In what may well have been her first public pronouncement since her recent appointment, the new United States Ambassador to Jamaica Pamela Bridgewater has declared her intention to set her face against corruption during her diplomatic tenure on the island. Fighting corruption, she said, has been part of her personal agenda during earlier diplomatic postings which postings have included South Africa, Benin, Ghana and Jamaica.
Ambassadorial appointments are usually preceded by Foreign Office (the State Department in the case of the United States) pre-posting briefings on issues considered to be important to bilateral relations between the sending and receiving countries. We can therefore assume that her personal convictions aside, the Ambassador’s pronouncement in Kingston would have derived from the content of her pre-posting briefing. In other words, she would have been conveying an official message to Kingston from Washington.
In typical diplomatic fashion the Ambassador did not neglect to congratulate Jamaica on its improvement in Transparency International’s global corruption index – aware though she would have been that the country’s current 84th place ranking places it only just inside the top half of the 178 countries surveyed by Transparency International. That congratulatory note, therefore, was meant as no more than a soft, diplomatic introduction to a sterner substantive pronouncement on Washington’s concern over corruption in Jamaica.
Since the United States’ foreign policy posture on corruption can hardly be said to be confined to Jamaica, one can also assume that what Ambassador Bridgewater had to say about corruption, though directed specifically at Jamaica, was not intended to fall on deaf ears in the rest of the region, certainly not in Guyana where TI’s corruption ranking places us in the bottom half of the international corruption league table.
Of course, Washington has repeatedly pronounced on the matter of corruption in Guyana through its annual State Department reports, and while these and various other reports are routinely frowned upon by the political administration here, the government, in its own deliberate and private judgment, cannot pretend not to be aware of the magnitude of the problem here.
Setting aside the oft-stated concerns in Washing-ton that corruption impacts negatively on US poverty-alleviation pursuits in developing countries and puts monies set aside in its own budget for development initiatives elsewhere into pockets for which those monies were not intended, there is another, perhaps more significant underpinning to the US foreign policy posture on corruption. Little has changed since the introduction in 2002 by George W Bush of the National Security Strategy in which he declared that “poverty, weak institutions and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders.” Bush went further, declaring that the US National Security Strategy would embody the use of its “economic engagement with other countries to underscore” its “intolerance of corruption.” The point the then United States President was seeking to make – and it may well have gone virtually unnoticed in some parts of the Caribbean – was that in tagging anti-corruption as a tenet of its foreign policy the United States was in fact addressing a national security concern.
Bush’s pronouncement, made as it was in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack, was intended to send a signal to the rest of the international community regarding a new US national security paradigm that regarded corruption as a bedfellow of terrorism.
Jamaica, given its geographic proximity to the United States, its high crime rate and its history of powerful drug cartels some of which have made their presence felt on US soil to telling effect, would be very much on Washington’s radar since corruption in that country is likely to be perceived by US foreign policy analysts as a possible direct threat to America’s national security interests. Accordingly, Washington would clearly have a strong vested interest in exerting such pressures as it can to rein in corruption in Jamaica. The fact that it has chosen to appoint a self-confessed disciple of anti-corruption as its new Ambassador to Jamaica, and to instruct the Ambassador to send an early and unambiguous signal to the effect that the issue of corruption will feature prominently on the diplomatic agenda, can be regarded as an unmistakable sign that the United States now seeks to treat more seriously with the issue of corruption in the Caribbean as a whole.
Here in Guyana corruption-related activities have come to the fore in the form of increased drug-trafficking, suspected widespread money-laundering and – as documented in successive reports published by the Office of the Auditor General – clear evidence of a persistent pattern of corrupt practices in state institutions that employ various schemes involving collusion between state officials and private operators to steal from the public treasury. In the particular case of the instances of those practices cited in the Auditor General’s reports, what is particularly striking is the decided lack of success – some say even lack of effort – on the part of the authorities to curb these practices.
Ambassador Bridgewater’s corruption pronouncement, therefore, while having been made in Kingston and specifically directed at the authorities in Jamaica is well worth the attention of the various other capitals in the region. Certainly, the authorities here in Guyana can hardly pretend that her pronouncement does not, in a very real way, apply to us.
