Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

The num­ber of guns leav­ing US ports bound for the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca has no­tice­ably in­creased over the past sev­en years, ac­cord­ing to a re­gion­al se­cu­ri­ty up­date.

The trend was one of sev­er­al high­light­ed in a ten-page doc­u­ment com­piled by the Cari­com Im­ple­men­ta­tion Agency for Crime and Se­cu­ri­ty (IM­PACS), the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA) and the Small Arms Sur­vey.

The re­port which used da­ta ob­tained from US Cus­toms and Bor­der Pro­tec­tion (CBP) was pub­lished yes­ter­day and not­ed that seizures of firearm ship­ments at US ports in­tend­ed for the Caribbean in­creased by 48 per cent from 2016 to 2023.

This uptick re­flects a sharp in­crease in the num­ber of gun ship­ments seized, with 138 seizures from 2020 to 2023, com­pared to on­ly 93 seizures be­tween 2016 and 2019.

The da­ta al­so sug­gest­ed that there was a grad­ual in­crease in as­sault ri­fles be­ing ex­port­ed to the re­gion with an eight per cent in­crease for the same pe­ri­od.

The re­port not­ed that as­sault ri­fles were seized at a high­er fre­quen­cy in ship­ments to the Caribbean than in Latin Amer­i­ca, de­spite be­ing com­par­a­tive­ly low­er in num­ber to Latin Amer­i­ca.

Just this week, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds said law en­force­ment of­fi­cials no­ticed that AR-15 as­sault ri­fles were the weapon of choice by gangs in this coun­try.

The use of as­sault ri­fles in gang-re­lat­ed at­tacks has pre­vi­ous­ly been at­trib­uted to T&T’s high mur­der toll by for­mer act­ing po­lice com­mis­sion­er Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob, as it can cause the death of mul­ti­ple vic­tims in a sin­gle vol­ley of shots.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment, re­gion­al se­cu­ri­ty con­sul­tant and for­mer di­rec­tor of the Na­tion­al Op­er­a­tions Cen­tre Garvin Heer­ah said the da­ta was proof of the com­pli­cat­ed, mul­ti-faceted prob­lem of il­le­gal arms traf­fick­ing.

Re­fer­ring to trends in the preva­lence and use of as­sault ri­fles, Heer­ah not­ed that it was re­flec­tive of a dis­turb­ing trend where high-pow­ered weapons were in high de­mand from lo­cal crim­i­nals.

“Be­fore on a block where a drug deal­er or a gang leader was com­fort­able with two 9mm pis­tols, that in­ter­est is no longer there.

“He wants the Air Jor­dan of guns, he wants an AR-15 or an au­to­mat­ic ri­fle in or­der to have that rank out there on the block in the Caribbean, so he is no longer in­ter­est­ed in 9mm pis­tols,” he said.

Heer­ah said while re­gion­al gov­ern­ments and US agen­cies have be­gun work on ad­dress­ing the in­flux of weapons in­to the Caribbean, a more de­ter­mined, con­sis­tent ap­proach was need­ed.

Re­fer­ring to on­go­ing ef­forts by the US to clamp down on the en­try of il­le­gal drugs in­to their coun­try from Latin Amer­i­ca, Heer­ah said a sim­i­lar com­mit­ment was need­ed in ad­dress­ing the flow of guns in­to the re­gion.

He rec­om­mend­ed that a Caribbean In­ves­ti­ga­tions Bu­reau be es­tab­lished which would have the flex­i­bil­i­ty and au­thor­i­ty to pur­sue transna­tion­al crime.

“This unit should have the au­ton­o­my and au­thor­i­ty to in­ves­ti­gate transna­tion­al or­gan­ised crime across Caribbean states and the ju­ris­dic­tion to ar­rest and bring peo­ple be­fore the courts.

“We must ad­dress this with ro­bust in­ves­ti­ga­tions and a con­sis­ten­cy of plan­ning and polic­ing.”

Con­tact­ed for com­ment on Fri­day, DCP Op­er­a­tions Ju­nior Ben­jamin said while he was yet to see the re­port, he as­sured that the TTPS was ca­pa­ble and pre­pared to con­tin­ue their gun-re­trieval ex­er­cise with col­lab­o­ra­tion from in­tel­li­gence part­ners.

“Once we have the in­for­ma­tion, we are go­ing to work on the in­for­ma­tion to en­sure we turn the in­tel­li­gence in­to ev­i­dence and to bring per­pe­tra­tors to jus­tice.”

The re­port al­so not­ed that out of 16 US cities, most gun ship­ments bound for the Caribbean were seized in Mi­a­mi, Flori­da, with 206 ship­ments re­cov­ered by law en­force­ment over sev­en years.