Caribbean & Central America - April 2015 (ISSN 1741-4458)

*** BARBADOS PM LETS OBAMA KNOW OF FRUSTRATIONS. Barbados’s Prime Minister Freundel Stuart expressed a series of frustrations with the US at the recent one-day Caricom-US summit in Jamaica. He called for a more structured partnership, and he said that the Caribbean nations should not be seen as “elegant nuisances, or angry and dejected supplicants ringing the doorbell or banging on the door of the United States of America”.

He raised a number of specific gripes. The first was the constant representation of many Caribbean nations as “tax havens” and the imposition of “change after change in the rules that apply to our jurisdictions”. Secondly, he complained about the provision of “trade-distorting subsidies” to rum producers in the US territories of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

And, thirdly, he revealed the frustrations felt by the small Caribbean nations in dealings with the US authorities whereby obligations imposed on the Caribbean are not always reciprocated by the US. His example was the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which he said was justified on the grounds of revenue protection and enhancement but which, he feared, “may not be applied evenly in respect of the right of access of the US to information as against the exercise of a similar right by our jurisdictions”.

*** TRINIDAD & TOBAGO PLAYS UP PRE-ELECTION GOOD NEWS. There has been good news for Trinidad both on oil production and tourism, which is particularly welcome for the government in an election year. On the oil front, the Energy Ministry is pointing to a year-on-year increase in production of more than 4% for Q1 2015. Production is said to have reached around 83,000 barrels per day (bpd) compared with 79,466 bpd in Q1 2014.

The People’s Partnership (PP) government was quick to claim the credit for this increase and to contrast its performance with the previous People’s National Movement (PNM) government (2007-2010). Energy Minister Kevin Ramnarine said: “Oil production had been in decline since 2006 due to a lack of strategic focus by the former PNM administration. Our harshest critics would agree, and the facts would show, that under this government we have not only stabilized production but have managed to realize an increase in output.”

On tourism, the first quarter of 2015 showed a 20% increase in visitor arrivals, a significant movement given that the US is the source of 40% of all visitors to Trinidad.

*** DINO GOES DOWN. On 10 March, Dino Bouterse, the son of Suriname’s President Desi Bouterse, was sentenced by a New York court to just over 16 years in prison for attempting to provide material support to Hezbollah – the Lebanese militant group designated as a terrorist organization by the US – for arms offences, and for drug trafficking. The particular embarrassment is that Dino Bouterse was instrumental in setting up Suriname’s counter-terrorism unit. He is said to have discussed supplying Hezbollah with surface-to-air missiles for use against US targets. But he was trapped in a sting operation, and the judge accepted that his motivation was greed rather than the desire to cause great harm, so he was spared the 30-year sentence that the prosecutors were seeking.

Suriname goes to the polls on 25 May, with President Bouterse’s National Democratic Party (NDP) defending a slim one-seat majority in the 51-seat National Assembly. Bouterse, who first came to power through the barrel of a gun following a coup in February 1980, was constitutionally elected president in 2010. The president is elected by the majority in the National Assembly.