The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

For a while, I’ve looked at crime trends and studied them closely to understand and learn how to fully combat these problems. We always had a gang problem and illegal arms dealing being the two biggest issues in crime.

But I learned that those issues were fueled by a far worse problem that has plagued not only Bahamians, but the entire Caribbean region for decades, which is the Mexican drug cartels.

In the 1980s, we were ground zero for Pablo Escobar’s global expansion of his cocaine trade, starting with Carlos Lehder-Rivas purchasing Norman’s Cay and holding the island for four years, running cocaine shipments flawlessly from Columbia to Miami without resistance. Eventually, Carlos was caught and sentenced for life, and the Cay was reclaimed by the government.

Unfortunately, the PLP suffered catastrophic losses to its reputation, causing them to lose the election of 1992 and the incident made them infamous for being the party that supported various drug lords in Bahamian history.

Worse, the Bahamian drug trade never actually died off after the DEA and the RBPF intervened. In fact, the new set of cartels has taken over the previous smuggling routes that the Colombian cartels had before, and the Caribbean cocaine trade is rising fast.

The various Mexican cartels constantly fight each other over smuggling routes and territory to build new infrastructure to process coca leaves into cocaine, labs to create meth and Fentanyl, places to hide money, and even places to train people to be sicarios with training grounds and ex-military instructors. News stations, newspapers and journalists have been almost silenced by the cartel drug lords, and anyone who disobeys them will face certain death. Because of bribery and sheer brutality and power, Mexico is a narco-state, where narco-terrorists reign supreme and their influence spreads far from their country.

The level of violence in Mexico has crossed into literal terrorism, and with hundreds of millions of dollars that is funnelled to bribe politicians and arm each sicarios to fight against their rivals and security forces. 28,000 and 35,000 people have been slaughtered in Mexico in 2017 and 2018. All of those victims were mostly tortured before being killed, and torture is like a sport to them. They’re true terrorists to the bone, just like Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

In other countries, the Mexican cartels give local gangs money and guns to ensure loyalty to the sicarios and they start community programmes to win trust over local governments. More likely, these cartels have adopted the rulebook from the US Army’s Green Berets and the CIA’s Special Activities Division and mastered their own version of unconventional warfare, psychological operations and asymmetric warfare on a massive scale. Most peace offerings by the cartels to stop the violence is for their benefit for drug smuggling and drug production, not for the Mexican citizen.

In terms of drug smuggling, the Columbian smugglers and the Mexican sicarios use tunnels under the US-Mexico border constantly to get drugs to it’s destination with most success. But if the border wall goes up, along with the preexisting tunnels rendered unusable. Then the Central American drug routes will dry up, but the Caribbean is another massive problem. A problem that puts everyone at risk to become a narco-state just like Mexico.

The Caribbean’s military power and security measures are far weaker than Central American military forces, and the matter is made worse is that we’re over water and the cartels use go fast boats, bribe captains of commercial cargo ships and use narco-submarines to move tons of cocaine up to the US East Coast, which some of those shipments going past one hundred million dollars. While many Caribbean islands don’t have a military-grade radar to monitor ships.

The Bahamas is a special prize to the Mexican drug cartels. Geologically, we’re located within a hundred miles from Florida and our country is a major shipping route that has ships coming from South America, Europe, North America and Asia. But what makes smuggling easier is that we have a crippled police force, an almost nonexistent military navy and a highly disorganised Customs department, giving the smugglers the edge over law enforcement at every corner.

From a perspective of a cartel drug lord. I possibly could bribe the RBPF, the RBDF and Customs to ensure that my shipment remains secure from prying eyes. I can hire the local Bahamian gangs to guard the cocaine shipments and pay them almost a million dollars and with high end military rifles, machine guns, tactical body armour and plates and explosives. I can build some new businesses to “help” the community and build legal money to hide the dirty ones. Most of our local gangs were supplied with guns from cartel connected gun runners from Florida.

That’s what these narco-terrorists do to survive and climb their way up the ranks of their organisation. Along with terrorist attacks and brutal executions that has destabilised Mexico.

All of the acts of narco-terrorism that has occurred in Mexico will soon fall on the Bahamas. Should we fail to act, the sicarios will flock to the country to guard their own drug shipments, which will bring a cataclysmic increase to crime, creating new rogue paramilitary groups, terrorism going rampant and the eventual downfall of the Bahamas. At that point, the rest of the Caribbean will be in grave danger, even if we managed to avoid becoming a narco-state.

The only medicine to our crime crisis locally and regionally is not with failing youth reform programmes and wasteful spending on those projects. The DEA should be more involved and NATO needs to launch a task force with CARICOM to hunt the street gangs who work with the cartels in Mexico and Columbia.

We need to act tough with enforcement and prosecution with gangs heavily connected with the Mexican cartels, who are mostly the ones heavily involved in the black market drug and gun smuggling in the Caribbean. There should be a terrorist watchlist system with all existing drug cartels being on the list. Anyone caught doing any business with them will freeze their financial accounts and place them under the watchlist. Politicians can be held on sanctions and prohibited from travelling on evidence of hiding cartel members or dirty money for the narco-terrorists.

Street gangs working for sicarios should also be top priority for arrests, and a 25-year sentence is mandatory for those who are cartel members or being a local gangster working for smugglers. Extradition for the sicarios and their gang allies to the US should also be a priority.

Like I said above. CARICOM and NATO should establish a multinational task force dedicated to counter-narcotics and hunting down local gangs and cartel sicarios, using both police and military assets to complete their daily tasks. Their main base of operations should be located in Andros for being in close proximity to the US. The Task Force can be governed by trustworthy individuals from CARICOM and NATO commanders, and they should be able to cross over different Caribbean countries with naval forces with approval and legislation that allows it.

If someone gives the task force any intelligence of cartel activity or street gangs running their own smuggling and theft rings then investigations will begin. And when enough evidence is gathered, then a large joint and military operation is launched to capture local criminals and narco-terrorists from Mexico and Columbia, and make illegal drugs and weapons smuggling harder for them. Then the individuals are extradited to the US and evidence will be used against them to ensure that these people are successfully convicted.

By that point, the goals of CARICOM and NATO is to ensure regional safety and order, by discouraging local street gangs and lower the lucrative illegal marker in drugs and gun trafficking, preventing the growth of the drug cartels and narco-terrorism. Only then, can the youth reform programmes work because the task force will ensure that the street gangs will face proper justice and give the youth another avenue for a better life.

AMMAKA RUSSELL

Nassau,

August 16, 2019.