Speaking at this week’s Caribbean Marketplace on Monday, President of the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association (CHTA) Nicola Madden-Greig, is quoted in last Monday’s Trinidad Guardian as saying that while countries in the region continue to battle with what – at least in some CARICOM territories – now appears to be a steadily worsening crime situation, the region, as a whole, appears to be a preferred destination for extra regional visitors, her assertion reportedly supported by information culled from data from a “survey at the Caribbean Travel Marketplace in Montego Bay Jamaica on Monday, which showed over 80 per cent of tourists felt safe during their vacations to the region.”
Here one might argue that Caribbean people residing abroad and returning home from years in the cold are much too busy ‘soaking up’ the various aspects of the ‘nice time’ for which some CARICOM territories have cultivated a unique expertise though it is difficult to turn one’s back on the enduring phenomenon of rising crime in some parts of the region. Here, it is not a question of whether or not visitors to the region are ‘grinning and bearing it’ insofar as the seeming worsening crime is concerned but whether there are parts of the region that are simply putting a brave face on what, in some instances, is an incrementally worsening situation, the policy makers in those territories having become wary of the likely impact of washing their dirty linen in the extra-regional market on which it is heavily dependent to keep them buoyant.
Truth be told, it is perhaps arguably true to state, as Ms. Madden-Grieg did that where crime is concerned “we do have some challenges domestically,” including incidents from time to time but “that the impact in terms of safety and security is less than 0.0001 per cent.” Surely this perspective leaves aside what is profound evidence of an extant circumstance in which, in Trinidad and Tobago, the persistence of gang-related violence and murders seemingly arising out of an assortment of incidents have gone to the point of ‘threatening the tenure of the Commissioner of Police’ and here, in Guyana, where the proliferation of serious crimes causes the effectiveness of the Guyana Police Force, frequently, to be called into question.
Ms. Madden-Grieg has a point in her assertion that here in the Caribbean, where crime is concerned, that “in terms of the impact on visitors to the region, it is negligible” can easily be interpreted by some audiences as a posture that is dismissive of the reality that sooner or later tourism is likely to cease to thrive in an environment where there is no (at least) minimal official assurance of visitor safety.
Here the timeliness of most of the matches in the 2024 Cricket World Cup is interesting. The event bespeaks of an occasion that will bring huge multi-national audiences to various small Caribbean territories, some of which are possessed of what in some instances, are fairly demanding pre-existing security challenges. Here, the challenge for some of the host territories reposes in their ability, or lack thereof, to ‘keep it together’ where crime is concerned for relatively short but likely intense periods. Perhaps, there is something to be said for the likely security-related considerations associated with CWC, being subjected to a broader intra-regional discourse on there being a likelihood of the creation of a much more robust and enlightened security strategy for the ‘rolling back’ of what would now appear – on the basis of reports coming from some CARICOM member countries – of a crime situation that is becoming worse, not better.
