Trinidadians Make Case for Return of Choice Real Estate

When the U.S. government occupied their land and bulldozed their seafront homes here, Anthony Tardieu recalled, “the family was given two days to get out at the point of a gun. And they left there crying.”

It was 1941--the year World War II came to the Caribbean--and the U.S. Navy had chosen this remote isle just off Venezuela for a 12-square-mile operations base that served as the linchpin of Washington’s outer defenses.

And the Tardieus’ pristine 377 acres were in the heart of what Trinidadian military historian Gaylord Kelshall called the Caribbean’s most strategic bay.

Today, that same land ranks among this region’s most valuable development property, just a 15-minute drive from the capital of the Caribbean’s most prosperous nation. And the Tardieus are suing to get it back, along with half a dozen other Trinidadians who claim to be the deeded owners of the land that was the Chaguaramas Operating Base and Naval Air Station.

The case, now pending before this former British colony’s highest appeal court, London’s Privy Council, could set a broad precedent for other real estate in the region--and in Canada--seized by the British colonial government and rented to the U.S. for the war effort.

Compensation and land use are at the core of the issue in Trinidad, where the base that once housed 30,000 Americans was considered so strategic the U.S. sailors called it “Little Gibraltar.”

In exchange for a 99-year lease for the land in March 1941, the U.S. government gave Britain 50 destroyers and paid $13 million to Trinidad’s colonial authorities, who, in turn, paid many of the landowners. But not the Tardieus, the family asserts.

“There is no dispute that compensation was paid for their houses and their crops but never for the land,” said Anthony Tardieu. “It’s simple. The lands were acquired for a public purpose, and the public purpose is no more. So the lands should be returned to their rightful owner. And they haven’t been.”

It’s not that simple.

In 1967, the U.S. Navy finally left most of what had become a postwar rest-and-recreation base, complete with an 18-hole golf course. But Washington’s lease wasn’t officially rescinded until Gen. Colin L. Powell came here and signed the land over to the Trinidadian government in 1988, according to Kelshall.

By then, this oil- and gas-rich nation was looking to diversify into tourism. And Chaguaramas’ beaches and dramatic coves were so ideal that Trinidad created the Chaguaramas Development Authority to oversee them.

The authority’s Web site now advertises the former Navy land as “one of the most beautifully serene, waiting-to-be-developed areas of the Caribbean.” It offers investors tax holidays and duty concessions and states that “there are virtually no restrictions to investing in Chaguaramas.” That includes the Tardieus’ land on Scotland Bay, which the authority says “can be developed into an ideal eco-tourist resort.”

Yet little development has come to Chaguaramas. There’s a booming marina and shipyard on the piers the U.S. military left behind. Trinidad’s government spent about $13 million renovating the 1940s-vintage aircraft hangar for the Miss Universe pageant that was staged here last month.

“But the government can’t get any major development because they don’t have clear title to the land,” Tardieu said. “We do.”

Development Authority officials deny that. They point to two lower court victories here in a lawsuit the landowners filed against the Trinidadian government in 1992. Twice, local judges ruled that the families had been adequately compensated. But the Tardieus assert that those rulings were political, and they say they turned to the Privy Council in the hopes that the council is beyond local influence.

Historian Kelshall attributes the lack of development to other factors.

“What’s stopping development in Chaguaramas isn’t the land claim. It’s the inclusion of civil servants in the Development Authority,” Kelshall said. “Civil servants measure their power not in what they can do but in what they can stop.”