Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

One day af­ter the Unit­ed States De­part­ment of State an­nounced a pol­i­cy ef­fec­tive­ly bar­ring peo­ple from en­ter­ing the US over con­cerns about cor­rup­tion and drug traf­fick­ing, Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der said the Gov­ern­ment would not rec­om­mend any­one to be black­list­ed.

On Mon­day, a state­ment is­sued by the US De­part­ment of State an­nounced the pol­i­cy would be rolled out to tar­get peo­ple and their im­me­di­ate fam­i­ly mem­bers iden­ti­fied as seek­ing to “un­der­mine de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly-elect­ed gov­ern­ments through cor­rup­tion or nar­co-traf­fick­ing ac­tiv­i­ties.”

The state­ment iden­ti­fied sev­er­al peo­ple in Ecuador, Colom­bia, Bo­livia and Pe­ru who could face sanc­tions, in­clud­ing hav­ing any US visas they held ren­dered in­el­i­gi­ble.

Re­spond­ing to this de­ci­sion at the de­struc­tion of nar­cotics at the Ca­roni Cre­ma­tion Site yes­ter­day, Alexan­der said the de­ci­sion to add any T&T na­tion­al on such a list would fall square­ly with­in the re­mit of the US gov­ern­ment.

“We al­low the Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment to bring their in­tel­li­gence and if there are peo­ple in Trinidad and To­ba­go who run afoul... or they have in­tel­li­gence about, then they treat with it ac­cord­ing­ly.

“We have no ju­ris­dic­tion over what the Amer­i­cans do. So we let them do their thing and that’s ex­act­ly what hap­pened there.”

Alexan­der fur­ther stressed the im­por­tance of col­lab­o­ra­tions with US in­tel­li­gence agen­cies, not­ing that the work of ex­ter­nal agen­cies was in­valu­able in pro­vid­ing in­for­ma­tion for lo­cal se­cu­ri­ty op­er­a­tions.

He added that while he could not iden­ti­fy how many of the drugs de­stroyed dur­ing yes­ter­day’s ex­er­cise were seized us­ing for­eign-based in­tel­li­gence, he main­tained that such agen­cies played a crit­i­cal role for an­ti-crime op­er­a­tions.

“They con­tin­ue to sup­port us. That’s our part­ners and they are in this fight to­geth­er with the TTPS.

“I can’t give you a def­i­nite, one, two, three or four... How­ev­er they are part of our se­cu­ri­ty ap­pa­ra­tus in terms of the in­tel­li­gence they pro­vide to us.”