On Tiny St. Lucia, Boat Blasts Reveal Tensions Underlying Island Tourism

When a 32-foot Sea Skip excursion boat from St. Lucia’s posh Sandals Halcyon Resort blew up just off shore, killing an American honeymooner, the hotel’s Swiss translator and two local dive masters, shock waves went through this tiny Caribbean country.

Local police quickly ruled the blast an accident, even before they finished their investigation. Newly elected Prime Minister Kenny Anthony rushed to the scene, where he warned journalists against “erroneous conclusions which may well have a deleterious effect on our country.”

But rumors spread fast.

It was the fourth boat explosion in 13 months in peaceful, pristine St. Lucia. And it was the first to draw blood: Paul George, the New Jersey newlywed, was the first tourist killed here since the island linked its future to tourism--especially the more than 70,000 Americans who now visit the island each year.

And the aftermath of the Oct. 19 incident has sharply underscored a fact of life for St. Lucia and the other Windward Islands: Their economic survival, for decades dependent on the banana trade, increasingly hinges on their image abroad.

By itself, the explosion that ripped the entire deck off the Sandals Sea Skip and blew its captain 10 feet into the air probably would have caused little more than a ripple of worry here and abroad: Two separate forensic investigations recently concluded that the accident--due to either design or maintenance flaws--could have happened anywhere.

But the three explosions that came before it were decidedly different. Even Anthony’s government concedes that someone has been blowing up Howard Otway’s deep-sea fishing boats in Rodney Bay. So it was natural for most of St. Lucia’s 150,000 people to fear the worst: orchestrated sabotage by internal rivals for the island’s vital, yet limited, tourist trade.

Chain Reaction

And the blast has initiated a chain reaction of internal conflict and concern:

When Guy Ellis, one of the nation’s most experienced journalists, suggested that all four blasts could be linked, the government accused him of “economic sabotage.” That threatened the nation’s democratic pillar of a free press, Ellis countered.

And when investigations by the government and the resort came to conflicting conclusions about the latest blast’s cause, attention turned to the relationship between the government and a private corporation that helps generate much of its revenue.

Tiny island states such as St. Lucia--where half the population now lives directly or indirectly off tourism--compete against one another and dozens of other nations for the world’s limited tourist dollars.

“I’m one of those who’s very concerned,” said St. Lucia Chamber of Commerce President Guy Mayers. “Changing your emphasis from bananas to tourism, you’re putting yourself more at the mercy of international market forces.”

A drawn-out U.S.-led fight in the World Trade Organization that ended British banana trade subsidies to the island last year forced it to look to other types of commerce. Now, several years after St. Lucia started diversifying its economy, tourism has replaced bananas as the nation’s top money earner: The 431,729 foreign visitors to the island last year spent a total of $272 million.

But tourism, says Mayers, “is a very fickle industry. Any bad press is capable of killing your industry overnight.”

The shift also has had a profound effect on the island societies themselves, stoking once-hidden and harmless animosities.

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“St. Lucia is an island paradise, but it is also a place where real people live,” said the nation’s new tourism minister, 39-year-old Philip J. Pierre. “All men have their petty jealousies; they have their needs and wants at the individual level. So we have these problems.

“Everybody here wants more of the economic cake. And that’s not unique to this country.”

By most accounts, those forces were to blame for the bombings of Howard Otway’s boats.

Born on the nearby island of Grenada, Otway migrated here in the mid-1970s to escape political repression at home. He took St. Lucian citizenship and eventually started a small deep-sea fishing business, which generated $700 million last year.

On an island best known for spectacular beaches, mountains and rain forests, and a culture that produced two Nobel laureates, Otway succeeded in creating a new niche for sportfishing and whale watching.

Otway founded the St. Lucia Game Fishing Assn. and was about to host a British film crew making a documentary on the subject a year ago when someone--police suspect a competitor--blew a hole in his first boat, Reel Affair.

Months later, a bomb struck his second boat. And in September, Reel Affair was sabotaged yet again.

‘A Certain Animosity’

“We don’t have bombs here. We have a very peaceful country,” said the soft-spoken Otway. “And all of a sudden, my boats blow up.

“I have reason to assume, although it’s pure conjecture, that I have upset a party or parties, and they’ve let that be known to me in a very visible way.”

Michael Chastanet, one of the island’s most successful businesspeople, whose two new shopping malls are booming with the help of St. Lucia’s tourist trade, said he never had much doubt that Otway’s boats were deliberately targeted.

“Howard Otway has a little problem. Howard is from Grenada,” said Chastanet, explaining that Otway’s foreign roots exacerbated local resentment toward his success. “I think over the years he built up a certain animosity. The other boat owners saw him going out every day while they were sitting idle in harbor. The competition probably bombed him.”

Rick Wayne, a local publisher, talk-show host and former world champion bodybuilder, said Otway’s woes reflect a more widespread problem: “the perception that the people who are creaming off the most from tourism here are either the foreigners or the better-off St. Lucians.”

He and many others here blame the United Workers Party, which ruled the island for nearly three decades until Anthony’s young Labor Party government took power after May elections.

“I think the previous government let us down badly,” Wayne said. “We’re talking about a people totally lacking in self-esteem. We’re talking about a people who came out of servitude, who would never like the idea of serving people again. And the previous government did nothing to educate our people that working in service industries like tourism can be dignified.”

Anthony’s government is trying to do just that for a population largely descended from African slaves, who were brought here by the British and French during an era when St. Lucia changed hands 14 times between the two colonial powers. The government is sponsoring new hotel-management courses that Tourism Minister Pierre said are designed to “move [the country’s work force] up the value chain of the tourism industry.”

In the weeks since the fatal boat blast, though, the government and the Jamaica-based Sandals resort chain that has driven St. Lucia’s tourism boom have been forced to develop a far more immediate strategy: damage control.

The results have been mixed.

Although it sharply chided Ellis for suggesting a link to the earlier explosions, the government did not attempt to cover up the deadly blast. It posted on the Internet full reports of what had happened, including expressions of “sincere regret” to victims’ families.

But soon after, exultant from preliminary findings that the Sea Skip had not been bombed, police convened a news conference to report that proper maintenance could have prevented the blast.

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Sandals, which owns two resorts here and 10 others throughout the Caribbean, reacted swiftly and angrily. It criticized the government’s conclusion as a premature “overreaction” and insisted that Sandals’ boat-maintenance program “is widely known to be among the most comprehensive and thorough anywhere in the Caribbean.”

Sandals’ own internal investigation showed that a design flaw by the Sea Skip’s U.S. manufacturer most likely caused the explosion. A gas line had ruptured unseen under the sealed deck, it concluded, filling the hull with fumes, which ignited when the captain tried to start a bilge pump.

Although the dueling investigations threatened a short-term rift between St. Lucia’s government and the resort chain, most analysts expect the firestorm to subside in the weeks ahead.

Packed Resorts

In fact, Sandals and the island’s other resorts have been packed with U.S. and European newlyweds in the weeks following the explosion. And, as the internal controversy continued to rage in the blasts’ aftermath, there were traffic jams in Castries’ picturesque harbor, as behemoth cruise ships jockeyed three at a time to dock on the island that advertises, “St. Lucia: Where wonders never cease.”