“Safe Caribbean” was the hashtag for the Caricom symposium held last week in Port of Spain.
The two-day event brought regional prime ministers and police commissioners together with representatives of relevant state and other organisations to devise workable strategies and solutions for creating a safe Caribbean.
The symposium came hot on the heels of a report in the Ttinidad and Tobago press of the World of Statistics’ (WOS) finding that TT ranks sixth on the list of the world’s most criminal countries. We also rank sixth in the 2023 World Population Review (WPR) of crime rate by country.
Venezuela tops the WOS list, Honduras is fifth, Guyana seventh and Jamaica tenth. So, three of the ten most criminal countries globally are English-speaking Caricom countries. With our two Spanish-speaking neighbours, we comprise half of the most criminal parts of the world.
That is some statistic, especially considering who is in the other half – Papua New Guinea (second), Afghanistan (third), South Africa (fourth) Syria (eight) Somalia (ninth).
That is not good company to be keeping. Those are the really bad kids on the block, nearly all suffering from the ravages of war and dictatorship, chronic underdevelopment and with histories of colonial brutality, national trauma and failed leadership.
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Compared to them, there is little in TT’s past that accounts for how we have descended into our present predicament. Along with the rest of the region, TT suffers from the effects of colonisation and our closeness to a superpower, and we have had our particular trials, but nothing as bad as resource-poor Jamaica.
Jamaica was also a victim of the Cold War and the real polarisation of political ideology during the long middle part of the 20th century that pitted political parties and citizens against one another, leading to deepening poverty, enduring violence and mass migration.
There was a huge price to pay for the stance taken by the then Jamaican government of Michael Manley against the US’s not-to-be-denied desire to command those who live in her backyard. We know that the US could bomb a country without a single missile being fired. Fix the price of sugar on the international commodity market and the Jamaican economy would implode. Then flood the country with guns – in fact, all of Central and South America with arms and funding for local contra-armies – and the gullible natives would do the worst to themselves.
Guyana, too, was the site of a war of political ideology that led to years of great darkness and a brain drain from which the country will never recover, not for all the oil reserves in the world.
Until the relatively recent, vast oil discoveries, Guyana was among the poorest countries on the map and looked like a place that time and God had forgotten. Now, it is the fastest growing economy globally. It is underpopulated and has a history of unstable politics, so we can only imagine that keeping the country on the straight and na
