The Tribune

By SIMON

The brutal sexual assaults and murders of 12-year-old Adriel Moxey and 72-year-old Vernencha Butler outraged and horrified most Bahamians. These depraved acts were quickly followed by allegations by US officials of “a conspiracy to smuggle tons of cocaine through The Bahamas into the United States”.

These murders and the indictment are linked. They expose a deep-seated cultural and social decay, a cesspool of pathologies and slack behaviour tolerated and even promoted at every level of society.

This includes a dysfunctional criminal justice system and corruption on the police force. It includes the inability, indifference and ineptness of the political directorate and the state in addressing growing inequality.

It includes the need for widespread social intervention strategies and specific measures that have been as repeatedly proposed as they have been repeatedly misunderstood or ignored by both major political parties.

At our rotting core is unchecked mental health problems and a culture of violence and retaliation that help fuel crimes that are more frequent in The Bahamas than in jurisdictions much larger than our own.

Just like our obesity levels, one of the highest in the world, we have become so normalised, inured and accepting of the sickness, violence, and death around us that we no longer appreciate what a healthy society might feel and look like.

We have ignored these symptoms, resulting in an acquired immune deficiency syndrome increasingly resistant to treatment, and leading to more illness and more death and even greater pathologies.

The violence that led to the tragedies of Adriel Moxey and Vernencha Butler occurred in a society in which our political leaders refuse to outlaw marital rape, sending a message to girls and boys that women remain inferior and are objects for abuse.

Sadly, most people in our society support this sickening misogyny, which encourages domestic abuse violence against girls and women.

On cue, rather than encouraging ideas to regenerate a culture of life and liberation, our response to the murders is more killing, this time by the state. We are in bondage to a fundamentalist mindset that still does not grasp the life, death and resurrection of the Christ who preached liberation from revenge.

The US indictment includes two Royal Bahamas Police Royal officers, one Royal Bahamas Defence Force officer, and a number of other Bahamians. The allegations in the indictment are explosive. They suggest a country mired in corruption, including by government officials and a number of members on the Police Force.

The indictment is not solely or mostly about “bad apples”. It is about corruption at the root, branches and trunk of the Bahamian state. The message in the indictment is that there is something rotting at the core of The Bahamas, including various state organs.

The other messages of the indictment may be viewed in question form. Why is there so much tolerance for corruption by the Bahamian people and the political elite? Who is mostly benefitting from the mass corruption in the country?

We have been here before, the aftereffects of which linger in our social fabric and in the fabric of certain political entities, which appear immune to reform.

In a well-known series of special reports in The Miami Herald, titled, “A Nation for Sale: Corruption in the Bahamas” Carl Hiaasen and Jim McGee chronicled the destructive descent of the Bahamas into the corrosive drug era of the 1970s and 1980s.

In their first report on September 1, 1983, Hiaasen and McGee observed: “Drug corruption in The Bahamas has transformed one of the world’s idyllic destinations into a dangerous smuggler’s paradise…

“If you’re a drug smuggler in The Bahamas, you’ll never run out of things to do. You can buy an airstrip, or an island. You can buy citizenship. You can buy protection. You can buy justice.

“And should your drug cargo get seized by police, you can even buy it back. ‘I felt that the government of the Bahamas was a payable situation,’ says convicted pot smuggler Robert L Frappier. ‘If you paid enough money, you were protected in The Bahamas.’”

Hiaasen and McGee noted: “Corruption, spawned and fuelled by American drug millionaires, has stained every strata of Bahamian officialdom, from constables to Cabinet ministers.

“The scandal has enfolded some of those nearest to Prime Minister Lynden O Pindling – and Pindling himself…

“The smugglers’ wake already is ruinous. Spill over from the cocaine trade has spurred a freebase epidemic that menaces a whole generation of young Bahamians. A violent crime waves threatens the nation’s lifeblood tourist trade.”

Carlos Toro was a representative for the infamous Medellin Drug Cartel and was a friend of its co-founder Carlos Lehder, who turned Norman’s Cay into one of the most notorious drug transhipment outposts in the region.

Toro remembered: “Norman’s Cay was a playground. I have a vivid picture of being picked up in a Land Rover with the top down and naked women driving to come and welcome me from my airplane ... And there we partied. And it was a Sodom and Gomorrah ... drugs, sex, no police ... you made the rules ... and it was fun.”

A few decades later, that description of Norman’s Cay sounded eerily and sickeningly similar to Nygard Cay, which a number of senior politicians visited as guests.

At Norman’s Cay and at Nygard Cay, two wealthy foreigners mocked and scoffed at the country’s sovereignty, ruling their enclaves like potentates, allegedly bribing politicians and law enforcement officials to turn a blind eye to their alleged criminal conduct.

Norman’s Cay is about six and a quarter miles in length and approximately 800 acres. It sits at the northern end of the Exuma chain, approximately 33 miles southeast of New Providence. The small relatively remote island is a short trip of about 210 miles from the Florida coast.

Its relative isolation and geographic location in The Bahamas and the Americas has been exploited by pirates, rumrunners and drug barons. Today, it is a private retreat for wealthy Bahamians and foreigners, its reputation and environs restored through various recent investments.

Carlos Lehder was a drug trafficker who used a number of innovations to expand his nefarious trade. Like many others, he appreciated the value and strategic advantage of the archipelagic nature of The Bahamas and its proximity to the United States. Lehder helped to revolutionize how drugs were transported into the United States.

“The typical method of transporting small shipments, often carried by human drug mules, either through ingestion or in their luggage, onto commercial airlines, was surpassed by the use of small aircraft shipping entire loads of cocaine”, from a transshipment base in The Bahamas.”

We have not recovered from that era and now we are facing the most explosive allegations of drug trafficking rife through The Bahamas since that era. In this worrying context this journal opined:

“The news that three officers charged with the protection of our country have been accused in an indictment in the US relating to drug and gun offences is enough to bring back memories of the days when our country was branded as a nation for sale in the drug years.”

Our international reputation is a grave matter of concern. More concerning is the level of criminality and violence which continues to worsen, further devaluing our country and our future.

It is this devaluation, sickness, lethargy and indifference by many of us, including our governments that has resulted in the criminal violence which in part took the lives of Adriel and Vernencha.

Their deaths, like many others, did not occur in a vacuum. Nor did the alleged corruption, and drug and gun trafficking by various Bahamians. If we do not appreciate how these are linked we will not understand the degree of social revolution and transformational change we desperately need.

On their own, the political elite will not respond as urgently, dramatically or intelligently, as they must. Through creative ideas, advocacy, political action, and constant nonviolent agitation the Bahamian people must be the wellspring of change.

We must begin to heal ourselves even as we help to try to root out and heal what is deeply rotten within.