On March 8, 2026, Trinidad Ex­press colum­nist Suni­ty Ma­haraj pub­lished a col­umn dis­cussing Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s at­ten­dance at the Shield of the Amer­i­c­as Sum­mit at Trump Na­tion­al Do­ral Mi­a­mi and the sign­ing of the so-called “Do­ral Char­ter” to com­bat drug car­tels in Latin Amer­i­ca.

While I re­spect Ma­haraj’s se­nior­i­ty in the field of jour­nal­ism, her writ­ing left much to be de­sired and was full of lead­ing ques­tions sim­i­lar to what an at­tor­ney would use un­der cross-ex­am­i­na­tion. The in­tent of these lead­ing ques­tions was to put for­ward her dis­plea­sure at the Do­ral Char­ter in a seem­ing­ly neu­tral way. Her col­umn al­so feigned ig­no­rance of the ob­vi­ous move to­wards the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion that the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) made be­fore the 2025 elec­tion.

I had asked the ques­tion “Is the UNC right-wing or left- wing?” in my T&T Guardian col­umn in May 2025 be­cause of the ob­vi­ous em­brace of right-wing poli­cies by the UNC. Right-wing con­ser­v­a­tives were in­ter­viewed then, and not­ed that the UNC had aligned with Re­pub­li­can poli­cies such as Stand-Your-Ground laws and an an­ti-Nico­las Maduro stance.

Re­pub­li­cans with dual cit­i­zen­ship cast their votes in sup­port of the UNC on the ex­pec­ta­tion that the new ad­min­is­tra­tion would lean to the right. It could not have been more ob­vi­ous to those of us on the ground, but Ma­haraj’s col­umn feigns ig­no­rance of this change back in 2025. Fur­ther­more, the UNC’s sup­port of the cam­paign against Maduro was a more re­al shift to the right than the Do­ral char­ter.

An ex­am­ple of a lead­ing ques­tion in Ma­haraj’s col­umn is this ex­cerpt that con­tains pre­sup­po­si­tions and as­sump­tions about in­ter­na­tion­al law and par­lia­men­tary pro­ce­dure: “When, why and how was the for­eign pol­i­cy po­si­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go changed from non-align­ment to an align­ment with the hemi­spher­ic am­bi­tions of the su­per­pow­er bent on cre­at­ing a unipo­lar world un­der its sole con­trol? Did we blink and miss the mo­ment when the Prime Min­is­ter stood be­fore the Par­lia­ment and ar­gued her case for break­ing with T&T’s long-held po­si­tion of neu­tral­i­ty?”

The Do­ral Char­ter is not a treaty or an in­ter­na­tion­al agree­ment with le­gal ef­fect; it is mere­ly a po­lit­i­cal de­c­la­ra­tion with a frame­work for re­gion­al co­op­er­a­tion. As a stu­dent of in­ter­na­tion­al law, I can ad­vise that if a treaty were signed, it would re­quire a bill to be passed in Par­lia­ment to have le­gal ef­fect un­der our du­al­ist le­gal sys­tem. The Do­ral Char­ter is, how­ev­er, not a treaty or con­ven­tion gov­erned by the Vi­en­na Con­ven­tion on the Law of Treaties.

Ma­haraj’s ques­tion pre­sup­pos­es that there is a re­quire­ment for a de­bate every time the ex­ec­u­tive branch of gov­ern­ment signs a non-bind­ing doc­u­ment, but fails to cite a le­gal prece­dent or par­lia­men­tary con­ven­tion to sup­port said pre­sup­po­si­tion.

Hav­ing not signed a bind­ing treaty that cre­ates new le­gal oblig­a­tions to­wards the US as an al­ly, it could be ar­gued that, legal­ly, T&T re­mains neu­tral, since all of the ac­tions that have tak­en place to date were gov­erned by pre-ex­ist­ing doc­u­ments such as the SO­FA agree­ment.

More­over, Ma­haraj seems to com­plete­ly ig­nore the fact that a large seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion sup­ports the close ties with the US in the hopes of re­duc­ing the stran­gle­hold that drug car­tels have on the re­gion.

If the re­cent THA elec­tion in Jan­u­ary is any barom­e­ter, the in­stal­la­tion of a US radar in To­ba­go did not pre­vent the To­ba­go Peo­ple’s Par­ty from win­ning all 15 seats. The peo­ple of To­ba­go were clear­ly not of­fend­ed enough by the US troops and mil­i­tary hard­ware on their soil to vote for the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) in num­bers high enough to give the par­ty even one seat.

The To­ba­go radar and the fre­quent vis­its of US troops, ships and air­craft pri­or to the ar­rest of Maduro were a clear­er em­brace of US pol­i­cy than the Do­ral Char­ter. Ma­haraj’s’ col­umn fails to men­tion these events.

On Mon­day, March 9, the Ex­press ran an ar­ti­cle “Busi­ness sec­tor wel­comes US se­cu­ri­ty al­liance,” with mem­bers of the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Re­gion­al Busi­ness Cham­bers gen­er­al­ly wel­com­ing new ef­forts to com­bat crime.

The on­ly part of Ma­haraj’s col­umn I can find my­self agree­ing with is the clos­ing para­graph: “The clam­our in some quar­ters to be res­cued by the US is a big part of the prob­lem of a so­ci­ety still re­fus­ing to take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for its mis­takes and it­self.”

I agree there is some dan­ger in see­ing the US part­ner­ship as the main way to re­duce crime.

Sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ments in the le­gal sys­tem and re­form of the po­lice ser­vice are crit­i­cal and ar­guably more im­pact­ful than in­ter­na­tion­al part­ner­ships if done cor­rect­ly.

I do think it is im­por­tant to con­tin­ue dis­cussing po­lit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy and pol­i­cy de­ci­sions, and I hope these dis­cus­sions be­gin to af­fect vot­ers more than the usu­al race-based pol­i­tics that af­flicts T&T.

How­ev­er, pol­i­cy and ide­o­log­i­cal dis­cus­sions should al­so be ground­ed in an ac­cu­rate analy­sis of the law and par­lia­men­tary pro­ce­dure, as I have at­tempt­ed to pro­vide in this col­umn.