Small, high-tech drug gangs fuelling TT’s crime wave

AT THE CORE of Trinidad and Tobago’s current crime crisis, is the trafficking of cocaine and heroin from Venezuela. Fast boats are used to transport this illegal cargo from staging areas in Guiria, Carupano and Maturin across the Gulf of Paria to Trinidad, en route to markets in the United States and Europe. The drugs get to the Venezuelan coastline on boats which navigate a complicated network of tributaries through the Orinoco delta, easily eluding detection, before being transferred to the fast boats which daily traverse the eight miles of open water between this country and Venezuela. Once in Trinidad, the drugs are transferred to a series of well-fortified storage areas located throughout this country, then repacked and shipped onwards on planes and boats which island-hop up the Caribbean chain to Puerto Rico and Florida, then onward by other more sophisticated modes of transport to final destinations in the US and Europe.

For more than two decades, Trinidad and Tobago has been an important stop on a major drug trafficking route that runs northeast to Florida, either directly or via Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and other islands in the Lesser Antilles. This route has been used extensively since the late 1980s, although it has been eclipsed somewhat in favour of a Mexican route. Sunday Newsday investigations have revealed that close collaboration between well- placed public officials in this country and drug networks in South America have ensured that the illicit activity operates with relatively few disruptions. According to well-placed sources, a well-insulated hierarchy with powerful, political, legal and business connections oversees the system. This local cartel, which involves persons of varying political affiliations and ethnicities, provides legal as well as law enforcement protection to its most important operatives, ensuring that mostly low-level personnel are vulnerable to arrest and conviction.

In the early 1990s, the TT drug cartels were closely linked to the Cali and Medellin cartels which dominated the Latin American drug trade and focused mostly on cocaine trafficking. However, there has been a significant change in the operation of Caribbean and Latin American drug networks since the 1993 death of Medellin cartel leader Pablo Escobar and the arrests of several key members of the Cali cartel. At the turn of the 21st century, new, more loosely structured drug organisations began emerging and taking control of the trade. According to one report, these organisations operate in “small, autonomous cells that are linked via Internet chat rooms and cellular phones protected by the very latest in encryption technology.”

“Unlike the previous cartels, these ‘boutique’ groups typically contract out the majority of their jobs to specialists who work on a job-to-job basis rather than as part of an integrated structure. “The new syndicates have also increasingly diversified their operations into opiates, reacting to growing consumer demand in the United States for higher-grade heroin that need not be injected intravenously,” the report continues. These new drug organisations are harder to detect, because they lack the operational “footprints” of their predecessors. In this country, as is the case in other islands of the Caribbean, drugs has been a way of life for more than two decades.

Under the scrutiny of the new breed of Latin American drug syndicates, small-time gangsters are involved in moving huge quantities of cocaine and heroin through the region. Sources say many of these drug smugglers are paid in cocaine rather than cash, a system that has contributed significantly to the large numbers of drug addicts in this country. To secure the trade here, large-scale arms smuggling takes place from Grenada, Barbados, Venezuela, Colombia and the US. The most prized high-power weapons include the Isreali Uzi, the AK-47, 9mm semi-automatic pistols and automatic Barettas.

These weapons, purchased with the proceeds from local drug trafficking, are fuelling the current gang warfare taking place in crime hot spots throughout Port-of-Spain and East Trinidad, boosting the murder and kidnapping rates to current unprecedented levels. The first major public revelation of the extent of the drug trade in this country came via the Scott Drug Report which was made public during the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) Administration of then Prime Minister ANR Robinson in 1987. The report had been commissioned during the tenure of People’s National Movement (PNM) Prime Minister George Chambers in 1984, but was not released at the time of its completion two years later