As the United States threatens to attack Venezuela, some Caribbean allies are offering support.
The United States has been amassing military forces and assets in the region since August. It has killed more than 80 people in strikes on boats it alleges are carrying drugs to the United States. The Trump administration has not provided evidence to support the claim.
Several airlines have suspended flights to Venezuela; President Donald Trump on Saturday said they should consider the country’s airspace closed.
Colombia’s president has accused the United States of killing an innocent fisherman. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has mobilized troops and urged citizens to join self-defense militias. Ordinary Venezuelans are anxious and uncertain about what might happen next.
But some countries are supporting the United States or considering it. Here’s how.
Dominican Republic
Dominican President Luis Abinader has authorized the U.S. military to operate within restricted areas at San Isidro Air Base and Las Americas International Airport in its fight against Venezuelan drug traffickers. U.S. military aircraft may refuel and transport equipment and technical personnel, he said at a joint news conference with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the Dominican capital on Wednesday.
Hegseth said the deployment would have a “small footprint, temporary, fully respecting your sovereignty and your laws.” He called it a “model for the region, a model we hope to build upon” for other countries that want to “lock shields and arms with us.”
Abinader said the Dominican Republic shares a “special bond” with the United States, its most important strategic partner, that includes cooperation on the fight against drug trafficking.
“Dominicans, our country faces a real threat, a threat that does not recognize borders, that does not distinguish flags, that destroys families and that has been trying to use our territory as a route for decades,” he said. “That threat is drug trafficking, and no country should or can face it without allies.”
He described the agreement as temporarily expanding cooperation “to reinforce air and maritime surveillance against drug trafficking,” he said. The scope will be “technical, limited and temporary,” he said, and aimed at preventing the entry of narcotics and striking more forcefully at transnational organized crime.
Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has been a vocal supporter of the Trump administration’s actions off the islands. “I have no sympathy for traffickers,” she said after the first strike — in September — killed 11 people. “The U.S. military should kill them all violently.”
On Thursday, she said U.S. Marines were working at the airport on Tobago.
U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine metwith Persad-Bissessar in her country Tuesday to discuss regional stability and unity on countering narcotrafficking.
But she has been circumspect in describing details. On Wednesday, she told a reporter that the U.S. military was “helping us with something to do with the airport” and mentioned “a roadway.”
“We’re not about to launch any campaign against Venezuela,” she said. “I’ve made that very clear. Trinidad has not been asked to be a base for any war against Venezuela.”
Pressed by reporters on Thursday, she said Marines were still helping with the airport on “a runway and a road and a radar.” She said U.S. troops “will help us to improve our surveillance and the intelligence of the radars for the narco-traffickers in our waters and outside our waters.”
Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands
Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, not an independent nation. It was used throughout the Cold War to support U.S. military action in Central and South America.
Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, on the eastern end of the main island, was once one of the world’s largest naval facilities. But it was shut down in 2004, after the Navy stopped practicing air-sea-land assaults on nearby Vieques, and the military presence shrank.
Now Rosy Roads is back in business. In recent weeks, crews have cleared taxiways, and fighter jets and transport planes have landed. New aircraft has also been spotted at the Henry E. Rohlsen Airport on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Grenada
The United States approached Grenada to request a temporary installation of radar equipment and associated technical personnel at an international airport, the island government said in October, and it was “carefully assessing and reviewing the requests in technical consultations.”
The decision is complicated by the history between the United States and Grenada. U.S. Marines invaded the small island in October 1983 after the assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop.
The ostensible purpose of the mission was to protect some 600 American medical students at St. George’s University. But it was the height of the Cold War, and President Ronald Reagan had complained as Bishop, a socialist revolutionary, built an international airport with the help of armed Cubans.
That airport, now named for the slain leader, would be the site of the U.S. radar installation.
“I appreciate that because of the history of the Maurice Bishop International Airport, because October in particular is tied to the history … that it is a highly emotive issue,” Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said on his radio call-in program, “DMs with PM.”
Mitchell told Parliament this month that his government has “not been able to provide a response” because there were remaining safety and technical concerns. The Grenada Foreign Affairs Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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