Manning/Bush agree on eradication of drug trade in TT

Prime Minister Patrick Manning intends to address United States’ concerns about terrorism by tackling the drug trade in Trinidad and Tobago. He announced this yesterday at a post-Cabinet media conference at Whitehall at which he gave an account of his meeting with US President George W Bush and other officials. Manning said: “We advised the authorities in the United States that we supported US concerns about terrorism worldwide — we are not without our own experiences here — and that we believe that these things are tied up in part with the drug trade and with the levels of crime that we see in some of our countries and in Trinidad and Tobago.”

The US authorities had also been told, said Manning, that his Government supported the view of Scotland Yard expressed in 1994 that Trinidad and Tobago was small enough to completely eradicate the drug trade. Manning declared: “We further went on to state that we were taking steps here to eradicate the drug trade if we can.” He said certain local kidnappings were related to the drug trade, which if eliminated, would bring greater security to our citizens. Listing the new security measures, Manning said: “We advised the US authorities that the Government of Trinidad and Tobago has recently purchased a state-of-the-art radar which should be in service here in about a year, and which will give us 360 degree coverage of our coastline with high resolution, being able to detect small craft travelling anywhere within the territorial waters of Trinidad and Tobago.” Trinidad and Tobago, he added, has taken steps to be able to patrol and do interdiction exercises in our exclusive economic zone. He said: “Cabinet has taken a decision to order two fast patrol boats. They will be about twice the length of existing boats and will have a helicopter capability, in addition to which they will have the capability of launching fast interceptors, and the helicopter associated with it will have an attack capability.”

“We pointed out that when TT did that and when the drug dealers would notice the extent of the vigilance here, they are likely to move elsewhere in the region. That is a situation of which we have to be mindful, a situation we cannot afford to ignore. It’s been the pattern of drug dealers that when a particular location becomes too ‘hot’ for them as they describe it they move elsewhere, and what we are fearful of is that as TT takes these steps to protect its own borders and protect its own citizens and bring greater levels of security to the people of TT, that those actions themselves can have a debilitating effect on the rest of the Eastern Caribbean.” He said these surveillance initiatives enabled TT to not only protect our economic zone and our proposed natural gas pipeline to Guadeloupe, but also to do drug interdiction exercises in the Caribbean region. “It is a matter Trinidad and Tobago is prepared to discuss, if appropriate funding arrangements were available to us,” he added.