As Hotbed for Drug Trade, Caribbean Nations Suffer

More than 60% of the South American cocaine sold in the U.S. and Europe now moves through the small, vulnerable island nations of the Caribbean, fueling corruption, violence and drug abuse and threatening the political and social fabric of the region, senior United Nations officials and local anti-drug czars said Monday.

Opening a two-day meeting of senior counter-narcotics officials here that will free up tens of millions of dollars in European and U.S. anti-drug aid for this region, the officials also acknowledged that powerful drug mafias increasingly are using this area’s booming offshore banking industry to launder billions of dollars in illicit profits.

As a result of that trend, the Caribbean’s 29 nations and territories face “fragile and distorted economies, poor governments and corruption,” said Pino Arlacchi, who, as head of the U.N. International Drug Control Program, is the world body’s top anti-narcotics official.

“The sad reality,” he said, is that “drug trafficking and abuse, as well as the legitimization of the proceeds of crime, are negatively affecting the Caribbean region in terms of health, corruption, internal security, violence, economic development and the integrity of financial systems.”

The U.N.--releasing new statistics that show 40% of the cocaine sold in the United States alone now enters via the Caribbean, a figure 10 percentage points higher than previous estimates--confirmed that Colombian cocaine producers are forging new partnerships in the region. Traditionally, those manufacturers have relied on Mexican border-smuggling groups to reach American markets.

Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez, whose drug-plagued nation is hosting this week’s conference, described the Caribbean in an opening speech as “ideal for drug trafficking.”

“In truth, we are speaking of a region that has an enormous number of states and territories that are underprotected,” he said. “We all know that the drug trafficking industry, at the international level, represents the greatest threat to the national security of our . . . nations.”

Representing the island states--whose national budgets and law enforcement agencies are overwhelmed by the drug cartels’ sophistication and wealth--police and military officers, bureaucrats and politicians on Monday swapped intelligence and ideas here on ways to better cooperate in the drug war.

Theirs is a daunting task, as recent incidents illustrate:

* On tiny Dominica, in the eastern Caribbean, an independent commission investigating drug corruption issued a report last month that triggered the firing of 12 national police officers; one officer then killed his wife with an ax and committed suicide with poison.

* Drug crime on the island of St. Kitts is bolstering a secessionist move by its sister isle, Nevis. Supporters there want to exit the twin-island federation because they say Nevis’ image is being sullied by narcotics-related violence in St. Kitts.

* The Dominican Republic has become a hot spot for drug-money laundering, according to the country’s counter-narcotics chief and a U.S. federal indictment in Miami. That indictment charges two prominent Dominicans with funneling millions of dollars in Colombian drug money through local casinos, hotels, aircraft and a national baseball team.

* In Haiti, U.N. peacekeepers began pulling out last week and turning law enforcement over to a new national police force, more than 20 of whose members have been arrested on drug-trafficking charges in recent months.

Delegates at the conference--the second such international initiative launched in the 18 months since intelligence agencies first spotted the disturbing upswing in narcotics-related activities in this region--said they are all too aware of the challenges they confront. But they are finding hope, for example, in European Union-sponsored aid.

The EU has committed $25 million to a five-year regional anti-drug campaign; delegates here are figuring which programs will get financial support from the EU aid and from the United States and the U.N.

Among the projects proposed is a $5-million, European-funded program to teach Caribbean agencies how to monitor the complex financial transactions that have made the region what Arlacchi called “the center of the world’s money-laundering business today.”

Citing widespread police and political corruption in the area, he said in an interview Monday that the Caribbean “reminds me of the atmosphere in Sicily in the early 1980s, when I started studying the Mafia. Two-thirds of the Sicilian politicians were corrupted or close to the Mafia at that time, and the Mafia was everywhere.”

Arlacchi, an Italian sociology professor who was named to his U.N. post three months ago, was among a small group of judges, educators and other activists who took on Italy’s powerful crime syndicate 15 years ago. He is among the few, he said, who are still alive after a battle he described as “10 to 15 years of hard work.”

He conceded that the Caribbean drug war may be equally arduous. “But we should be confident in our means, which also are very powerful,” he said. “Our most important project is confidence-building of the people in the region. You have institutions and people who are clean, honest and committed. Our strategy should be to select these people and make them feel as if the international community is with them. In the long term, these minorities will be the majority.”