A year on, Port of Spain is caught between a patron and its own dead

The families of Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo marked a year since a US strike they say killed the two men. Their prime minister has praised the campaign, and the contradiction is now a domestic reckoning.

PORT OF SPAIN. A year has passed, and two families in Trinidad are still waiting for their men to come home, or at least for someone to answer for why they never will. On October 14, 2026, Al Jazeera reported that the relatives of Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo marked the anniversary of the day the two went missing, a day their families say ended in a United States strike on the boat carrying them back from Venezuela.

The men were not, by their families' account, what Washington says it targets. Al Jazeera reported that the families describe Joseph and Samaroo as a fisherman and a farm worker who had been working in Venezuela to support relatives at home, and that both called home two days before the trip and were never heard from again. Four other people were killed in the same strike. A Guardian investigation identified the two Trinidadians, along with a Saint Lucian, Ricky Joseph, among the dead across the wider campaign.

The families have filed a wrongful death lawsuit in United States federal court in Boston, argued by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. "Chad was the heart of our family," Joseph's mother, Lenore Burnley, told Al Jazeera.

The government's uncomfortable position

The domestic politics of this are raw, because the government in Port of Spain has not opposed the campaign that killed its own nationals. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has publicly praised the United States strikes on alleged trafficking vessels, a stance that reads very differently at home now that Trinidadian names are on the list of the dead. The tension is impossible to miss: a prime minister endorsing a military campaign in the very waters where her citizens were killed, while those citizens' families pursue the United States through its own courts.

That contradiction is the Trinidadian story within the regional one. For the fishing communities along the country's coasts, the strikes are not a distant policy. They are a reason to think twice about an ordinary working trip across waters that Trinidadians have crossed to Venezuela for generations, for trade, for work and for family. A chilled small-boat economy is a real cost in a country whose southern coast lives within sight of the Venezuelan shore.

What the Ledger can and cannot say

The Ledger reports the verified facts: the identities established by the Guardian's investigation, the lawsuit filed in Boston and carried by Al Jazeera, the family's account and the quote from Joseph's mother, and the prime minister's public support for the strikes. We do not assert the men's innocence or guilt, because that is precisely what no court has yet determined, which is the families' entire point. The United States has offered little public evidence for its claim that those aboard were trafficking, and it has not publicly identified the victims.

Trinidad and Tobago entered this chapter as a bystander to a campaign aimed at others. A year on, it is a participant in a grief it did not choose, and its government is caught between a powerful patron it has chosen to praise and the families of citizens that patron's forces killed. The anniversary this month did not resolve that bind. It sharpened it.