Foreign media focuses on BEETHAM

Under the headline “A SLUM THAT NAGS SITE OF AMERICAS SUMMIT”, the Associated Press had this to say:

“A newly finished brick wall mostly obscures from the view of leaders arriving at the Summit of the Americas a slum that embodies their biggest challenges: drug- related violence and an economic crisis that threatens to erase gains against poverty.

“The people of Beetham Estate, which flanks the main highway entering Port-of- Spain from the east, call it “the wall of shame,” though community activist Sherma Wilson says it was built to shield them from the highway, not vice versa.

“Beetham is home to some 5,000 people, about a tenth of them squatters. A block- wide slice of simple dwellings that runs most of a mile and is wedged between motorcars, it is a place outsiders shun for the danger.

“A coconut-processing plant spews milky waste into a scum-coated pond that intersects the neighbourhood, emptying into a malodorous mangrove swamp. After heavy rains, crud overflows into many of the one-storey brick and mortar homes.

“They don’t give a damn about us here,” said Wilson, who has organised residents to demand everything from drainage ditches to electric and water hookups from the Government.

“Like most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago is just now beginning to feel the global recession’s sting, and it’s places like Beetham, where society’s bottom feeders gather, that tend to suffer most.

Unemployed young men lounge on its main street, fixing bicycles and cursing military police who cruise the slum in jeeps and, they say, harass them for no reason.

“Wars between rival gangs who peddle cocaine and marijuana claim about two young lives a day in this country of more than 1.4 million. It saw 157 murders in the first three-and-a-half months of this year, on the heels of 545 last year – the highest ever.

“Wilson said Colombian and Mexican traffickers are increasingly controlling Trinidad’s drug trade.

“Meanwhile, the labour market is suffering from fresh layoffs in the republic’s previously robust oil industry.

“Keith Lynch, a 35-year-old landscaper who lives in Beetham, says he barely gets enough steady work to feed his family of four.

“He laughs so heartily his dreadlocks sway when asked if he thinks the new US president, Barack Obama, can do much to help the 180 million Latin American and Caribbean people living in poverty. Everyone knows Obama already has his hands full trying to mend the world’s leading economy.

“But Lynch turns serious when asked about the potential for worsening crime.

“If they step on the small man and he don’t have nothing he’s going to go take from another man’s hand,” Lynch said.

“Experts fear the region is losing in a matter of months what it took years to gain. Between 2002-2006, regional poverty dropped ten points to 34 percent, according to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America.

“Now, an Inter-American Development Bank study estimates some 15 million people in the region will fall into poverty if its economy shrinks one percent this year.

“Analysts say the leaders of the 34 democracies gathering in Port-of-Spain this weekend can only hope to sketch the beginnings of a strategy to respond to the crisis.

“As democratically elected officials, they’ve got a lot on the line.

Mauricio Cardenas, a Colombian economist with the Brookings Institution, predicts voters will punish governments on the right and the left alike in elections across much of Latin America in the coming two years. That could not only provoke more state intervention in economies, at the expense of the free market, it could also breed social instability.

“A crisis lasting more than a year, with an important economic contraction, could cause considerable social trouble, including an increase in crime,” said Costa Rican political scientist Kevin Casas-Zamora.

Miami Herald:

“The residents of Beetham Gardens, a drab area of rundown government housing and relentless gang warfare, have been cut off from the rest of this sprawling Trinidadian capital.

“The Government has erected a wall along the neighbourhood’s frayed edges, blocking the view into a long troubled community that shares space with the murky waters of industrial waste, overgrown weeds and the constant stench of the nearby landfill.

“The five-foot-tall wall is simply a beautifying touch, say government officials, who have spent months prepping for the arrival this week of 33 leaders including President Barack Obama at the largest and most important gathering of hemispheric leaders.

But to those who live behind the wall, the structure means something else: It’s a symbol of years of broken promises, government neglect and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.