CNS STORY: In the Caribbean, church workers fight a new kind of culture of death

LATAM LETTER Aug-3-2010 (1,030 words) Backgrounder. xxxi

In the Caribbean, church workers fight a new kind of culture of death

By Ezra Fieser
Catholic News Service

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (CNS) -- Stretches of sun-soaked golden beach, warm ocean waters, all-inclusive resorts and violent drug wars?

The Caribbean has long been considered an international tourism destination, but these days it is revisiting its reputation as a transit point for drug shipments.

Catholic leaders, security experts and government officials say the drug wars in Mexico and Colombia and the tightening of the southern U.S. border are pushing traffickers toward maritime routes, turning Caribbean islands into increasingly dangerous stopovers for South American drugs bound for the U.S. and Europe.

While drug trafficking in the Caribbean has existed for many years, leaders say the recent wave of trafficking is pitting a multibillion dollar international hydra against underfunded and undertrained authorities. And, too often, authorities find themselves outmatched and outnumbered.

"They send speed boats back and forth from Jamaica to Haiti, sending drugs to Haiti to be transported and picking up Haitians to bring back to Jamaica. Everyone knows it, but the coast guard here is not equipped to deal with it," Archbishop Donald Reece of Kingston, Jamaica, told Catholic News Service. "It's a Caribbean-wide problem and it's pervasive."

Jamaica became the poster child for the "Caribbean-wide problem" earlier this year when authorities attempted to carry out a U.S. extradition request for drug lord Christopher "Dudus" Coke, considered a Robin Hood in the poor Kingston neighborhood, Tivoli Gardens, that he controlled. The May 22 police raid created a backlash as residents took up arms against the law enforcement authorities. Seventy-four people were killed and 500 others were arrested within a week.

Coke was eventually captured, but the incident reminded the region and the U.S. that drug trafficking in the Caribbean is still a driving force.

The "current events in Jamaica underscore the degree to which we have embraced and even cultivated a culture of death," the Antilles Episcopal Conference said in a June 2 letter. "We need to dismantle this culture of death and violence by intentionally creating a culture of life and peace."

The culture of death may not compare to the situation in Mexico, where a drug war has claimed 25,500 lives -- including more than 6,000 this year -- since President Felipe Calderon came to power in 2006. In fact, some Caribbean islands are safer than the United States. And foreigners, the basis of a tourism industry that fuels many local economies, are rarely victims. But Caribbean authorities say rising crime and murder rates are directly related to drugs.

In Puerto Rico officials believe a rise in drug-related crimes accounted for its high death toll in 2009, when 890 people were killed, the third-worst year on record. Even before this year's violence, Jamaica counted the world's second-highest murder rate for countries not at war, according to U.N. figures. And the Dominican Republic's homicide rate has nearly doubled in the last five years.

Cardinal Nicolas Lopez Rodriguez of Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic's largest city and capital, has urged authorities to confront drug trafficking, which he says is disrupting Dominican society.

The Dominican bishops' conference released a statement in July that asked, "How can we be indifferent to the shedding of blood, to the escalating violent attacks on the people for whom Christ shed his blood? We have to examine our behavior, personal and institutional."

For many, the situation today recalls the situation 25 years ago, when the Caribbean was synonymous with drug trafficking.

Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar linked South American growers to U.S. users by "building up the Caribbean connection," criminologist Keith Maguire wrote in his 1998 study of Escobar's rise. "The Caribbean served not just as an important conduit for cocaine to North America. It also functioned as a key center for laundering drug money and converting (it) into legitimate funds."

Back then most cocaine entered the U.S. from the Caribbean through South Florida, said a June 2010 report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. Americans even watched the drama unfold on the hit television series "Miami Vice."

But a crackdown led traffickers to reassess the route, pushing more of the shipments through Central America and Mexico. Mexican cartels then won control of the trafficking as Colombian cartels disintegrated, the report said.

Today, about three-fourths of the cocaine entering the U.S., the world's largest consumer, comes through Central America and Mexico. But now the pendulum is swinging back: The Mexican crackdown is pushing traffickers to the Caribbean, experts say.

"It was out the picture for a few years," Dominican security expert Lilian Bobea said. "Now, cartels are looking for more routes, and that's leading to a kind of revival of drug-related conflict in the Caribbean."

The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs wrote in July that "as a result of the U.S.-led Merida Initiative and Plan Colombia, the Caribbean Basin has become a victim of the balloon effect, as drug trafficking has been pushed in the direction of the region. Traffic through the Caribbean is expected to increase even further in the coming years."

The U.S. response has been the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, a package of aid and training to 15 Caribbean countries that began last year. President Barack Obama launched the initiative in 2009 by proposing $45 million for it. Congress, however, reduced it to $37 million.

The Obama Administration's 2011 budget calls for $72.6 million divided between areas such as military financing and narcotics control. It is unclear exactly how much will be dedicated to needed police training.

Leela Ramdeen, director of the Catholic Commission for Social Justice in Trinidad and Tobago, said the social implications of the drug trade are grave. Her nation of islands off the coast of South America has become a major transit point for cocaine on its way to Europe, the U.S. and Africa.

"Drug trafficking preys on our youth and our most vulnerable," Ramdeen said. "It's very lucrative and if you go to a kid who is not educated, has dropped out of school and is looking for a job and offer him some money and a gun to run drugs -- that's power. That's hard to say 'no' to.

" That's what's responsible for this culture of death here. And it's not unique to Trinidad. This is a regional problem."

END

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