By Raffique Shah
August 30, 2025
Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar can never be as uninformed as she portrays herself to be in matters of foreign affairs, to wit: regional and hemispheric alliances. It took previous governments, starting with the PNM in the 1960s, to cultivate good relations with our Spanish-speaking neighbours in Venezuela.
We often forgot then, as many states now learn, that there is the vast expanse of Portuguese-speaking Brazil a step away from Venezuela.
As a child of the 1950s, how well I recall the fear of Venezuelans that stalked us—strange-looking men and women who spoke Spanish. They would sail across the Gulf of Paria, come to different bays in Trinidad, from where they would engage in trade with us.
T&T, of course, had to wait until our Independence in 1962 when they formally approached states and associations of states, attempting to strike up good relations. It was not easygoing. We often saw people from South America—at least those who traded at a level that probably included contraband, both ways, and maybe guns and ammunition. Our government and our law officers could not allow for this dangerous trend to be considered normal, so they moved with haste, policing the Gulf and stopping the illegal arms and drugs.
By the 1970s, trade in the sale of illegal firearms and drugs had increased due to the introduction of cocaine. I do not have numbers—I don’t think anybody has—but the cocaine trade exploded in an upward trend in the 1980s. The government here teamed up with associated countries in the Caribbean that traded with Europe.
The South American drug cartels were eager to expand business in Europe which was a lucrative market for them. T&T became a focal point for the re-export of mainly cocaine, with Trinidad drug lords also cashing in on the opportunity.
Oil tankers traversing the Atlantic, which would stop in Trinidad before proceeding to Europe where their cargoes measured in tonnes, would have welded into their hulls secret compartments to stash expensive and large quantities of cocaine and psychedelics. It was not only Trinidad that was a target for the drug cartels; in fact, we don’t know that Venezuela was a factor like the US President and drug agencies claim. Remember, we are still looking for the weapons of mass destruction which the US, in the early 2000s, claimed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was hiding.
When the Cold War between the US and the then-Soviet Union was on—which was anything that happened after World War II ended (Korea, Vietnam, and others too numerous to mention)—they lasted for as long as it took America to beat the daylights out of them. The US would then install a non-communist government, and…War Done!
Anyone who lived through those eras would not believe a word of what Washington says. Chavez was the problem because he refused to bow to them. Now Maduro, who succeeded Chavez, is the big problem. America has taken a policy decision that other countries that are big illicit narcotics producers are the problem. For them, the problem never is their oversized appetite for anything.
Imagine, they have created the opioid epidemic with droves of people, on a daily basis, abusing and, worse, overdosing and dying from use of a pharmaceutical drug that they made available for chronic pain sufferers. The epidemic is so bad that you have babies being born with withdrawal symptoms, and teenagers overdosing and dying daily—children of the rich, poor and super-rich.
But America has waged no war on the pharmaceutical companies that have caused the problem, just like they have waged no wars on the gun producers and sellers who aid and abet the local crackhead who shoots up his school or local supermarket in mass killings.
I am no crackhead, never did narcotics; but I know about America’s insatiable appetite for narcotics, alcohol, sexual abuse and torture of children, animals, adults—you name it. America is a sick society.
Our PM should be focusing on uniting the country to face a major economic meltdown that seems imminent. It is almost certain that her Government will somehow have to make cuts on spending for us to barely survive. We face major crises and we need for an understanding population to support measures that must be taken to restore some normalcy where our economy is concerned. We need to live good with our neighbours because they are our biggest market for manufactured goods and services. In fact, we just need to be damn good neighbours.
We need to stop relying on leaders who, even when they have fully functioning brains and a teaspoon of empathy, oversaw the murders of tens of thousands of Palestinian children and added sanctions to our closest neighbours, preventing us from accessing our own oil.
It is bad manners to sleep with the enemy, Madam Prime Minister.