#BTEditorial – Beheading the snake

Anyone who suggests Barbadians are over-reacting to the recent killing of Acting Station Sergeant Newton Lewis, are out of step with the current state of affairs in this country. They are also failing to confront the two-headed demon of illegal drugs and guns now rampaging in too many of our communities.

The murder of 46-year-old Lewis not far from his St Peter home as he responded to a report of a robbery at a near-by establishment, should not have shocked those of us who have been observing the steady decline in standards and values in this country.

We have witnessed the rampant killings in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and even in smaller islands like St Lucia and St Kitts/Nevis. The common theme in most of these killings is vigilante justice as groups of young men settle scores over drugs and other disputes with the use of guns.

While handguns were in popular use by criminals, the situation has got frighteningly worse with these misguided, mostly uneducated, young men, increasingly getting their hands with seeming ease on high-powered weaponry.

This is a most disturbing development. Members of the judiciary have also commented on the growing frequency with which youngsters are appearing before the courts suggesting that they just “found” these guns with ammunition to boot.

Even with the possibility of a long prison sentence or heavy fine, these are still not enough to compel convicted criminals to reveal where they acquired these guns.

The weapons are not being manufactured in Barbados, and so equal attention must be paid not only to finding and prosecuting those found with unlicensed firearms and ammunition, but serious resources dedicated to uncovering how and who are behind the surge of guns in this country.

We applaud the efforts of the current administration to plug the gaping hole that existed at the Bridgetown Port where most containers were not being scanned. Attorney General Dale Marshall should take credit for ensuring this shameful lapse in national security was addressed.

But we are a small island with several points at which guns and drugs can be landed. There is no time to take bows and thump our chests that we fixed one patch in a pair of trousers full of holes.

The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research says 42 of the 50 most violent cities in the world are in Latin America and Caribbean. Moreover, after Central and South America, the Caribbean has the highest murder rate in the world at 15.1 per 100 000 population. And most of those murders are overwhelmingly caused by guns.

According to a recent report by that UN research institute “since the 1990s when weapons enter into communities, they tend to stay. The guns left behind circulate with gangs and criminals and can be found for hire or resale. They are used in numerous murders or by locals, not affiliated with gangs, looking for protection or revenge”.

It added: “External flows of guns and ammunition increase the capacity for local violence in the communities.  They make gang culture more lethal and reshape local criminal structures and practices.”

There is also another insidious aspect of the gun crisis that we in Barbados must not ignore. It relates to how criminals are acquiring arms from countries in the region with a long history of gun trading.

A report published last year uncovered a thriving guns-for-drugs trade taking place between Haiti and Jamaica. According to Insight Crime, a think tank that examines organised crime in Latin America and the Caribbean, between 150 to 200 firearms are smuggled each month from Haiti to Jamaica.

Anthony Clayton, a security expert, and professor at the University of the West Indies said crime groups in Jamaica mostly swapped marijuana for weapons. The academic noted that Haiti was the source of illegal weapons smuggled there from the United States.

It was argued that the “newer and higher-powered weapons are mostly imported from the United States,” Clayton said, adding, “The ones from Haiti are sometimes called the rusty guns, because they tend to be older.”

Haiti is a destination for guns out of the United States, and this is so despite the presence of an arms embargo on the country. According to Insight Crime, in February 2019, a Florida gun shop owner was found guilty of conspiring with Haitian officials to traffick more than 166 semi-automatic weapons to Haiti. Also in 2019, an American marine was arrested when his flight landed in Haiti and was found with three plastic boxes containing eight firearms, ammunition, and body armour.

While officials in Barbados are still in the dark about the source of the guns on our streets, it is clear that more research and attention must be placed on stopping the dangerous gun surge. Arresting misguided young criminals will not stop the crisis.

The snake must be decapitated for the fear and killing to end. That can only occur if we know where the snake can be found.