The CARICOM dispute between Port of Spain and the rest of the region is no longer a dispute about Dr. Carla Barnett.
Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar told the Trinidad Express on Wednesday that CARICOM is free to expel Trinidad and Tobago if it wishes. That is not a procedural statement. That is a country telling its closest regional partners that the cost of forcing the issue is now on them.
The mechanics are familiar by now. Barnett’s reappointment as Secretary-General was decided at the 50th Heads of Government meeting in St. Kitts in February 2026, during a session that the PM says was not formally placed on the plenary agenda — a breach, she argues, of the revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. T&T was not present. Last Friday a virtual meeting was convened, requested by Montserrat, to discuss the controversy. T&T’s PM and Foreign Minister Sean Sobers were both absent — Sobers, the PM says, because Barnett herself disinvited him from the Nevis retreat via WhatsApp, a message still sitting on the COFCOR group chat. Ten of fifteen leaders proceeded anyway. Barnett’s reappointment stood.
What turns this from a credentialing row into a structural rupture is the trade pivot the PM volunteered in the same interview. Trinidad and Tobago, she said, is actively working to expand its trade network with the Middle East, South America, India, and Africa. The unstated half of that sentence — and not depending on CARICOM as a trade market — does most of the work.
For a country whose energy economy already runs through global rather than regional channels, the threat is more credible than it would be from almost any other member state. Jamaica cannot make this argument. Barbados cannot. The OECS cannot. T&T can, because the bulk of its export revenue is already not regional.
The PM also ruled out the Caribbean Court of Justice as a venue for the dispute, repeating that her government will never make the CCJ T&T’s final court of appeal. That closes off the one mechanism the rest of CARICOM could plausibly have used to put the question to a neutral arbiter.
What is left is a public renegotiation of T&T’s place inside the regional architecture, conducted in the open, with the rest of the membership invited to decide how much they want to push back. Persad-Bissessar’s wager is that they will not push very hard, because the alternative — actually expelling the region’s largest economy over a procedural dispute about a Secretary-General — is a cost no other capital is prepared to pay.
She is probably right. Which is exactly why the rest of CARICOM should be worried about what she does with the leverage next.
Trade Winds Brief — Caribbean and diaspora news, analysis, and accountability journalism.