Tourism, Security and Safety From Theory to Practice

Short-Run Impacts
The success of transshipment across the region directed by experienced traffickers
using sophisticated networks and methods suggest the Caribbean narcoeconomy—
along with its associated evils of violence, drug abuse, corruption, and money
laundering—is increasingly embedded in the insular political economy. This is evi-
dent in the rise in criminality across the region reviewed above, and the incidence
of high-powered firearms and American-style tactics: gang warfare, drive-by
shootings, and home invasions (de Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999b). The nar-
coeconomy is further suggested by the rise in citizen gun purchases, the spread of
private security agencies and high-tech alarm systems, and the proliferation of
guard dogs, high-wire fencing, and grilled windows. Griffith (1997, p. 123) reports
the telling example of former Governor Roy Schneider of the USVI who carried
“a Glock semiautomatic pistol when he did not have his official security detail.”
Few segments of island life have gone untouched. The grim realities include:
(1) the growing presence of drug-addicted youth in low-income urban areas and
around resorts; (2) the active daily complicity of some local police, shipping, and
Customs officials and airline personnel; (3) collusion at the highest levels impli-
cating law enforcement and elected officials in what one regional writer calls
“massive public corruption” (Reese, 1997) in nearly a dozen nations; (4) prison
overcrowding primarily because of drug-related offenses; (5) the clogging of over-
taxed court dockets and resources plus the associated problems of evidence tam-
pering and witness and jury intimidation. In this last regard, one of the more
celebrated examples is the case of Charles “Little Nut” Miller, a deportee, who is
alleged to have successfully avoided extradition from St. Kitts to face narcotics
violations in the United States by threatening American students at the island’s off-
shore veterinary school (Larmer, 1998).
Certainly the most palpable evidence of narco traffic’s role in island society is
the daily economic impact. As the region’s second largest export sector behind
tourism, the narcoeconomy is “one of the few areas where global profits continue
to flow from the developed to the developing world” (Leggett, 2000, p. 143). In the
private sector, the infusion includes the substantial payroll to the drug workforce:
growers (marijuana), pilots, boat captains, engineers, shippers, baggage handlers,
couriers, lawyers, accountants, street pushers, and enforcers. Given the risks, these
employees are paid above the going local wage, and their spending supports a
diverse array of local businesses. In the public sector, clandestine payoffs to com-
pliant police, Customs employees, and other officials are quite substantial.
According to Harriott, (2002, p. 12), public corruption provides “Caribbean civil
servants with some US $320 million in income annually.”
These infusions circulate through the insular economy in a number of ways.
They are fed by rising addiction, which is partly a product of the Colombian car-
tel’s practice of paying traffickers in kind to avoid money laundering (DEA, 1998).
They are also fed by protection and extortion rackets, which recently have become
a major source of gang income (Robotham, 2003). On the other hand, drug profits
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are invested in legitimate enterprises serving residents and laundered into hotel
facilities and casinos catering to visitors. As an illustration of the embeddedness of
drug activity, marijuana’s financial significance was exemplified by the December
1998 uproar in St. Vincent, the second largest Caribbean producer after Jamaica,
when US troops helped destroy over one million plants; and growers began “a peti-
tion drive to ask President Clinton for damages” (Navarro, 1999, p. 4). The foot-
print of the narco dollar is deep.