Is the prime minister in step with the people?

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Was the prime minister being absolutely frank and upfront with his employers, the Jamaican people, in his assertion of “steering Jamaica clear of the US-Venezuela tensions” when he spoke at the National Day of Prayer service, recently?

Would Mr Holness and the people not be in lockstep if the people were appropriately apprised, and aware, of the repeatedly announced synchronisation of his government with the Trump administration?

No comment whatsoever is here made on the current relationship between Kingston and Washington; this is but an observation of what in fact exists in the public domain.

That relationship would, of necessity, direct and drive how Mr Holness speaks to the “tensions”, and also colour any declaration relating to the approach taken by his government.

Positioned beside the prime minister here on Jamaican soil in January 2020, then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo commended him for “standing up to the illegitimate, destabilising Maduro dictatorship”.

Lest we forget! Has the Holness-led administration not long been taken to task for turning its face against Venezuela, fast upon that country’s landmark economic life-saving gestures toward Jamaica and other CARICOM states, including during the Maduro incumbency?

President Trump’s new Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s March 2025 Jamaican visit was marked by a defining affirmation coming out of the Pentagon by the US Special Envoy for Latin America, Mauricio Claver-Carone: “Jamaica is probably our most like-minded partner in the Caribbean ...The government, Prime Minister Holness, has been a great ally.”

As that great ally, Mr Holness was pointedly addressed by Secretary Rubio in lofty tones, the kind of which are normally reserved only for the chosen few: “And I can think of no better friend in the Caribbean and frankly in the Western Hemisphere than Jamaica, and your government, Prime Minister.”

Would awareness of that settled synchronised background of like-mindedness and hemispheric bonding with the Trump regime not have placed the prime minister’s employers on the proper platform from which to ponder whether he had, of his own volition, steered Jamaica away from the tensions or had himself and his government, over time, been steered into silence?

A devotional lesson has long been delivered and become time-tested, “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free!”

A.J. NICHOLSON