The people who live beside the new airport in the coastal Crown Point neighborhood of Tobago spent the last week of November listening to the deafening rumble of enormous U.S. military jets, which they said arrived in the dead of night.
They woke on Nov. 28 to see a mysterious large rotating machine pointed at the sky.
One resident wondered if it was a bomb, and others feared it emitted radiation.
The device turned out to be a state-of-the-art mobile long-range sensor known as G/ATOR, or Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar, that is owned by the U.S. Marines and is worth tens of millions of dollars.
The effort to bring a military tool to the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, just days after a visit by the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has become a flashpoint in a heated debate over Trinidad’s involvement in the Trump administration’s escalating conflict with nearby Venezuela.
Tobago, a small island of 60,000 people off the north coast of Trinidad, is roughly 70 nautical miles from Venezuela.
Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, who has expressed strong support for the lethal U.S. attacks on vessels near Venezuela, has offered shifting explanations for why American soldiers are deployed on the island. Critics fear that in a desire to curry favor with President Trump, Trinidad’s government has put the country in the line of fire.
Trinidad’s government announced on Monday that it would allow the U.S. military to use its airports. A short time later, Venezuela’s interior minister accused Trinidad of helping the United States seize a Venezuelan oil tanker last week.
The minister, Diosdado Cabello, said that Trinidad’s leader had embarked on a “hostile agenda” toward Venezuela, “including the installation of U.S. military radars for the siege against vessels transporting Venezuelan oil.”
The prime minister of Trinidad said the radar enhances the country’s surveillance capabilities and offers a “superior layer of protection,” but she has not said what the country received in response for allowing the United States to position it.
The mobile radar is one of the latest elements in the United States’ buildup in the Caribbean, part of the Trump administration’s growing military operations aimed at Venezuela.
As the United States ratchets up pressure against Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian president, experts say that Trinidad and Tobago, the country closest to Venezuela’s northern coast, has already taken sides.
“It is my firm belief that we have gotten into something that we have no business being in,” said Ancil Dennis, an opposition party leader and former senator in Tobago.
The United States and Trinidad both claim the radar is meant to combat drug trafficking.
But the G/ATOR, one of 60 the Air Force and Marines purchased from the defense contractor Northrop Grumman in deals totaling about $1.5 billion, is a military asset used to detect incoming airborne threats, such as airplanes and missiles, according to the company’s website.
A vast majority of drug trafficking in the Caribbean is conducted by sea, and this particular device is not designed for maritime purposes, the manufacturer confirmed in an interview with The New York Times.
“They are helping us with something to do with the airport — they are helping us out with a little bit of roadway,” Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, told reporters on Nov. 26 when first asked about the presence of U.S. military jets in Tobago. “Marines are here, they’re training with our people, and that’s what it was about. There’s not a military force as such; they are not here on the ground. We are not about to launch any campaign against Venezuela.”
But after photographs of the radar surfaced, Ms. Persad-Bissessar, in a statement on Dec. 3, said the radar system assisted “with the detection of Venezuelan crude oil sanction-busting activities and traffickers who have been conducting deliveries of narcotics, firearms, ammunition and migrants into our country from Venezuela.”
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On Thursday, the Trinidad police announced a seizure of 1,560 kilos of marijuana worth $25 million captured in wetlands in northwest Trinidad as result, they said, of the new radar.
Experts were skeptical. The radar is not law-enforcement gear.
Northrop Grumman’s website says that, with a single scan, the G/ATOR delivers the data necessary for air defense weapons to destroy airborne threats including cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, manned aircraft and drones. The radar can determine the source of hostile fire.
The tool is not designed to track maritime or ground targets, said a Northrop Grumman executive who spoke on the condition he not be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue. He said the radar helps in identifying and destroying a target.
Norman Dindial, a retired Trinidad Coast Guard commander who ran the country’s coastal radars and is now leader of a small opposition party, said the prime minister’s explanations have fallen flat, and that the device is clearly meant to better position the United States in the event of a war with Venezuela.
The radar, he added, would be a “legitimate military target” if hostilities broke out between the United States and Venezuela.
“That radar is specifically for intercepting air targets,” he said. “We know it’s not for drugs.”
Less than 10 percent of drugs confiscated in the region from 2018 to 2021 arrived by airplane, according to the most recent data from the United Nations.
The U.S. Southern Command, which runs military operations in the region, said drug cartels used a variety of methods, including airplanes, to traffic illicit substances, but declined to elaborate.
The Southern Command, in a statement, confirmed that Marines had delivered the radar with the permission of Trinidad’s government and that the device supported “U.S. military forces that are deployed to the Caribbean to disrupt illicit drug trafficking and protect the homeland.”
Mark F. Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the radar could help direct U.S. strikes.
“Thus, it cannot help with counterdrug efforts against vessels, but can spot any Venezuelan aircraft coming out,” he said.
Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff, met with Ms. Persad-Bissessar in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital, on Nov. 25, days before the radar was installed.
The U.S.S. Gravely, a guided missile destroyer, docked at the port of Port of Spain in late October along with members of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit. In November, at least seven U.S. military aircraft, including C-17s and a Super Hercules, a military transport plane, were tracked landing in Tobago, according to open-source flight trackers.
Also in November, about 350 Marines were in Trinidad conducting joint training exercises with the Trinidad and Tobago Defense Force.
“The government doesn’t want to vocally announce its actual support for regime change in Venezuela,” said Pearce Robinson, a Trinidadian independent journalist and activist who first posted the images of the radar. “Everything the government has done thus far points to that, quite frankly.”
The government of Grenada, another Caribbean nation, announced in October that it was considering a U.S. request to allow the same radar’s placement there, but the prime minister told the country’s parliament that allowing it may not be legal.
Trinidad’s prime minister has not said what benefits Trinidad could receive if it cooperates with the Trump administration.
Trinidad has long sought permission to drill in gas fields in shallow waters in Venezuela, near the Trinidad maritime border.
Allowing the radar strengthens Trinidad’s military-to-military cooperation, said Brian Fonseca, director of the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University.
“The arrangement creates diplomatic and political leverage for Trinidad and Tobago,” Mr. Fonseca said, “giving the government a valuable point of good will it can draw on in future engagements with Washington.”
Prior Beharry contributed reporting from Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.
Frances Robles is a Times reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean. She has reported on the region for more than 25 years.
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