Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. Hope you’ll join us here every Saturday. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.
This week’s main topic was going to be the Cayes Massacre, a particularly grievous point in U.S history connected to our treatment of civilians in the Caribbean today. The shameful massacre of Haitian civilians by U.S. troops took place on Dec. 6, 1929.
The Zinn Education Project posted this excerpt from “The Long Legacy of Occupation in Haiti,” a 2015 piece written by Edwidge Danticat for The New Yorker.
In Les Cayes, Haiti, one of the worst massacres of civilians took place on December 6, 1929, during the nineteen-year American occupation of Haiti, an occupation that began in 1915.
The Cayes massacre took place during a demonstration, which was part of a nationwide strike and an ongoing local rebellion. U.S. Marine battalions fired on fifteen hundred people, wounding twenty-three and killing twelve.
On July 28, 1915, United States Marines landed in Haiti on the orders of President Woodrow Wilson, who feared that European interests might reduce American commercial and political influence in Haiti, and in the region surrounding the Panama Canal. The precipitating event was the assassination of the Haitian President, Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, but U.S. interests in Haiti went back as far as the previous century. (President Andrew Johnson wanted to annex both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Twenty years later, Secretary of State James Blaine unsuccessfully tried to obtain Môle-Saint-Nicolas, a northern Haitian settlement, for a naval base.)
However, given that the United States is currently killing civilians under the guise of a “drug war” and murdered the survivors of our latest “strike”—with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump salivating over orders to “kill them all”—we don’t have to go back to 1915 to point to brutality on the part of the U.S.
Our news media is all atwitter about Hegseth and who gave the orders and whether anyone can be charged, as are editorial cartoonists, and we’re glad to see it. However, we need to address the continuing murderous U.S. practice from today’s Caribbean perspective, as well as from a human perspective.
We’ve been exposed to videos of the attacks, presented as if these killings are from a first-person shooter video game. But we must be mindful that these are human beings being slaughtered—with lives and families and communities who are mourning them.
The Washington Post’s Frances Vinall wrote “Family of Colombian man killed in U.S. boat strikes files formal complaint”:
The family of a Colombian man killed in a U.S. strike on a boat in the Caribbean filed a complaint Tuesday with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), alleging the United States committed human rights violations in an “extra-judicial killing.”
Alejandro Andres Carranza Medina, a 42-year-old fisherman, was killed in a Sept. 15 U.S. military strike off the Colombian coast, according to the filing.
The complaint was filed by Carranza’s wife and four children. Their lawyer, Daniel Kovalik, said in a phone interview that the grieving family had been left without their chief breadwinner and were facing threats after speaking publicly about the case.
[..]
Carranza’s family is seeking compensation, though Kovalik acknowledged the IACHR does not have the power to enforce any recommendations it makes.
“They [the family] also want the killings to stop,” he said. “We hope that this can be at least part of the process of getting that to happen.”
On the political level, there is no singular unified Caribbean response to these attacks. It’s doubtful there will be, given that the nation states in the region have a broad variety of political leadership, representing perspectives that range from right to center to left, with differing relationships to the United States and our current regime.
National responses have been diverse, as detailed in this article from The Latin American Post titled “Latin America Divided Over U.S. Maritime Drug Strikes”:
As U.S. warships patrol near Venezuela and alleged drug boats erupt in violence at sea, Latin America and the Caribbean are torn between fear, muted support, and outright outrage. This split highlights profound regional fractures over security, sovereignty, and the erosion of a rules-based global order.
A Fractured Region Confronts a Familiar Force of U.S. Power
Given the long, tangled history of U.S. involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean, the complex regional responses to U.S. maritime operations should make the audience appreciate the intricacies of regional geopolitics and the importance of nuanced analysis.
The region’s response to this maritime crackdown—and the prospect of a broader U.S. operation targeting President Nicolás Maduro—has been inconsistent, despite the obvious geopolitical and human stakes. Since early September, the U.S. has launched at least 19 strikes in surrounding waters—first in the Caribbean, later in the Pacific—resulting in at least 76 deaths. Though the United Nations human rights chief has condemned the strikes as “unacceptable” and in breach of international law, no coordinated response has emerged from Latin America or the Caribbean.
Ideological leanings influence regional responses. Left-wing leaders in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil oppose, while right-leaning governments in Paraguay, Argentina, and Ecuador broadly support Washington’s framing, highlighting regional ideological divides.
