One week before it released its 2008 World Drug Report on Thursday to coincide with International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) issued a press release culled from the information that fed into the report on drugs and crime in Central America and the Caribbean. Obviously, the UNODC felt the need to highlight the situation in the Caribbean apart from referring to it in the report. It noted in the press release that the Caribbean as a whole now has the highest murder rate in the world, and that the majority of the murders are linked to the drug trade, according to research done by the World Bank and the UNODC.
The Caribbean has long been a preferred vacation destination for tourists from Europe and North America seeking a tropical respite from their seasonal weather, particularly during the colder months of the year. Touted as ‘paradise’ in tourist brochures, the economies of some islands, such as Jamaica and Barbados as well as Trinidad and Tobago to some extent, have been built on the tourist dollar, pound or euro. Unfortunately, along with the tourist dollars, in some cases, came the drug dollars, which at first were not easy to differentiate.
Record seizures of drugs along the traditional routes between producing countries in South and Central America and demand countries in Europe and North America, forced suppliers to turn to the Caribbean and non-producing South American countries to continue their business. Long unpatrolled coastlines and porous borders – particularly with regard to Guyana – proved a boon and these states, with their limited law-enforcement capacity, found themselves caught in the cross-hairs of the drug trade, the UNODC said. Before long, corrupt officials were being well compensated to look the other way while drug drops and transshipments went down. As it happened, however, not all of the illicit drugs that arrived in Guyana and the Caribbean left and violent crime, partly as a result of drug turf wars, rose in tandem with corruption.
Of the major countries in Caricom today, Jamaica, which still depends heavily on tourism to boost its economy, has the highest murder rate in the region followed closely by Trinidad and Tobago, which also has an extremely high kidnapping rate. Barbados’s crime rate is not as bad, while per capita, Guyana’s is quite dismal. The UNODC, noting that crime hurts business, warns that if corrective action is not taken, tourism, a mainstay of the economy of these islands and an industry dependent on positive consumer perceptions, could suffer dire consequences. The outlook in the case of Guyana is not good. This country’s economy has long been agriculturally based, but a decline in exports owing to the loss of preferential markets and global competition has seen a marked shift towards other industries, tourism being a major one. Significant sums of money have already been invested, both by private individuals/companies and by the government to market Guyana’s eco-tourism. However, there is not yet a significant annual clientele to allow for positive returns and drugs and crime could definitely put a spoke in that wheel.
Nevertheless, it is not all gloom and doom. The UNODC has found that globally, there has been a reduction in the demand for illicit drugs and that their use is limited to about five per cent of the global population, a drop in the pan compared with the abuse of the legal but still deadly substances, alcohol and tobacco. Still, the report said, because drug trafficking is still undermining national security and drug money being used as a “lubricant for corruption,” countries in South and Central America and the Caribbean, particularly where poverty is an issue, were at risk of seeing socio-economic development fall further behind and democracy, where it exists, undermined. This, in turn, would have an adverse impact on the strides being made globally.
To prevent this, the UNODC is urging that countries look at reducing drug dependence and drug related crime by strengthening policing and justice systems – international assistance is available for the latter. In the case of Guyana, policing and justice reform programmes are under way and the government through the Ministry of Health is moving to boost drug rehabilitation. However, the problem will not go away overnight; the road ahead promises to be rocky in dealing with both drug trafficking and abuse. Everything depends on us staying the course.