It was easy enough for President Barack Obama to commit his administration to support what he called the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April last year in Trinidad and Tobago. It will be a lot more difficult for states in the Caribbean to comprehend exactly what he meant by ‘Basin’ and ‘Security.’
President Obama’s initiative, of course, is not the start of US security engagement in the Caribbean. The region has always been seen as a vulnerable flank in its territorial defence. The conquest of Puerto Rico, the purchase of the Virgin Islands, the lease of Guantanamo in Cuba and various armed interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama and elsewhere have left long-lasting footprints on the regional landscape.
President Bill Clinton, in more recent times, secured the support of the states of the Caribbean Community to participate in the multinational United Nations Mission in Haiti in 1994-95. Clinton’s robust engagement at the meeting with heads of state and government of the Caribbean states in Bridgetown, Barbados in May 1997 produced the Bridgetown Declaration of Principles which the heads adopted and pledged to strengthen security and other forms of cooperation. President George Bush then had a comparatively light encounter with selected Caribbean Community heads in New York in September 2003.
Much has changed in the Caribbean since President Clinton’s initiative twelve years ago. One of the most important has been the election of Hugo Chávez to the presidency of Venezuela and his campaign of opposition to the USA. In the wake of the failed coup d’etat in April 2002, Chávez intensified his quest for foreign allies and fostered the spread of his concept of ‘Bolivarianism’ to Bolivia, Ecuador and Honduras and the establishment of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestro America, known by its Spanish acronym ALBA – much to the chagrin of the USA and its main South American ally, Colombia. Some CARICOM states have been seduced by Chavismo just as many were by Fidelismo decades ago.
Another important change has been the progress made by the Caribbean Community, largely through its own efforts, to safeguard the security of its member states. CARICOM Heads of Government at their inter-sessional meeting in St Vincent and The Grenadines in February 2007 – considering the fundamental nature and widening scale of transnational crime – determined that ‘security’ be made the fourth pillar of the Caribbean Community. The Heads had further agreed to formalise their decision by incorporating this provision in the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas which, in essence, is the community’s constitution. This would now establish security on an equal footing to economic integration, foreign policy coordination and functional cooperation as one of the bases for the consolidation of the Caribbean Community.
This enhanced focus on Caribbean regional security cooperation should be seen alongside the special ‘crime summit’ meeting in Port-of-Spain at which the Heads agreed on a Strategy and Plan of Action to stem the rising tide of violent criminality by building on the legacy of the successful security co-operation arrangements put in place for the Cricket World Cup 2007. Certain elements − the Advanced Passenger Information System, the Regional Intelligence Fusion Centre, the Joint Regional Communications Centre, and an Advanced Cargo Information System – were considered for upgrading, expansion and being placed on a permanent basis while discussions would continue to finalise the implementation of the CARICOM Visa, the CARICOM Travel Card and the Single Domestic Space.
The Caribbean, therefore, is not a ‘clean slate.’ Much has already happened and the USA must take account of these changing security circumstances. The objective of President Obama’s proposed initiative was stated as the US Government’s desire “to go beyond traditional patterns of bilateral relations and make important steps towards a more regionally-focused framework of cooperation, collaboration and partnership to effectively confront the challenges and maximise the available capabilities, capacity and resources within the partnership.” This seems not to have happened.
The Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, said to be a copy of the ‘Merida Initiative’ – USA’s security cooperation agreement with Mexico and Central America – claims to recognise that narco-trafficking, gun-running, money-laundering and other transnational crimes in the Caribbean have intensified. Expectations were high until United States Secretary of Defence Dr Robert Gates paid an official visit to Barbados in April this year. His explanations, more or less, put an end to expectations and dispelled any lingering illusions about the US intentions behind the US Initiative.
Defined officially as a “multi-year, multi-faceted effort by the US Government and Caribbean partners to develop a joint regional citizen safety strategy to tackle the full range of security and criminal threats to the Caribbean Basin,” the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative had been assumed, at the outset, to include all fifteen Caribbean Commun-ity states – including the Dominican Republic and Haiti. It now seems that such an assumption was incorrect. The Initiative, at best, will be only partial in both scale and scope.
Unlike President Clinton’s 1997 Bridgetown meeting, Secretary Gates’s Bridgetown encounter brought together only the Prime Ministers of Barbados and the six member states of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean states which adhere to the Regional Security System. He apparently envisaged linking those seven states in a hemispheric security subset that is separate from their traditional CARICOM partners. Dr Gates was specific in his remarks. He said “I think that one of the things we need to think about going forward is how we connect the Regional Security System with the efforts of the French and the Dutch…how Colombia and Peru are doing it. They are all tied together in many respects.”
The direction proposed by Gates would surely constitute a significant departure from current security cooperation arrangements among CARICOM states, especially the huge pattern of policies, programmes and relationships spawned by the security framework established for the Cricket World Cup competition.
The US ‘Caribbean Initiative’ seems to have little to do with the current concept of CARICOM security. The Mérida Initiative, furthermore, has had the unintended consequence of diverting narco-trafficking away from Central America and into the Caribbean. As Dr Gates acknowledged, “I think narco-trafficking is a problem for the hemisphere as a whole and, wherever you put pressure, the traffickers will go where there is less resistance [and] where there is less capability.” This is exactly what has happened in the Caribbean Basin.
The US Government recognised that narco-trafficking has intensified in all other CARICOM states. For all intents and purposes, however, the Caribbean Initiative, in its present form, will place relatively less emphasis on the security needs of the larger states that do not belong to the Regional Security System even though the larger states – The Bahamas, Belize, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago – have been affected more seriously by narco-trafficking.
US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Julissa Reynoso, announced that the security Initiative has been built on three strategic objectives – to reduce illicit narco-trafficking, advance public safety and security and promote social justice. As a result, funding will come from several US Government sources such as the Development Assistance, Economic Support Fund, International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement and Foreign Military Financing accounts. This means that the money, sparing as it is, will be spread thinly over various areas – equipment and training to combat narco-trafficking and related violence and organized crime; judicial reform; institution-building; education; anti-corruption; rule-of-law activities and maritime security. The US Congress has specified also that at least $21.1 million should be used for social justice and education programmes.
In its present form as proposed by the US Department of Defence, the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative will be of limited usefulness, especially to the larger states. The US Government must work more closely with the Caribbean Community as an established international treaty organisation to provide better security for all of its member states, not just a selected few.
