By News Americas Now Staff Writer
News Americas Now, NY, NY, Thurs. Oct. 15, 2026: Saint Lucia’s Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre is in Washington today to deliver the welcome address at the United States-Caribbean Dialogue, speaking in his capacity as chairman of the Caribbean Community, CARICOM. His message, according to a statement from his office, will emphasize cooperation on “the everyday concerns of Caribbean people” – affordable energy, investment, employment, public safety, and disaster recovery. The dialogue, which brings Caribbean leaders together with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, is being framed as “practical support, investment and sustained engagement in areas of shared interest.”
That language is landing at a moment when two of the most consequential developments in U.S.-Caribbean relations right now have unfolded with little Caribbean input into the terms.
Since September 2025, U.S. military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific – carried out under Joint Task Force Southern Spear – have killed at least 238 people, according to data compiled by USNI News. While the Trump administration has emphasized Venezuelan and Colombian crews, a Guardian investigation that identified 16 of the campaign’s victims by name found Caribbean nationals among the dead: Trinidad and Tobago nationals Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, and Saint Lucian Ricky Joseph – a citizen of the very country whose prime minister is chairing this week’s dialogue. Two unidentified bodies believed linked to the campaign’s first strike washed ashore in Trinidad and Tobago in September 2025, and families of two more missing Trinidadian men came forward after an October 2025 strike that killed six.
THE STRIKES
The strikes have divided opinion within the region even as they’ve drawn international rebuke. Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has publicly praised the campaign, saying her country wants drug traffickers killed -— a position that sits uneasily against the fact that at least three Trinidadian and Saint Lucian nationals are confirmed among its casualties. UN human rights experts have called the killings “extrajudicial executions,” and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk has formally demanded the U.S. halt the strikes and open an investigation. Colombia and Venezuela have filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The legal justification — that the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug-trafficking crews it has designated “unlawful combatants” — remains fiercely contested, and a Washington Post report alleging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that no survivors be left after a September 2 strike has been denied by the Pentagon but not fully resolved. Despite the campaign’s stated purpose of reducing U.S. overdose deaths, CDC data show no measurable decline since it began.
US DEPORTEES
At the same time, Caribbean nations are increasingly becoming receiving points for U.S. immigration enforcement. Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Dominica and Belize have all begun accepting US deportees under agreements with Washington – arrangements that, in at least one case this week, a Caribbean parliament says it was never shown in full before its government signed on.
This week’s dialogue is not a new format – the U.S. and Caribbean have held security cooperation talks since a 2009 commitment at the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, with seven prior high-level dialogues held since 2010. What has changed less, sixteen years on, is the balance of power in what gets called a partnership: Washington sets the terms of the drug interdiction campaign and the deportation agreements, and Caribbean governments are left to manage the fallout – diplomatically, politically, and now, in several cases, with their own citizens among the dead.
Pierre’s welcome address today is expected to focus on investment, energy, and disaster recovery. Whether the harder questions – about the strikes, the deportations, and what Caribbean nations are actually getting in return – surface in the closed-door sessions is, for now, not part of the public record.
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