On October 16, an unusual warning went out on Trinidadian airwaves. “Fishermen are being warned to slow down and stay close to shore amid fears of being bombed by the United States military,” the anchor on CNC3 began, “which continues its anti-narcotics operations in the Caribbean Sea.” Two Trinidadian fishermen, Chad Joseph and Richie Samaroo, had been killed in a U.S. Navy airstrike targeting their boat as they left Venezuela for Trinidad, a short 6-mile trip that Joseph had told his family about. President Donald Trump had claimed the boat was a “vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” without naming the drug cartel it was supposedly affiliated with, and that “intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics” along a known “DTO route.”

The killing of a friendly country’s nationals, in America’s backyard, in a targeted American airstrike, should have been news alone. But it has been only a brick in the wall of a war that is being constructed in the southern Caribbean, one that is being built up in ways both overt and disturbingly covert.

As of the time of this writing, eight American warships, manned by more than 4,500 Marines and sailors, have been placed just outside of Venezuelan waters. The New York Times has identified guided-missile cruisers moving close to Venezuelan shores, as well as Reaper drones stationed nearby in Puerto Rico, alongside a number of stealth fighter jets. On Wednesday, War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed on X that the military escalated this campaign by conducting a lethal airstrike on a vessel in the Pacific Ocean for the first time, off of Colombia’s waters, just days after Trump accused its president, Gustavo Petro, of being an “illegal drug dealer” after he criticized the American campaign in the Caribbean.

Some of the ships identified by CNN, like the USS San Antonio and the USS Gravely, have gained combat experience fighting the Houthi movement in Yemen, attempting to break their blockade in the Red Sea against Israel-bound cargo ships. Now, such U.S. military resources have been moved to the Caribbean, to deal with the next American enemy.

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