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

*** GRANGER UPGRADES GUYANA’S DEFENCE. Guyana’s new president, David Granger, told a gathering of Guyana Defence Force (GDF) officers on 15 October that the country needed a plan for “total national defence”. The president argued that threats to Guyana’s borders and territorial waters still existed and that “Guyana’s National Defence Strategy should focus on deterrence based…to dissuade a potential adversary from resorting to a particular course of action by convincing him that the costs of pursuing it will outweigh the potential gains.”

Among the president’s proposals was the reconstitution of a ‘reserve force’, previously the Guyana People’s Militia, which should have a minimum strength of 50% of the ‘regular force’. Other changes would be required to develop the GDF’s capacity “to provide continuous surveillance over Guyana’s air, territorial, and maritime borders and approaches”.

A few days later, Granger told parliament: “The chronicle of Venezuela’s provocations and aggression towards Guyana since independence is well known. Through unsubtle threats and undiplomatic coercion, Venezuela has sought to establish itself as the arbiter of Guyana’s development of the entire Essequibo…Venezuela’s claims are not only illegal, they are injurious to the economic development of Guyana.”

*** ANTIGUA’S PREMIER CHALLENGES ECLAC PROJECTIONS. Antigua’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne said on 19 October that the latest forecasts from the Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac) will need to be revised upwards. Eclac recently dropped its economic growth 2015 forecast for Antigua from an earlier prediction of 5.4% to 2%. Browne told parliament: “By the time they would have gotten all the information…I believe strongly that by the end of this year we would have posted 3.5%.” In 2014, the Antiguan economy grew by 2.8%.

Separately, the IMF has urged Antigua to cut tax concessions. It says that the tax ratio to GDP is 17% and that there is “scope for that to increase”. The IMF says that “stronger revenue mobilization” can come from removing concessions and reducing the size of exemptions rather than from increasing tax rates.

*** JAMAICA’S OPPOSITION LEADER ATTACKS MURDER RATE. The leader of the opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Andrew Holness, has warned that serious crime is worsening under the People’s National Party (PNP) government of Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller.

Speaking at a political rally on 30 October, Holness warned: “If you keep the PNP in power, the truth is that you could lose your life. If you keep the PNP in power and the crime rate continues to rise, the truth is that the next murder victim could be you.”

Holness based his attack on the latest figures from the Jamaica Constabulary Force which show that there were 1,016 murders between 1 January and 23 October this year, a 24% increase on the same period last year when there were 822 murders.

The further political point made by Holness was that under the last JLP government, the annual murder total was brought down to 1,125 in 2011. In fact in 2014, under the present government, the total was 1,005, down from 1,200 in 2013, but it is now clearly on the increase again.