Better late than never?
Suspicious deals on seas a norm
http://www.guardian.co.tt/news/2015-01- ... -guard-can’t-stem-drug-tide
Cracks in our Borders
Multi-media journalist Urvashi Tiwari-Roopnarine has been investigating T&T’s flourishing illegal drug trade for the past several weeks. That journey has taken her to several parts of the country for extensive interviews with several people involved in the trade, people who have been researching it and members of the law enforcement agencies and government charged with trying to prevent the activity.
Today, she talks to fishermen about the activity they have seen on the high seas and a former drug mule who was caught in part five of her six-part series on the trade titled Cracks in Our Borders.
Fishermen in Moruga harbour suspicions about the coastal radar system which has been set up across T&T to protect the country’s borders from infiltration by the drug cartels. They told the Guardian Media Limited’s (GML) Enterprise Desk that even though the functional radars were rotating, they did not believe they were picking up vessels entering and exiting our territory.
The radars are supposed to be able to detect vessels at a radius of 60 kilometres at sea, GML was told. In theory, that means the Coast Guard should be able to detect any vessel and, more importantly, any suspicious activity within the area. But vice president of the Grand Chemin Fishing Association Kishan Sinanan says the experiences of his members at sea suggest to them that the radars are not working.
“To me it just spinning, because we don’t get any feedback,” Sinanan said. “If people break down at sea, if we go to the station or whosoever Coast Guard, they can’t give account of whosoever and whatsoever.” Another Moruga fisherman said based on some of the activity he had seen on the waters, the radars were either not working or drug running was being covered up or facilitated by the law enforcement agencies.
“I on the waters 24/7, that’s my job, I does do fishing. I on the waters. I does see suspicious vessels time and time again, through night and through day and yet still when I buy a papers I not seeing no interception of any vessels.” The fishermen said the absence and predictability of Coast Guard patrols gave them little confidence while at sea. “Normally, people know when the Coast Guard go up or down. They know how to do their run night or day or whatsoever,” one fisherman said.
“Things happens here, things is happening on the south eastern coast. I does be on the water at night 24/7. I does see movements of suspicious vessels all over the place and I see no Coast Guard.” Minister of National Security Gary Griffith agrees that there is much more to be done, but says it is a gradual process. He believes the system gives the Coast Guard the capability to respond to vessels coming into T&T waters.
Head of International Relations at the University of the West Indies, Prof Andy Knight, says just having the radars operational may not be enough. “Apart from the radar system you need to have adequate vessels to interdict traffickers who are trying to get into the region using small speedy boats an, in some cases, homemade submarines,” he said.
Griffith pointed out, however, that the Government had a three-tiered approach to border protection where vessels could patrol and interdict from the shoreline to deep waters. But fishermen are concerned that these new vessels may be just as irregular as current patrols. A game fisherman from Point Galeota said, “Now and then you see choppers pass by, but you don’t see no boat and thing.”
Human trafficking
Drug trade researcher Darius Figueira says our open and unmanned seas also open up another lucrative trade to international cartels—the most valuable of all—human trafficking. “When you look at the amount of people being smuggled through the Caribbean, that is the biggest business in the Caribbean today … trafficking of humans, because there is more profit in trafficking a human than to traffic a kilo (of cocaine),” he said.
Human trafficking, Figueira explained, was not just limited to prostitution rings, but included people who wanted to migrate and could not qualify. The US State Department gave T&T a tier two rating in their 2012 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. It pointed out that while efforts were being made, the country did not fully comply with the minimum standards for tackling human trafficking.
“You bring them in through the Caribbean, transit them through Central America, you put them in Mexico and move them to a border point, put them in the hands of a coyote to carry them across,” Figueira said. The 2014 TIP report published by the United States Department of State says “law enforcement and civil society reported that some police and immigration officers facilitated human trafficking in the country, with some government officials directly exploiting victims.”
A drug mule’s account
Professor Andy Knight says poverty makes citizens vulnerable as victims of the illegal drug trade. “There are a lot of people in these countries who are poor and are looking for some extra income, and it’s easy to convince them to become the mules for some cartel in South America or Latin America,” he said.
A 2005 survey of the women’s prison showed that drug-related offences accounted for 46.4 per cent of the incarcerations. Of those women imprisoned, trafficking accounted for 56 per cent of the charges that landed them in jail. Katryna Hamilton-Brown, a well-educated woman, contributed to this statistic. She told GML one bad decision in 2010 cost her over two years of her life apart from her children and family.
“I attempted to traffic drugs to Jamaica but I was subsequently held at the airport that very morning," she said during an interview. And all it took to lure her was 800 grammes of cocaine, a desire to get away and a promise of US$2,500. “I only met them once. They didn’t give me too much info. They said this is what's going to happen, this is how it’s going to go down and it’s going to happen tomorrow,” Hamilton-Brown said, adding that it was her first time.
She was dropped off at the Piarco International Airport with the cocaine stitched into her clothing.
Used as decoy
Hamilton-Brown recounted her anxiety as she went through the procedure to board the flight. “I’m feeling people staring at me for no apparent reason. Something inside of me says, ‘Katryna you don’t need to be here,’ but who do I call, what do I say?"
Initially, though, she successfully cleared Customs and was only waiting to get on to her flight.
“An officer came from nowhere and she was like, ‘I want to search you.’ I was like, ‘okay, that’s no problem, you can go ahead and search me.’ She just kept patting me down and said, ‘I know you have something on you, you know,’" she recalled. She was then taken to a separate room for a further search. “When we arrived in that room I took off the clothes and handed it to her. I was like, ‘here, this is what you looking for.’”
She said the officer seemed resilient, giving her the impression there was a tip-off and there was no way out. She eventually pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and spent over two years in prison. Hamilton-Brown said people who were approached to become drug mules were lured by stories of success, but the traffickers never told them the other side of the story.
“They never tell you that part of it, they never tell you about the girls who went to other countries and never made it back because they were raped or killed or whatever,” she said. She gave birth to her daughter behind bars and was able to spend just one day with the infant. Looking back, Hamilton-Brown said she knew one thing for sure, she was not the only mule dropped off at the airport that day, but was just the one to be caught.
