With the English speaking Caribbean having received more than 6 million tourists in 2007, the marked upsurge in violent crime appears – at least up until now – to have done little to diminish the popularity of the region as a tourist haven. However, an article published in the February 12 on-line edition of The Economist would have sensitized both foreign governments and potential tourists to the increasing risk to life and limb by a region which The Economist article says is now “the world leader in violent crime.”
The article points to the January 28 Lusignan massacre in which eleven people were killed as symptomatic of an increasing trend of violent crime in the region. While Guyanese across the country were traumatized by the Lusignan killings The Economist article says that the crime situation here is by no means the worst in the region. It lists Jamaica, the leading tourist territory in the region, as “the world’s most murderous country” and states that some of the smaller territories in the region are “catching up fast.” According to the article, The Bahamas, another of the favoured tourist countries in the region, is “far more dangerous than Guyana” while in Trinidad & Tobago “the murder rate has quadrupled over the past decade despite a fall in unemployment from 18 per cent in 1994 to 4 per cent last year. Suriname, the article says, has “the safest streets” in the region.
While the article cites the illegal drug trade as “the common factor” behind the upsurge of crime in the region it notes that murder rates have soared despite the fact that cocaine shipments to the Caribbean have stabilized since the 1990s.
Despite the upsurge in visitor arrivals in the region last year the article notes that few tourists have been affected by the violence. “Most of the bullets hit young working-class men with the wrong networking skills or their families and neighbours.”
The article notes that while crime hardly featured in last year’s elections in Jamaica or the Bahamas or in the recent elections in Belize, political polarizarion in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago “has brought calls for get-tough policies such as zero tolerance, the enforcement of the death penalty and the imposition of a state of emergency. Prisons in the region, the article noted, are crowded with 18 Caribbean countries being among the 31 countries in the world where more than three out of every thousand citizens are behind bars.