-training course told

Stepped up US interdiction of the drug trade on its border with Mexico could force more of the illicit substances through the Caribbean, a regional official has warned.

The flow of illegal drugs was the major topic as points of contact for intelligence sharing from across the region gathered at the closing ceremony of the latest CARICOM   IMPACS  law enforcement training programme held in  Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, last week. They were told that  the harmonization of intelligence operations  can improve  the region’s  drug fight.

Executive Director of CARICOM IMPACS, Lynne Anne Williams stressed the value of the course to the fight against the drug trade,   “The harmonization of intelligence operations and training in communications protocols can only improve the  region’s  capacity to discover, identify and interdict traffickers and the transnational supply chain that supports them.”

She was addressing  an audience that included   Senator  Dr. Errol Cort, Chairman of the CARICOM Council for National Security and Law Enforcement (CONSLE) and Minister of National Security and Labour for Antigua and Barbuda, along with  Stylianos Christopoulos,  Charge  d’Affaires of the European Commission of Trinidad and Tobago,  said an IMPACS release  with a Trinidad and Tobago May 7th  dateline.

Under the auspices of the European Union’s 9th  EDF fund,  the five-day training course aimed to strengthen the Regional Intelligence Management Framework, through the standardization of terminology, operating procedures and communications protocols.

And delivering the feature presentation  last Friday,    Dr Cort defended  regional governments saying that despite their inability to stem the tide, “most governments had diverted scarce resources from social and economic programmes to fight the drug trade.”

He quoted the 2007 Report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) which reverberated across the globe with its finding that drug trafficking was the principal transnational crime in the region pointing out that many had greeted the report as if it were a novel revelation.  This, he said, “was certainly not the case either among our Caribbean luminaries or our security practitioners, who had both been grappling with the challenges imposed by this reality for decades.”

To make his point, Dr Cort then cited the warning contained in the Time for Action Report released by the West Indian Commission  back in 1992 which stated that, “nothing poses greater threats to the civil society in the Caribbean Community countries than the drug problem.”

He further noted that “this message was again officially aired and endorsed at the regional level, exactly one decade later, with the publication in September 2002  of the Report of the Regional Task Force on Crime and Security”.

Dr Cort also observed that it was this report that had prompted the establishment  in 2006  of the Regional Management Framework for Crime and Security which was now responsible, through IMPACS, in partnership with the EU, for the training programme that they had just attended.

Cort described the Caribbean Community and the European Union as natural partners on this issue of the drug trade as  both regions  are negatively affected.

Meanwhile,   Christopoulos of the European Commission made a similar point in his presentation quoting the International Narcotics Board 2008 report which estimates that 40% of the cocaine entering Europe passes through the Caribbean. He described the partnership with the EU on this matter, as a win-win exercise.

Cort  urged  his audience to be mindful of the link between current events in the international environment, and the drug trade. He explained that the increasing interdiction activity of the United States government at its border with Mexico could  inadvertently contribute to the Caribbean receiving more attention from criminals as a transshipment route.

All three speakers agreed that the collaborative approach within the region and between regions held the most promise to reduce the flow of illicit drugs and the criminal activities that it helps to spawn.

Both Cort and Williams thanked the European Union for its contribution while Williams called on participants to apply in full measure all that was garnered and the networking achieved during the course, to ensure that the training had its intended impact at the operational level within their respective territories.