By Levi Janssen Maraval,Mrs Persad

Copyright trinidadexpress

As concerned citizens, we must ask: why is Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar dragging Trinidad and Tobago into a fight that is not ours?

If the United States wants to deter Venezuelan aggression against Guyana, it can build a base in the disputed Guyanese Essequibo. That is entirely and strictly between Washington and Georgetown.

Instead, our Prime Minister is volunteering our land and waters for possible US military action against Venezuela. This is a reckless continuation of provocative behaviour by Mrs Persad-Bissessar.

For ten years as opposition leader, she interfered in Venezuela’s politics, refusing to recognise President Nicolas Maduro while backing Juan Guaido, who had declared himself president without ever winning an election.

Guaido is now irrelevant, yet Mrs Persad-Bissessar continues the anti-Venezuela hostility—this time, as Prime Minister on behalf of Trinidad and Tobago, thereby formally inserting this country into Venezuela’s internal affairs, a very first for us and in violation of our decades-old foreign policy principle of non-interference in the affairs of other states.

The excuse of “fighting drug cartels” is not convincing.

Labelling President Maduro a drug trafficker and using a US indictment that has no validity in international law and enforceable only with military muscle is a decades-old strategy used by Washington whenever it wishes to remove a strong, defiant leader who rejects American imperialism.

Mrs Persad-Bissessar has naively swallowed that bogus US drug trafficking narrative without hesitation, question or verification.

The US does not need warships and thousands of troops in the Caribbean to stop cocaine shipments. If it truly wants to end the drug trade, it would enter the jungles of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru and destroy at source coca fields and labs.

Without production, there would be nothing to traffic or transship; but more than that, there would be no justification for warships in our waters.

The truth is obvious. This US charade is about regime change in Venezuela. By siding with that agenda, our Prime Minister is aligning Trinidad and Tobago with Yankee imperialism and aggression, turning the country into a pawn and a potential target.

Our role should be peace, not pawn or sycophant; and our leadership should reflect sobriety, not what was described recently by Caracas.