Even among U.S.-friendly governments, support is often muted. El Salvador’s populist president Nayib Bukele, who has cooperated closely with Washington on security, has offered no public endorsement of the strikes. Still, reports suggest U.S. aircraft involved in the operation may be using Salvadoran territory. Where backing exists, it tends to be conditional and carefully restrained.
And where does CARICOM stand on this? Guyana’s Staebroek News reports “CARICOM says drug fight must be in conformity with international law, Trinidad reserves position”:
CARICOM has been under pressure for weeks to take a stand on the US mobilization in the Southern Caribbean which has encompassed vessels, thousands of marines and a nuclear-powered submarine. Using drones, the US has blown up a number of boats thought to be involved in drug trafficking and over 20 persons have been killed. Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has expressed full support for the US stance while other members of CARICOM have expressed concern.
The CARICOM statement said:
“Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) met and discussed various issues on the regional agenda including the increased security build up in the Caribbean and the potential impacts on Member States.
“Save in respect of Trinidad and Tobago who reserved its position, Heads agreed on the following:
“They reaffirmed the principle of maintaining the Caribbean region as a Zone of Peace and the importance of dialogue and engagement towards the peaceful resolution of disputes and conflict. CARICOM remains willing to assist towards that objective.
Right-wing Puerto Rico Gov. Jenniffer González Colón, who formerly chaired Latinos for Trump, and the Dominican Republic’s conservative businessman President Luis Abinader are firmly in the Trump camp.
Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has taken a strong position supporting Trump, and is facing intense criticism from her opposition.
CounterPunch’s Vijay Prashad wrote “The Caribbean Faces Two Choices: Join the US Attempt to Intimidate Venezuela or Build Its Own Sovereignty”:
US President Donald Trump has authorised the USS Gerald R. Ford to enter the Caribbean. It now floats north of Puerto Rico, joining the USS Iwo Jima and other US navy assets to threaten Venezuela with an attack. Tensions are high in the Caribbean, with various theories floating about regarding the possibility of what seems to be an inevitable assault by the US and regarding the social catastrophe that such an attack will occasion. CARICOM, the regional body of the Caribbean countries, released a statement affirming its view that the region must be a “zone of peace” and that disputes must be resolved peacefully. Ten former heads of government from Caribbean states published a letter demanding that “our region must never become a pawn in the rivalries of others”.
Former Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Stuart Young said on 21 August, “CARICOM and our region is a recognised zone of peace, and it is critical that this be maintained”. Trinidad and Tobago, he said, has “respected and upheld the principles of non-intervention and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and for good reason”. On the surface, it appears as if no one in the Caribbean wants the United States to attack Venezuela.
However, the current Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar (known by her initials as KPB), has openly said that she supports the US actions in the Caribbean. This includes the illegal murder of eighty-three people in twenty-one strikes since 2 September 2025. In fact, when CARICOM released its declaration on the region being a zone of peace, Trinidad and Tobago withdrew from the statement. Why has the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago gone against the entire CARICOM leadership and supported the Trump administration’s military adventure in the Caribbean?
Backyard
Since the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the United States has treated all Latin America and the Caribbean as its “backyard”. The United States has intervened in at least thirty of the thirty-three countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (90 percent of the countries, in other words) —from the US attack on Argentina’s Malvinas Islands (1831-32) to the current threats against Venezuela.
The idea of the “zone of peace” emerged in 1971 when the UN General Assembly voted for the Indian Ocean to be a “zone of peace”. In the next two decades, when CARICOM debated this concept for the Caribbean, the United States intervened in, at least, the Dominican Republic (after 1965), Jamaica (1972-1976), Guyana (1974-1976), Barbados (1976-1978), Grenada (1979-1983), Nicaragua (1981-1988), Suriname (1982-1988), and Haiti (1986).
In 1986, at the CARICOM summit in Guyana, the Prime Minister of Barbados, Errol Barrow, said “My position remains clear that the Caribbean must be recognised and respected as a zone of peace… I have said, and I repeat, that while I am prime minister of Barbados, our territory will not be used to intimidate any of our neighbours be that neighbour Cuba or the USA.” Since Barrow made that comment, Caribbean leaders have punctually affirmed, against the United States, that they are nobody’s backyard and that their waters are a zone of peace. In 2014, in Havana, all members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) approved a “zone of peace” proclamation with the aim “of uprooting forever threat or use of force” in the region.
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