The problem has been receiving increased international attention over the past 20 years and especially since the decade of the 1990s. A series of inter-linked factors, loosely associated with the course of globalisation and the end of the Cold War, appear to be at work.

First, global inequality has increased significantly since the early 1980s, both within and between nations. The debt crisis and structural adjustment programmes have taken a heavy toll in human and social costs. Social safety nets have disintegrated in eastern and southern Europe and in the failed states in parts of Africa. Human security, in basic economic and social terms, has deteriorated.

The cities of the South - and increasingly those of the North - are crowded with desperate people, especially young males, willing to try desperate means to get their share of the economic pie.

Second, arms and ammunition are in plentiful supply in a huge underground trade: Supplies have been augmented by the break-up of the Soviet system and the end of the wars of liberation in Africa and of the civil wars in Central America.

Third, globalisation has facilitated the spread of transnational crime syndicates.

Deregulation of financial systems and capital flows have enabled the transfer and channelling of funds into legitimate businesses. Trade liberalisation has given rise to porous borders. Rising human insecurity has fuelled drug abuse. Prostitution and human smuggling have become integral parts of the global crime business.

And fourth, fiscal deficits have made it increasingly difficult for many governments to discharge their responsibilities in the area of security. As criminal resources have grown, state resources have shrunk.

The illicit drug industry alone generates, by conservative estimates, about $500 billion a year in revenues. This is far more than the combined GDP of 24 states in the Greater Caribbean region.

The world trade in illegal drugs is worth anywhere from $100 billion (UN figure) to $500 billion (US figure). CARICOM and Central America together export $32 billion worth of goods and services.

But there are several factors that make the Greater Caribbean region especially vulnerable to the spin-offs of the international crime industry. One is its geographic location: The region sits astride transshipment routes for illegal drugs between the main producing and consuming centres. The map below says it all.

A second is its geographic and political fragmentation: There are 25 independent states and 12 affiliated territories. Together with this is the small size of the majority of its jurisdictions; 23 of which have less than one million people.

Crime and security (2)
The Caribbean Corridors

IN THE global crime industry, the traffic in illegal drugs is a major component. Heroin, cocaine and cannabis (ganja) are the principal commodities. Although cannabis is the leader in terms of users, unit prices and profits are highest for heroin and cocaine. The industrial countries are the major markets for illegal drugs, though consumption has been increasing steadily in the developing world and in Eastern Europe.

While the heroin trade originates in Asia, the cocaine and cannabis trade is centred in the Americas. Estimates published by the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODCCP, Global Illicit Drug Trends 2002) provide an outline of the scale and geographical pattern of the industry in the hemisphere.

For cocaine, just three countries are reported to account for global production: Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. Estimates are given for area cultivated in coca, potential production of coca leaf and potential production of cocaine.

The figures indicate significant changes in the second half of the 1980s and in the 1990s. Between 1985 and 1999 estimated global cultivation increased by 83 per cent, but coca leaf production more than doubled and cocaine production more than tripled. In other words, yields have increased dramatically due to improved production methods and technology.

There has also been a marked shift in the location of production from Bolivia and Peru to Colombia. In 1985, Colombia's share in the industry was small. By 2001, it accounted for 69 per cent of coca cultivation, 77 per cent of potential coca leaf production and 75 per cent of potential cocaine production.

The shift helps to explain why the Greater Caribbean region occupies a central position in trans-shipment routes for both the North American and European markets. An OAS report on Maritime Drug Trafficking Routes and Methods in the Americas (CICAD/Doc.984/98) identifies two major routing areas: the `Amazon corridor’ and the `Caribbean corridor’.

The Amazon corridor involves parts of Brazil, Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia and Paraguay. The Caribbean corridor involves the countries of northern South and Central America and the island chain.

The Caribbean corridor itself involves two routes, both originating from Colombia's North Coast and from Venezuela. One is centred on Puerto Rico, where the drug is re-packaged and staged for direct shipments into the US East Coast. `Go-fast boats’ follow the Venezuelan coastline and proceed either directly to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti or keeping close to the coasts of the eastern Caribbean islands, blending with normal traffic.

In the second, vessels follow a northwesterly course into the western Caribbean to locations on or near the shore of the Yucatan Peninsula for off-loading of cocaine to transit Mexico.

In 1999, 33 countries in the Greater Caribbean provided estimates of trafficking (Table). The list includes most of the Caribbean islands, large and small, independent and non-independent and all of Central America. Many believe that this trafficking lies behind the steep growth in homicides in several countries in recent years.

Estimated cocaine trafficking in the Greater Caribbean, 1999

Sub-region No. of countries reporting Trafficking (kg.)

Island Caribbean 21(1) 11,604

Central America 7 (2) 16,690

South America 4 (3) 76,572

North America 1 (4) 34,622

1) Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, British Virgin Islands.

(2) Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama.

(3) Colombia, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela

(4) Mexico.

Source: UNODCCP: Global Illicit Drug Trends, 2002.

Crime and Caribbean Security (3) Cannabis Connections
CANNABIS (ganja) is the most popular illegal drug worldwide, with an estimated 147 million users, compared to 13 million for cocaine and nine million for heroin. It is grown in all regions of the world, the United States itself being a major producer. In 2000, one-half of world trafficking took place in the Greater Caribbean region, by United Nations estimates.

The big difference between cannabis and other illegal drugs is in unit prices and profits. In the United States the average price of cannabis herb is roughly one-eighth that of cocaine on wholesale and retail markets. The price differential reflects the considerably greater narcotic effects of cocaine (demand factor) and the concentration of control efforts on this drug (supply factor).

For the small countries of Central America and the island Caribbean, cannabis exceeds cocaine in trafficking by a factor of 3.4 in terms of quantity, but is less than 40 per cent of the cocaine trade in value, when measured by prices on the U.S. market. When the countries on the northern rim of South America are included, the value comparison turns even more decisively in favour of cocaine (see table).

The economics of relative prices and returns vis-a-vis risks explain the shifts in the trade during the 1980s and 1990s. With the rapid growth in the cocaine trade from South America to North America and Europe, the Caribbean region came to occupy a strategic geographic position for warehousing, packaging and trans-shipment. Criminal syndicates with a continental reach are said to have utilised existing cannabis distribution networks based in the western Caribbean mainland and islands.

In business terms, strategic alliances were made, based on the complementary assets of the partners: control over supply and distribution networks of the major syndicates and the locational advantages of the intermediaries.

Geo-economic changes in production and supply corridors in the late 1990s resulted in a shifting of trans-shipments routes towards the eastern Caribbean. With this came new alliances and their inevitable spin-offs in the form of turf wars. Money-laundering through off-shore financial centres added to the mix.