The Joint Trade Union Move­ment (JTUM) is voic­ing its op­po­si­tion to any form of mil­i­tary con­flict in the re­gion, de­clar­ing that the Caribbean must re­main a “Zone of Peace.”

The union, which had thrown its sup­port be­hind the rul­ing Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress Gov­ern­ment in the lead-up to the elec­tion and, most re­cent­ly, re­it­er­at­ed that po­si­tion, is­sued a strong warn­ing yes­ter­day that war or mil­i­tary es­ca­la­tion would not au­gur well for this coun­try or the wider Caribbean.

The state­ment comes weeks af­ter the Unit­ed States de­ployed sev­er­al mil­i­tary ves­sels to the south­ern Caribbean as part of its cam­paign against nar­co-traf­fick­ing, which it said is be­ing fa­cil­i­tat­ed by el­e­ments in Venezuela. Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has open­ly sup­port­ed the US’ ac­tions, urg­ing it to “kill them all vi­o­lent­ly.”

Led by An­cel Ro­get, JTUM yes­ter­day stressed that any form of mil­i­tary con­flict in the Caribbean would have dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences for Caribbean cit­i­zens and could set T&T back “many decades.”

The union said ris­ing pub­lic anx­i­ety over po­ten­tial mil­i­tary ac­tion near Trinidad and To­ba­go could un­der­mine busi­ness pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and pose a se­ri­ous threat to na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment.

The dock­ing of the war­ship USS Grave­ly in Port-of-Spain be­tween Oc­to­ber 26 and 31, prompt­ed Venezue­lan of­fi­cials to ac­cuse T&T of at­tempt­ing to pro­voke a war in the re­gion.

In its of­fi­cial state­ment, JTUM ex­pressed sol­i­dar­i­ty with calls for re­gion­al sta­bil­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly in T&T’s mar­itime zones.

The union al­so en­dorsed the up­com­ing Vig­il for Peace, or­gan­ised by civ­il so­ci­ety groups, sched­uled for Sun­day, No­vem­ber 9, at Wood­ford Square.

The Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ) has al­so been call­ing for the re­gion to re­main a “Zone of Peace,” urg­ing the Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com) to en­sure that the prin­ci­ples of peace con­tin­ue to guide re­gion­al af­fairs.

Gov­ern­ment has pre­vi­ous­ly told cit­i­zens that there is no need to pan­ic, as there is no war, but reaf­firmed its sup­port for the Unit­ed States’ an­ti-nar­cotics mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion.