Caribbean world's 'bloodiest region'
Pastor Dale Morgan
Caribbean world's 'bloodiest region'*
By Michael Christie in Miami
May 04, 2007 03:40am
Article from: Reuters
Rising murder rates have made the tourism-dependent Caribbean possibly
the bloodiest region in the world and are severely affecting potential
economic growth, the World Bank said.
Blaming most of the violent crime in countries like Jamaica and Trinidad
and Tobago on the trafficking of Colombian cocaine to Europe and the US,
the report said the region's homicide rate of 30 per 100,000 inhabitants
a year was higher even than troubled southern and western Africa.
It acknowledged that murder statistics in small countries were often
problematic because a relatively small number of incidents can result in
high rates but said it was clear that homicides were a growing problem
in the Caribbean.
“While levels of crime and associated circumstances vary by country, the
strongest explanation for the relatively high rates of crime and
violence in the region - and their apparent rise in recent years - is
narcotics trafficking,” said the report, jointly prepared by the World
Bank and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
The authors cited studies that indicated Haiti, the poorest and most
unstable country in the Americas, could raise annual economic growth by
5.4 per cent if it cut its murder rate to the same level as Costa Rica
in Central America.
Jamaica, the verdant and mountainous home to reggae and a major
marijuana producer, could boost gross domestic product growth by the
same amount if it did likewise, while the Dominican Republic and Guyana
could add 1.8 per cent and 1.7 per cent respectively to annual GDP
expansion.
The report said an estimated 10 tonnes of cocaine were trafficked
through Jamaica and 20 tons through Haiti and the Dominican Republic in
2005.
But the signs were that the flow of narcotics through the Caribbean was
diminishing as Mexican cartels took over from Colombian organizations in
distributing drugs in the US and shifted trafficking routes to Central
America.
The World Bank and UN agency called on the region to modernize police
forces, improve crime statistics, invest in crime-reduction programs
like rehabilitating slums and consider novel methods to counter drug
trafficking.
It cited the example of a Dutch program to halt drug couriers flying
into Schiphol airport, in Amsterdam, from the Netherlands Antilles
islands of Curacao, Bonaire and Aruba.
Under a program called “100 per cent Control,” all planes and their
crews and passengers flying in from the Dutch Caribbean, Suriname or
Venezuela are extensively searched. Couriers found with less than 3kg of
cocaine are not detained but are deported and added to a blacklist.
“Rather than attempting to scare off potential smugglers with the threat
of incarceration, the Dutch approach was based on increasing the rate of
interdiction to the point that smuggling becomes unprofitable,” the
report said.
The number of couriers passing through Schiphol dropped from an
estimated 80 to 100 per day in 2003 to around 10 a month in 2005, the
report added.