Fear is suffocating the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago, said Garvin Heerah, regional security expert and strategic security consultant.

Heerah said he was concerned about reports of increased gang activity and gang-related homicides across the country.

Speaking Friday during a virtual pre-budget discussion on “Are crime levels derailing the next budget’s good intentions?” organized by the Business and Economic Development Unit of the University of the West Indies, Heerah said crime has affected all aspects of the country, politically, socially, economically and technologically.

He said the national budget presented tomorrow by the Minister of Finance must reflect initiatives aimed at stabilizing the country to reduce fear among citizens.

Heerah said: “Whatever your status and position in society, a fear has gripped the country, and as we approach Monday (Budget Day), our review of the financial year, we hope that some The funding that will be dedicated to national security and certain other ministries is aimed at reducing the fear of our citizens so that the impact on the economy can be mitigated.

“We must understand that for the economy to be stabilized, depending on how we view our spending and our profits, and as a national platform, fear must be reduced, and this will involve the whole role of police, law enforcement and national security aspects,” Heerah said.

Crime, politics and economics

He explained how crime continues to affect politics.

“Crime affects and impacts the politics of this country. We now see that a government can actually come to power because of crime, or that a government can have to leave office because of crime. Crime therefore has a significant impact on the politics of the country, and we recognize that organized crime is endemic in Trinidad and Tobago.

“Organized crime has allowed its tentacles to penetrate official offices in Trinidad and Tobago. Crime therefore has an impact on the entire political stability of our country and we see it. We are seeing crisis management based on politics,” he said.

Heerah added: “Crime has affected the economy. If I were a foreign investor and saw what was happening in Trinidad and Tobago, the criminality would have struck fear into foreign investor circles. T&T’s business chambers face crises; everyone is scared and thinking about what tomorrow brings and how can I invest to ensure the continuity of a crime situation that is getting out of control,” he said.

He said the social fabric of T&T has also been affected by crime.

He said criminal activity is now what some communities depend on to exist.

“From what we’re seeing right now, survival depends on crime. People are sending the message that you can only survive if you are involved in crime. There is also the question of patrimonialism in the social fabric, and it is when a State has lost contact with the soil, that something surfaces to fill this void and provides the water reservoir, sends the pregnant woman to the hospital, buys school books for the child, or puts food on the table.

“This system controls the communities and the state can no longer have control of these communities, and to gain access to the community the state has to go through the system of control, so crime has affected our social fabric. I will not accept that we should view gang culture as part of our social system. By doing this, you give oxygen to gangsterism, oxygen to gangsters, and you make them a parrot of our social culture,” Heerah said.

Criminals use different levels of sophistication, indicating that technology is affected by crime.

“We see the sophisticated criminal; we see crime efforts moving in the following direction, and to deal with it, we must deal with a more sophisticated police department and law enforcement and intelligence agencies, because crime has now mastered the technology to move money.

“It’s not just about gangsters or common criminals on the side of the road, it’s also about the movement of money, the illegal arms trade, the illegal drug trade and human trafficking. It’s transnational organized crime that manipulates technology for its own benefit,” Heerah said.

He said legislation needed to change to tackle crime.

“Legally we have to look at the legislation. Crime has impacted the legal aspects of the country so much that we don’t see justice being served and that is a problem,” Heerah said.

He added that crime also had an impact on the environment.

“The environment has changed. Our whole atmosphere has changed. Trinidad now ranks in the world in terms of homicides per capita. It’s a place where crime reigns, and it also happens in peaceful Tobago. We understand that the breadbasket of Tobago is tourism and attracting foreigners, and when we see what is happening, we wonder what happened to peaceful T&T,” Heerah said.

Organized crime

Criminologist Daurius Figueira, who also participated in the virtual discussion, said T&T’s organized crime has its roots in Colombian transnational organized crime.

“Colombian transnational organized crime has long exercised hegemony over the illicit trade of T&T. Our first big rise in murders in 2008, in fact, was brought about by the end of the third stage of evolution and the dawn of the fourth stage of Colombian transnational organized crime which drove the 2008 rise in murders. This What we must now understand about the first decade of the 21st century is that the entire Caribbean landscape has collapsed.

“Today in T&T we do not have a single dominant transnational organized crime group. We now have two. The Colombian economic model and the Mexican economic model. And in periods of intense violence never before experienced in T&T from 2017 to 2022, we were motivated by the fact that these two dominant economic models are so incompatible with each other that this inherent contradiction leads to a war of domination that has had an impact on T&T, and that is why you need to understand the specific nature of the violence,” he said.

Figueira said crime was changing rapidly.

“What we have done at T&T is continue to speak in general terms. No one can understand the heterogeneous nature of the rapidly evolving criminal landscape in T&T that is driving the violence; this triggered the symptoms of social collapse. What is happening is that we need to understand the dynamics inherent in these two dominant economic models across the Caribbean.

“It is not just in T&T that violence has started to resurface in the Eastern Caribbean states and even Belize, so it is a Caribbean reality. So we need to have this serious and in-depth conversation in which we expose the nature of these two business models, their operational procedures, their order of battle, their order of power, the battle between them both for dominance of the T&T sector, and how this battle is changing the nature of crime and criminal actions on the ground,” he said.

He said criminal activity had evolved since 2017.

“One of the fundamental reasons for this is that the business models are so different that in T&T today we have four gang branches. We have affiliations with Colombia and Mexico, but there are also criminal actors who are dispossessed because the criminal enterprise on the ground, under the control of transnational crime in T&T, has fired a significant number of its former workers.

“And they’re displaced from the old roles that they were in because the organizations that they belong to have all been decimated, so they’re now there and they have to live on a daily basis, so they’re now going to engage in criminal actions that They never had before, but they are now kissing each other with desperation,” Figueira said.

He continued: “And that is why criminal action now penetrates deeper into the fabric of the social order, looking for easy targets. So while this is happening, there is also a simultaneous war going on between people looking to scam players. So there is a complex and simultaneous overlapping violence in society. And if we refuse to accept this reality and do not deconstruct it, understand it, and recognize that it is based in research, then we will continue to fall behind.

“So you must now understand that the reality of Tobago’s illicit trade is not the reality of Trinidad. Tobago is better integrated with 21st century development and pipelines that run from the South American continent to the northern Eastern Caribbean, i.e. Trinidad. Tobago’s illicit businesses are now independent of Trinidad and supplies come from Tobago to Trinidad. You must understand these realities. The violence in Tobago is now hemorrhaging from Trinidad by dispossessed people seeking to take over Tobago,” Figueira said.