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By Sir Ronald Sanders
The Caribbean faces a new and urgent threat: weaponized drones in criminal hands are rapidly proliferating into the hands of criminal actors, non‑state militias, and private contractors.
What began as experimental tools for law enforcement has become instruments of murder, assassination, and terror across Latin America—and now in Haiti.
CARICOM governments must adopt firm, enforceable measures to restrict these devices before our region drifts into becoming a battlefield.
Marguerite Cawley is a researcher and writer at the think-tank, Insight Crime. When she surveyed Latin America’s drone landscape in 2014, she documented that multiple regional states operated unarmed UAVs without legal frameworks to govern their use.
Cawley warned that such platforms, though unarmed, carried latent dangers: in the wrong hands, their intelligence‑gathering advantages could swiftly be converted into strike missions.
In late 2024 and early 2025, those latent dangers have become realities.
In September 2024, insurgents lobbed a forty‑pound explosive drone into Ecuador’s La Roca prison near Guayaquil, illustrating how smuggling tools become siege weapons.
In March 2025, a Colombian soldier in the Catatumbo region was killed by a kamikaze UAV launched by the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN).
ELN is a far-left guerrilla insurgency group involved in the continuing Colombian conflict. This incident marked one of the first confirmed drone‑related fatalities attributed to a non‑state actor.
In February, Brigadier General Jorge Alejandro Gutiérrez Martínez of Mexico survived an attempted drone assassination in Chihuahua when an explosive‑laden craft targeted his convoy.
Haiti’s rapid descent illustrates how swiftly control can slip from governments into criminal hands. Haiti’s security crisis starkly warns of what could happen in other Caribbean countries.
The Transitional National Council in Haiti has confirmed that it has engaged private operatives to deploy kamikaze drones against leaders of gangs that are besieging the country.
These strike missions, shrouded in secrecy, have driven gangs to embed within civilian populations, threatening the lives of innocent residents.
Moreover, the UK Guardian Newspaper reports that first‑person‑view drones, equipped with commercial mining explosives, have damaged buildings in gang‑controlled districts. The same report warns that gangs are already seeking to retaliate by acquiring and adapting drones.
This rapid weaponization of commercial UAVs is not confined to Haiti. Online marketplaces now offer platforms capable of carrying improvised explosives, reconnaissance sensors, and facial‑recognition software.
The barrier to “weaponizing” a drone has collapsed: any individual with modest technical skills and internet access can transform a civilian drone into a precision strike asset.
If the Caribbean allows these devices to flow unimpeded, the countries will become proving grounds for airborne violence.
In September 2023, in an invited address to a seminar organised by the CARICOM Community (CARICOM) Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (IMPACS), I outlined four critical steps: ban, impose, distinguish, and secure.
First, ban the importation of any drone capable of sustained flight, payload delivery, or autonomous operation—except those owned and operated by national law‑enforcement agencies under strictly defined controls.
Second, impose severe penalties on anyone who imports, manufactures, or deploys weaponizable drones: hefty fines, asset forfeiture, and prison sentences.
Third, differentiate civilian‑grade drones from security‑grade systems, permitting only fixed‑blade, single‑camera models for benign tasks such as aerial photography or mapping.
Fourth, use the collective voice of CARICOM’s 14 member states at the United Nations to secure a legally binding treaty by 2026 banning lethal autonomous weapons systems without meaningful human oversight.
CARICOM states should now seriously and swiftly move to legislate these measures and close every loophole. While some may argue these actions impede innovation, our security imperative overrides such concerns.
Customs officers require training and equipment to inspect and identify illicit drone shipments.
National security forces should be mandated to register every UAV in a centralized, digital database that links each aircraft to its lawful owner and permitted use.
Any deployment by government agencies must be subject to oversight by an independent civilian body, with detailed after‑action reports made available to the public.
Civilian drones – for agriculture, disaster assessment, and infrastructure surveys – must meet strict technical criteria, rendering them irreversibly non‑weaponizable.
Legislation should prescribe proportional but punitive sanctions. Unauthorized importation or use of a weaponizable drone should trigger a mandatory minimum fine, asset forfeiture, and up to ten years’ imprisonment.
Trafficking in critical components, such as batteries, motors, or guidance modules, should carry equivalent penalties.
CARICOM must also establish a technical working group to develop unified standards for drone identification, detection, and interdiction, and to coordinate joint training exercises among regional agencies.
Where the local expertise does not exist, seek it from organizations like the Organization of American States while training local persons.
At the UN General Assembly this October, Caribbean delegations must press for a robust treaty—securing at least 20 co-sponsoring states—that mirrors existing bans on chemical and biological weapons.
We should demand global restrictions on dual‑use drone technologies and secure capacity‑building assistance to strengthen our detection and counter‑drone defences.
Can Caribbean countries allow the possibility of children growing up under the shadow of unseen killers overhead? The age of the weaponized drone has arrived.
From Catatumbo to Chihuahua, from La Roca to Port‑au‑Prince, we are witnessing how rapidly unarmed UAVs become tools of terror. CARICOM nations should unite in decisive legislative action to ensure that their skies do not become corridors of terror.
If our political leaders act now—with import bans, strict registries, transparent oversight, and punitive enforcement—they can set a global benchmark for drone governance, protect our citizens, and preserve the rule of law.
CARICOM governments should not wait for calamity before they act.
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