Multi-media journalist Urvashi Tiwari-Roopnarine has been investigating T&T’s flourishing illegal drug trade for the past several weeks. That journey has taken her to several parts of the country for extensive interviews with several people involved in the trade, people who have been researching it and members of the law enforcement agencies charged with trying to prevent the activity.
Today, she chats with some sources on how the drugs are brought into the country in part three of her six-part series on the trade titled Cracks in Our Borders.
Illicit trade researcher Darius Figueira says that boat running brings only the leftovers of drug cargo into T&T. “The good old days of product coming in on pirogues and floating across the Gulf of Paria, that is now passé. The prime method is containerised cargo,” he told the Guardian Media Limited (GML) Enterprise Desk.
He said other than being geographically close, T&T’s involvement in international trade provided a bigger platform for international drug cartels—the prospect of conducting their illicit trade under the guise of seemingly legitimate businesses. He said, “Any trafficker worth his salt would want to mix his product with the products that enter and exit T&T, because we have the volume of trade and financial volume by which traffickers will mix their product and dirty money,” he said.
Minister of National Security Gary Griffith has a similar opinion. “Obviously we have heavy illegal entry of guns and drugs into the country. Is it because of illegal ports of entry or is it through legitimate ports of entry through containers or people who enter through the airport?” he asked.
In January 2014, TT$644 million dollars’ worth of cocaine was intercepted in a container in Norfolk, United States. The drugs were hidden in crates of a fruit juice which is manufactured here in T&T and this country was its port of origin.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation stepped in to help T&T police with the case, but the public is yet to hear of any substantial breakthrough, although Griffith and the police repeatedly said during the course of last year that it was being thoroughly investigated and was at a sensitive stage.
Head of International Relations at the University of the West Indies, Professor Andy Knight, agrees with the theory that drug cartels transport their cargo through legal means, which means that legal ports would necessarily have to be infiltrated. The lack of proper infrastructure to deal with the millions of containers which come into these ports annually, including modern scanners, is but one weakness which the drug cartels take advantage of.
“It seems as though there is a fair amount of corruption at the ports of entry and, also, I don’t think there is sufficient security at the ports of entry in T&T to be able to deal with every single cargo ship. What they’re doing is spot checking,” Knight said.
ILLEGAL ECONOMIES
The UN estimated that during the period January to June 2008, 564 metric tonnes of cocaine were transited by sea through the Caribbean.This is equivalent to about 20 40-foot containers filled with cocaine.
Retired Commodore Anthony Franklin, then in his capacity as director of the Institute of Marine Affairs, also pointed out that 90 per cent of drugs entering the Caribbean reached its final destination, in a document titled Prevention and Suppression of Transnational Organised Crime, which used figures for the 2007-2008 period.
Prof Knight says in order to move these shipments, underworld elements forge alliances not only with customs officials but at every echelon necessary to keep the business afloat. “The real issue is that there is so much money involved, in some cases revenues surpass the revenues or GDPs of countries in the region,” Knight said.
He said this was the money which churned small economies and created symbiotic relationships throughout societies, making it difficult for all states to fight trafficking. They can outspend you, they can outpace you—speedier boats than Coast Guard, sometimes [they] have light aircraft—making them more difficult to deal with this type of organisation with the limited amount of revenue.”
Once the cargo got to its destination, Knight said, money laundering then put the dirty money to illicit use and shell companies were set up to funnel payments through a process of over or under invoicing. Economist Dr Roger Hosein explained how this worked. “So you may buy something from Colombia for two million dollars that is really for 40 dollars and the surplus money is used to pay for other type of products,” he said.
Corrupt officials
The International Security Sector Advisory Team’s current country profile of T&T says, “Reports of corruption among the police, the armed forces and customs officials are also frequent, and many officials are not properly or routinely vetted.” One senior Customs and Excise officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said all cargo entering our ports of entry was subject to checks, except delivery-authorised containers.
“When the shipper has been compliant, with a proven track record of paying all taxes, you know everything has been above board; they get a green clearance,” he said, in explaining what the delivery-authorised system means. But all other cargo is selected at random for scanning.
“This means we take out everything from the container and we go through it and make sure the same items declared are the same items in it, because we have had cases where things are not dutiable and too many items in containers were not declared,” he said. Over the years, he said, drug smugglers had also been innovative in how they brought in their cargo, even hiding the contraband in hollowed out vegetables and power tools.
Asked why each container was not scanned given the issues with shipments of contraband, he said, “If you have to do each container it will be time consuming and there would be people who would have to pay a lot of demurrage, so you pick and choose shippers, especially first-time shippers.” This system is not unique to T&T. Indeed, Figueira says, even in the United States it’s impossible to check every shipment.
“The volume of trade and product moving into the USA, [there is] no way you can flag everything and search everything 100 per cent," Figueira said. Figueira also said traffickers flooded the State with a torrent of narcotics, so little could be done to combat the contraband world. They also ensured that the bulk of their product got to its destination by recruiting customs officials, he said.
“Don’t send anything by chance. Make sure when my product lands you have customs officers on duty to clear it,” he said.