Caribbean & Central America - June 2022

*** ANTI-COLONIALISM PLAYS INTO BVI CRISIS. Recent visits by British royal family members to the Caribbean have been marked by a sudden drive towards republican status for territories that still have Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. Barbados made the move in November 2021, and others are indicating their intention to follow suit. Those that may do so include Belize, The Bahamas, Jamaica, Grenada, Antigua & Barbuda, and St Kitts & Nevis. In addition, the royal visits, by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and by the Earl and Countess of Wessex, also promoted renewed calls for reparations from the UK for its part in the slave trade. All of this has served to complicate the UK’s response to the arrest on 28 April in the US of Andrew Fahie, the premier of the British Virgin Islands (BVI), on drug-trafficking charges. Fahie’s arrest was followed a day later by the publication of a report from a Commission of Inquiry (COI) into corruption and the abuse of authority in the BVI.

The COI found “appalling” failures in the BVI’s governance and a “high likelihood” that serious corruption had occurred. It made a series of recommendations, including the suspension of the current system of governance in the BVI for at least two years. This prompted the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), a seven-nation sub-regional grouping, to issue a statement describing the recommendation as “a retrograde step in the evolution of the democratic process that is inconsistent with the United Nations Proclamation of Human Rights to be free of colonial rule”. “It is clear to us that, in principle, it is ill-advised to impose direct colonial rule and the history of such imposition in the Caribbean has never delivered the desired result,” the OECS said in the statement. The 15-nation Caribbean Community (Caricom) echoed these sentiments in a statement of its own, stressing that the “imposition of direct rule, and the history of such imposition in the Caribbean, was never intended to deliver democratic governance or to be an instrument of economic and social development of our countries and peoples”.

*** ST KITTS & NEVIS HEADING FOR GENERAL ELECTION. On 10 May, facing an imminent vote of no confidence that he was set to lose due to the defection of six members of the Team Unity coalition government, Prime Minister Timothy Harris asked SKN’s governor general to dissolve parliament, thus paving the way for a general election. The coalition government, which won re-election in 2020, is made up of the prime minister’s People’s Labour Party (PLP); the People’s Action Movement (PAM) led by ousted deputy prime minister of St Kitts Shawn Richards; and the Concerned Citizens Movement (CCM) led by the also estranged Nevis premier (and ousted foreign affairs minister) Mark Brantley. Before its dissolution, the coalition held nine of the 11 seats in parliament, with the opposition St Kitts-Nevis Labour Party (SKNLP) holding the other two.

SKNLP leader Terrance Drew responded to the dissolution of parliament by saying: “God has set out the nation on the rightful path to liberation after seven long years of oppressive government, seven long years of scandal after scandal, seven long years of tarnishing our country’s reputation.”

*** GANGS PROLIFERATING IN TRINIDAD & TOBAGO AS MURDER RATE SOARS. According to Trinidad’s acting police commissioner, McDonald Jacob, there are now 134 criminal gangs active in the country. Speaking on 10 May, Jacob said: “Our analysis has shown that 60% of the murders in Trinidad and Tobago is, in fact, gang-related and about 80% of our shootings and woundings are also gang-related. These gangs are now involved in illegal quarrying, drugs, robbery, extortion, and land grabbing, human trafficking and most recently, they are involved in the sale of illegal guns.” According to research by the Criminology Unit at the University of the West Indies, after suffering more than 200 murders in the first five months of the year, T&T is on course to surpass its highest number of annual murders, 547 recorded in 2008.