COMMENTARY Trinidad and Tobago's Persad-Bissessar should be applauded for steering away from Venezuela's Maduro — but questioned for steering into Trump's potential legal whirlpool.
If you thought Scylla and Charybdis dwell only in the Mediterranean, think again.
They lurk just as hazardously in the Caribbean — only here they’re called Maduro and Trump.
Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister thinks she can navigate between the two of them.
Perhaps she will. But the reality is, as she turns her back on the six-headed Scylla/Maduro — and who can blame her for doing that? — she may be disappearing into the whirlpool of Charybdis/Trump.
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If you remember your Greek mythology, Scylla and Charybdis are the sea monsters that menace the narrow Strait of Messina separating Italy and Sicily. They define dilemma: if you sail away from being devoured by Scylla, you get swallowed by Charybdis, and vice versa.
Right now, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and U.S. President Donald Trump stalk the equally tight Columbus Channel — aka the Serpent’s Mouth — between Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela.
And it would appear Trinidadian Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has made the right choice by shunning Scylla/Maduro.
Scylla and Charybdis don't dwell only in the Mediterranean — they just as hazardously stalk the Caribbean, only here they’re called Maduro and Trump.
Too many Caribbean leaders have long, and shamelessly, apologized for Maduro’s brutal and disastrous regime. They either sympathize with its left-wing, anti-U.S. mission, or they feel obligated because it once lavished oil aid on their countries.
Mollycoddling Maduro is also a spineless lefty compulsion shared by governments elsewhere in Latin America, from Brazil to Mexico.
But Persad-Bissessar has had the backbone to call Venezuela’s socialist revolution what it is: a repressive mafia whose alleged drug trafficking and other criminal scourges have leached into her neighboring island nation, which last year recorded its highest-ever homicide rate.
So, not surprisingly, Trinidad and Tobago is allowing the U.S. warships and other forces Trump has assembled in the Caribbean — ostensibly for anti-drug operations, but possibly to strike inside Venezuela and topple Maduro — to dock and conduct joint military exercises there.
Persona non grata
In response, Maduro this week declared Persad-Bissessar persona non grata and barred her from entering Venezuela.
To which Madame PM replied: “Why do they think I would want to go to Venezuela?”
On the one hand, you have to applaud her pluck.
It’s encouraging to see her and other center-left or leftist politicos in the region, like Chile’s Gabriel Boric, stand up to Maduro. Last year Maduro stole a presidential election he lost in a landslide to Venezuela’s democratic opposition — and imprisoned anybody who complained.
On the other hand, you have to question Persad-Bissessar’s naïvete.
She believes that by admirably steering her ship of state away from Scylla/Maduro, she can escape Charybdis/Trump and the serious legal issues that he — and she, if only by association — may have to answer for.
When Trump ordered the first U.S. military strike on a suspected drug-trafficking boat moving out of Venezuela into the Caribbean last month, killing what Trump said were 11 alleged narco-criminals onboard, Persad-Bissessar gave her full-throated approval.
“I … am happy that the U.S. naval deployment is having success in their mission,” she said. “I have no sympathy for traffickers. The U.S. military should kill them all, violently.”
Again, her frustration is understandable. And normally I would give a thumbs up to any Caribbean nation’s anti-narcotics cooperation with Uncle Sam.
But in this instance, just about every expert you consult will tell you Sam has crossed a troubling line of international law.
By destroying (so far) 13 suspected narco-vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific, and killing 57 people in them, they say the U.S. has shattered historic global norms that demand civilian criminals be subject to law enforcement, not military execution.
The Trump administration insists its targets are “narco-terrorist combatants” who are waging war on the U.S. with their “invasion” of deadly drugs.
But narco-traffickers, while despicable, are not Al Qaeda. And as crime-watchers inside Venezuela have told me, oftentimes those drug boats’ passengers include innocents such as migrants and women who are being sex-trafficked.
Sources close to Navy Adm. Alvin Holsey indicate a big reason he retired last week as head of the U.S. military’s Southern Command here in Doral — and hence as overseer of Trump’s Caribbean campaign — is that he was “very uncomfortable,” as one says, with that potential liability.
And that’s the Charybdis/Trump vortex Persad-Bissessar herself risks being sucked into, if she hasn’t been already.
Such is life in the Serpent’s Mouth.
