Crossfire: Is the US persons-of-interest list help or pressure?
Leroy (TT) and De Statsman (neutral) take the two ends. The reader decides.
LEROY (Port of Spain)
Let me tell you something. When America come knocking with a list of names, you take the list. You take the list because Trinidad been bleeding from the gun violence for fifteen years and our police service alone cannot solve this. The drugs is American demand. The guns is American manufacture. American intelligence agencies know who the players is because they been watching the trafficking routes for decades.
So when Washington finally hand over names — you say thank you. You don’t stand on principle when allyuh own people getting killed every weekend. Sovereignty is for governments that already provide security. We not there yet. Take the list. Work the list. Lock up the people on the list. Worry about principle when the murder rate come down.
DE STATSMAN (neutral)
Leroy is right that the violence is real and the U.S. role in producing it — guns south, drugs north — is unambiguous. He is also right that intelligence cooperation between small states and large states is normal, necessary, and not in itself a violation of anything.
But here is the question to sit with. A list of persons of interest, shared from a foreign intelligence service to a small state’s government, is not just a cooperation document. It is also a prioritization document. It tells Trinidad which targets the U.S. wants pursued. It does not necessarily tell Trinidad which targets are most strategically important from a Trinidadian perspective. Those two lists may overlap. They may not.
If Trinidad pursues the U.S. list — with U.S. evidence, U.S. priorities, U.S. timing — then Trinidad is doing American law enforcement inside its own borders, with all the political legitimacy and democratic accountability of a contractor relationship. That is not nothing. That is also not partnership.
The question is not whether to take the list. Leroy is right that you take it. The question is whether the list becomes the policy or whether the list becomes one input among several. The honest answer in most small states most of the time is: it becomes the policy. Whether that is acceptable depends on what you think sovereignty means in a region where the United States is, functionally, a co-author of every security decision that gets made.