Gus John | Caribbean in crisis…again!

Donald Trump is wreaking havoc in the Caribbean.

The activities of the US military and the CIA across the region and especially in Venezuela, the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro and the US virtual annexation of Venezuela are impacting upon the entire region, militarily, economically and psychologically. It is also highlighting just how fragile Caribbean integration and sovereignty actually are.

Just over four decades ago, October 25, 1983, Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada, sending the 82nd Airborne Battalion of 6,000 troops on what he called ‘a recuse mission’. A week earlier, October 19, 1983, Maurice Bishop, prime minister of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) and leader of the New Jewel Movement, was assassinated by members of the Grenadian armed forces, along with members of his Cabinet and loyalists in the military, in a confrontation between two factions in the PRG, one of which had placed Bishop under house arrest.

Thousands of people, who embodied the bloodless Grenada Revolution that had taken place on March 13, 1979, while the tyrannical prime minister, Eric Gairy, was out of the country, rallied to the residence where Bishop was being held under house arrest and freed him.

The Fort Rupert massacre of the prime minister, Cabinet members and scores of civilians sent shock waves across the Caribbean and the world. Three prominent Caribbean leaders – Eugenia Charles (Dominica), Tom Adams (Barbados) and Edward Seaga (Jamaica), all on the right of politics in the region and implacably opposed to the PRG – claimed to have asked Reagan to go in and rescue the people of Grenada from those in the People’s Revolutionary Army who were thought responsible for the massacre.

For his part, Reagan told the world that the US intervention, Operation Urgent Fury, was constitutional because they needed to rescue the hundreds of US medical students who were studying at the St George’s University in the south of the island. The then British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, made a feeble intervention, remonstrating with her pal, Reagan, for not given her prior warning of his intentions. Although Grenada was independent, the British monarch (QEII) still had a governor general as her representative on the island.

Maurice Bishop and the PRG had taken up a position in relation both to the neo-colonialism of the British and the hegemony of the USA in the Caribbean region, with a mission to secure capitalist interests by any means necessary.

The People’s Revolution sought to build a socialist state, with active citizenship and democratic participation being given expression in the everyday lives of the masses. The population not only identified with, but endorsed and took responsibility for delivering the transformation plan of the PRG, centred around: women’s equality; workers’ rights; land reform; free education and lifelong learning; free health care and People’s Assemblies.

SENDING A MESSAGE

The people were weaned away from seeing themselves as electoral fodder, at the whim of politicians seeking election and re-election, turning brother against sister and neighbour against neighbour.

The freedom, opportunities and improved standard of living that were becoming part of the day to day experience of young and old alike; the experience of voices being heard and the needs of the collective in any one village or parish not being made subordinate to the demands of powerful lobbies that are able to exert power and influence based on class, wealth, standing in the community, or colour and ethnic background, was the freedom that the revolution brought. It was a reclaiming of one’s basic humanity and of the right to belong and to be engaged in forging your own destiny.

That is what was killed with Maurice Bishop and his allies. That is what was buried by Reagan and Operation Urgent Fury.

Reagan was not concerned to save the Grenadian people from their military rulers. He, like his Caribbean allies who enabled him to say the US was not invading, but going on a rescue mission at the request of Grenada’s neighbours, was on a mission to rescue the Caribbean region from the sort of socialism Bishop and the PRG were seeking to embed. If that model were allowed to survive Bishop and if those who were now in control could continue to make it work, it would destabilise the political balance across the Caribbean and indeed in the US itself.

The US intervention, therefore, had as much to do with breaking the bond between Grenada and Cuba and between them and the Soviet Union, while sending out a signal to Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Jose Duarte and Alvara Magana in El Salvador, all closely aligned to the PRG in Grenada, and to Fidel Castro in Cuba.

The US returned Grenada to a state of dependency and subordination to its interests as the region recovered from the trauma of October 19th. Caribbean leaders felt they could retreat from hearing popular demands for ‘One Caribbean’, demands popularised by Maurice Bishop, alongside his admonition that: “Now more than ever, the Caribbean must stand united. We must resist any attempts to undermine our sovereignty, or destabilise our region.” Instead, they actively implanted neo-liberal ideology and encouraged individualism, while discouraging collectivism.

42 YEARS LATER

Maurice Bishop must be turning somersaults in his grave on account of where the Caribbean is now, 42 years later. A Caribbean in which the prime minister of Trinidad & Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, could be telling her nation and the world (September 5, 2025) that she has “no sympathy for drug traffickers” and that the US military “should kill them all violently”.

She had not demanded evidence that the boats being blasted out of the water by US forces operating above the Caribbean Sea are actually involved in drug trafficking, or in supplying guns to protect the drugs trade in Trinidad & Tobago, or anywhere else, she is putting her full weight behind Donald Trump’s spree of extrajudicial killings. The likelihood that those boats could contain Trinidadian fishing crew or people legitimately engaging in offshore activity is clearly not her concern. That prime minister must know that the US has the means to intercept those boats and establish what their business is and what they are transporting, followed by whatever legal action could be taken against offenders.

The tragedy is that this ‘shoot first and don’t take accountability later’ policy is being actively endorsed by the prime minister of the country which is the CARICOM lead on regional security. Even more bizarre was her announcement in December that CARICOM, the 15-member regional integration grouping, “is not a reliable partner at this time” and that it cannot continue to operate in “this dysfunctional and self-destructive manner as it is a grave disservice to the people of the Caribbean”.

Trump is not just punishing countries aligned to Venezuela, he is also punishing those who resist his attempts to militarise, if not colonise, the entire Caribbean as being in America’s national security interests to do so. He is approaching them, one by one, and cajoling/bullying them to agree to take third country refugees whom he insists on getting rid of.

Countries are making individual decisions about all this, no doubt mindful of the various forms of retaliation Trump is capable of. Latterly, CARICOM is seeking to orchestrate a combined approach to those requests from Trump, given the far-reaching implications of any such agreement.

For their own sakes and in the interests of regional security, this is clearly not the only issue on which those countries need to agree and apply a unified approach.

- Professor Augustine John is a Human Rights campaigner and Honorary Fellow at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com