sun-sentinel.com
Sunrise group fights violence in native Trinidad and Tobago
By Alva James-Johnson
Staff Writer
Posted August 15 2005
Carl Branker traveled to Colombia in the spring and felt safer than in his homeland, Trinidad and Tobago.
Security officers stood guard at the gate of his Colombian hotel, and checkpoints dotted the road to and from the airport.
Branker and other island nationals in South Florida said they wish government officials would be as diligent in their twin-island tropical homeland, now besieged by an epidemic of kidnappings and other crimes.
"I wouldn't want to see a security guard with a machine gun on every corner, but if it takes that before blood spills over the land, so let it be," said Branker, a Pembroke Pines resident. "I'm afraid if something is not done soon, that's where it's heading."
Branker is part of a group of nationals that began meeting about four months ago in Sunrise to address escalating crime on the twin islands.
The project, called Voices of T&T, is coordinated by Maha Helping Hands of South Florida, a group formed in 2004 to organize charitable projects in the Caribbean community.
Those involved are mainly East Indians from the twin-island nation's business sector whose families have been targeted.
Prak Supan, one of the organizers, said the group is nonpolitical but has been lobbying the islands' government for stronger law enforcement. Members said they are mobilizing nationals in South Florida, regardless of race.
Trinidad and Tobago, a country of 1.3 million people, sits on top of natural gas and oil fields, making it one of the wealthiest nations in the Caribbean. The island nation off the coast of Venezuela is composed mostly of Africans and East Indians, who tend to be divided politically.
"Politicians in Trinidad use race against each other," Supan said. "That's not going to work for the general populace. Everyone's going to benefit only if everyone gets on the same bandwagon."
Crime has been a significant problem since the 1990s, when a radical Muslim group, the Jamaat al-Muslimeen, tried to overthrow the government and held the prime minister and members of parliament hostage for five days.
The country has also been a trans-shipment port for drugs smuggled from South America to North America and Europe.
On Wednesday a bomb exploded on a busy street in Port-of-Spain, the capital, sending bystanders fleeing, according to The Associated Press. While no injuries were reported, the incident came a month after a bomb exploded inside a trash bin in the city, injuring 14 people. Police detained a suspect Friday for questioning and were searching for another, The Associated Press reported.
So far this year, the country has had 122 kidnappings, compared to a total of 162 in 2004, according to statistics compiled by the Trinidad and Tobago Express, a national daily newspaper.
Police have classified 28 as "kidnappings for ransom," while in most of the other cases victims were held for a couple of days and released, according to the newspaper.
The country has suffered 219 murders since January, compared to 259 for all of 2004, the newspaper reported. Ninety-one of the murders have occurred since May 26.
That's when Keith Noel, an employee of Tropical Power Limited, a generating systems company in Chaguanas, was hacked to death in his home and became the 136th murder victim. After his death, the owner of the company, Stephen Cadiz, and his employees formed a group to petition the government for changes. So far the Keith Noel 136 Committee has collected about 90,000 signatures, about 15 percent of them from nationals abroad who can sign at www.trinidadmurders.org.
"They visit Trinidad, and they have families here," said Cadiz. "They would like to come home to retire, but now they fear coming home,"
Some media reports have ranked the country second only to Colombia in the rate of kidnappings. But Tom Cash, who handles kidnapping negotiations in the Caribbean and Latin America for Kroll Inc., a risk-consulting firm, said numbers are not reliable because most of the kidnappings go unreported.
He said the top four countries for kidnappings are Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala and Brazil. But Trinidad and Tobago draws a lot of attention because it's an anomaly in the Caribbean region.
"Kidnappings and ransoms are a rarity in the Caribbean," Cash said. "I think what's fueling the kidnappings is the success of the kidnappers and the inability of the police to have the necessary laws and flexibility to catch [them]."
James Clement, the island nation's consul general in Miami, said Trinidadian authorities are working with the United States and other governments to address the crime problem.
"I don't think the crime situation in Trinidad and Tobago is any different to any place in the world," he said.
Some expatriates questioned whether nationals living in South Florida could really make a difference.
"A group here is not really going to influence the process in Trinidad significantly," said Glenn Joseph, a Trinidadian political and economic development consultant in South Florida. "The Trinidadian government, while it recognizes its nationals abroad, is not as dependent on them as other Caribbean countries because they're oil and gas rich."
Anthony Bryan, a native of Trinidad and professor emeritus in the Caribbean studies program of the University of Miami, said amateurs kidnapping people for profit are perpetrating much of the crime in the country.
"Kidnapping is seen as a business," he said. "There are lots of guns in the place, and [kidnappers] are inspired by the ransom they think the families are going to pay."
Energy when i say some man with a gun may have jays wife and kid in his hands - do you think this is just mere fantasy?
www.trinidadmurders.org
Study a little on jays home - it is not all blue drinks with umbrellas in them and lots of pretty sunshine.
trinidadexpress.com
Its like al capones chicago! hehe |
