The illegal firearms count in T&T can be as high as 15,000. This was the opinion of Opposition Senator Fitzgerald Hinds. He also said that a gun can be bought in Venezuela for as cheap as US$100. Hinds was speaking on the spate of gun-related crimes and murders affecting the country. The murder toll has reached 16 (13 of them gun related) for the first ten days of the new year.
Speaking to the Sunday Guardian on Thursday, Hinds said: “Seventy-five per cent of murders take place with firearms. The easy access to firearms is a major part of the problem. Police reported seizing approximately 500 illegal firearms, and those in the know estimate that there were about 12,000 to 15,000 illegal firearms in the country.
“This figure is not too farfetched as T&T is just 25 minutes away from Venezuela. There’s regular traffic between the mainland and T&T, and we’ve been informed that persons can purchase an illegal firearm in Venezuela for as little as US$100. “This country’s investment in border security is very important, the PNM had a security policy, an OPV, and helicopter programmes and the Government dismantled them in the name of politics four years ago.
“We’re naked, unprotected and exposed. As a result, drugs and guns are brought here and we have little control to the extent that little boys in our communities have easy access to these lethal weapons.” Venezuela has a factory that produces modern variants of the Russian AK-47 rifle.
He said not only were these weapons coming in small boats to T&T, fishermen were going down to the mainland and returning with a layer of fish on top and guns and cocaine hidden below, which was a more bountiful harvest than fish. Hinds said that it was a myth that only big shots with large ships and “big money” were bringing in guns and drugs.
“Little people,” yachties and poor fishermen also contributed substantially to the illicit trade all along the North coast, to the South-Western Peninsula and Cedros, he said. He said not only were T&T’s borders terribly porous, the guns and drugs were entering the country at legal ports of entry, concealed among legitimate cargo such as the 40-foot container with $30 million of high grade Arizona marijuana hidden among frozen chicken parts at the Port of Point Lisas in 2011.
Hinds said official and state-supported corruption were also major contributors to the gun problem. He said customs officers, police officers or people in authority can be bribed to turn a blind eye and in some cases, assist in importing and clearing their illicit shipments from legal ports of entry.
Hinds said there was no way to solve the crime problem until it was dealt with a full frontal assault against state-supported corruption, corrupt police, Customs, Immigration, Defence Force and airport security elements. He said the 360 degree radar investment could be rendered useless in 20 minutes by the operator who could be paid to turn a blind eye to every ship that passed under his watch.
Hinds called for proper certification and integrity testing such as regular and unscheduled polygraph and drug testing for the people who were sworn to protect and not supplicate themselves to importers or merchants of death to the country’s detriment.
Daurius Figueira: Go after the gun merchants
Criminologist Daurius Figueira said in order to reduce the rising level of deaths due to gun violence, the first thing was to determine how the guns were entering the country and go after the gun merchants and brokers to stem the importation of weapons. He said since before the end of the 20th century T&T has never dismantled any illicit gun trafficking and retailing organisations which were also linked with the drug trade.
Figueira said people continued to hold on to the myopic ‘80s view that some drugs and guns were coming in on pirogues on a small scale, but in reality there is an organised transnational small arms trafficking nexus throughout the Caribbean that emanated from different countries from Latin America. He said the first source country for illegal firearms was Venezuela and now it is Brazil, with its Taurus gun manufacturing company making reproductions of Beretta and Glock pistols.
Figueira said more and more reliance was now being placed on Brazil as a source country as guns were increasingly entering the Caribbean island chains from the Central American pipeline. He said Latin America was flooded with weaponry from around the world and the influx of illegal arms in Guyana were predominantly of Brazilian origin.