Violent deaths in Caribbean have become public-health epidemic, leaders tell Canada

When police in Trinidad and Tobago discovered a huge cache of AK-47 rifles and other high-powered weapons in a small village last week, they thought that they had made a major breakthrough in their fight against illegal arms trafficking. Then early Wednesday morning, officers discovered a dozen more rifles.

“People are arming themselves to carry out their criminal business, largely the drug trade and of course the human trafficking trade,” the country’s prime minister, Keith Rowley, said Wednesday afternoon as he and other Caribbean leaders prepared to head into a closed-door discussion with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about the crime wave sweeping their tiny countries.

Violent crime is soaring in the Caribbean region, once the postcard of peace and tranquility, and the explosion of arms is undermining development efforts in the 15-member Caribbean Community regional bloc known as CARICOM, Rowley told Trudeau as they prepared to end the first day of a Canada-CARICOM Summit in Ottawa.

“It is so serious that we are regarding violent crime as a public health issue,” Rowley said. “There are very few diseases that kill more people in CARICOM than arms and ammunition.”

Rowley’s comments were striking because even among CARICOM leaders, most of their focus on the security crisis has focused on the situation in Haiti, their most populous and problematic member where violent armed groups are challenging the authority of a weak state on a daily basis.

“Haitians are dealing with a complex crisis,” Trudeau said before passing the microphone to Rowley. “Our role as a partner is to provide support that will actually have sustainable, durable impacts. “

Canada, he said, is committed to helping build “a more secure and prosperous atmosphere” and in that regard, announced additional funding for Haiti.

That assistance includes the launching of a multi-year training program for Haiti’s national police force to fight corruption and gangs. Canada also will allocate 3.4 million Canadian dollars to provide equipment and assistance to fight weapons-related violence and to help Haitians remain healthy by investing another 18.3 million Canadian dollars for vaccines, Trudeau said.

While Haiti’s security woes remain a focus of the group, Rowley’s explanation of the violent crime problem in the Caribbean showed that others are suffering some of the same issues as Haiti, just to a lesser degree.

Like Haiti, countries in the mostly English-speaking regional bloc are seeing an increase in gang activities and an explosion in illegal arms and ammunition, whose easy export out of U.S. ports has allowed gangs to arm themselves “more and more efficiently and effectively,” Rowley said.

According to the data, he noted, the CARICOM region is losing about 15 people a day to violent deaths.

“Nearly all of it is from the use of firearms,” the prime minister said. “And there’s a proliferation in recent times of assault weapons so the instance of shootings usually end up with multiple casualties, many deaths.”

In June, during a similar gathering between CARICOM heads with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris in The Bahamas, leaders voiced their concerns about the illegal export of weapons from the United States and asked the Biden administration to do more to crack down on weapons trafficking.

As part of a $100 million commitment, Harris said the U.S. planned to appoint an experienced prosecutor at the Department of Justice to oversee cases involving illegal weapons smuggling in the Caribbean, which now account for more than 50% of the weapons trafficking investigations by U.S. agencies.

The State Department, she also said, will support a recently established Crime Gun Intelligence Unit in Trinidad and Tobago to help train police officers, and bring criminals to justice by helping Caribbean islands solve gun-related cases. The U.S. also pledged to help improve forensic work in the region and develop a Haiti Transnational Criminal Investigative Unit to help police tackle firearms and ammunition smuggling, human trafficking and transnational gang activity.

“With the U.S. we tell them straight, you are producing these things and they are easy to get,” Rowley said. “In Canada’s case, I would say that we need the cooperation with Canada in the following ways... we need to be better able to patrol our coastal areas with small craft. We can’t get a proper supply of small craft to put into use immediately.

“The other thing is the effectiveness of the police,” he said. “One of the things that we have to admit is that the criminal elements engaged in this violence using their arms and ammunition, they have grown their ability faster than the police has been able to cope with it and therefore we need improved police training and more effective policing.”

Rowley also noted that the region is facing problems keeping up with the new surge in crime in both the area of cybersecurity and the legal system

“A significant amount of this crime and criminality is operated using cyberspace and this is another area we believe that in collaboration with Canada and your people, that our ability to cope can be improved,” he said. “The laws and regulations that we have in place now, which are operating in the courts, they don’t cater for the population that exists. They cater for a different breed of people where there was some moral compass, some underpinning good behavior, some expectation of integrity in the institutions.

“If we do not adjust our legal responses, the courts then become a mockery, laughed at by the criminals,” he said. “Because when you get before the courts, and the courts pretend to be this moral arbiter, the criminals become the victims and their concern become the primary concern, because you can’t do them this, and you can’t do them that, and they just carry on, on what is in effect an ongoing criminal enterprise.”