channels of making sure that there are no surprises and practices, so that you get notification wherever it is feasible for actions that are going to have a foreseeable regional impact,” Symmonds was quoted as saying.

He said that ongoing dialogue would “avoid misunderstandings, and we can maintain and strengthen our mutual confidence with each other.”

Meanwhile, Colombian President Gustavo Petro questioned the operation on Wednesday, saying that it’s possible to conduct maritime interdiction of drug shipments without attacking a vessel’s occupants. He said that Colombia typically captures them, since those transporting the drugs “are not the big drug traffickers,” but rather, “very poor young people” from the region.

“Bombing the boat violates the universal principle of proportionality of force and results in murder,” the leftist president wrote on X.

Trump has said that the vessel targeted in the strike in international waters was operated by Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. The White House didn’t immediately explain how the military determined that those aboard the vessel were Tren de Aragua members.

The strike came after the U.S. announced last month that it planned to boost its maritime force in waters off Venezuela to fight threats from Latin American drug cartels.