I HAVE watched as successive governments have failed to pre-empt the spread of the cancer that is the illicit drug trade in my beloved land, Tobago.

Tobago is now a “swallowers’ paradise”, and the tourist industry and the Tobagonian social order are under assault.

Already, signs of an alternative social order have appeared with the resultant propensity for violence with impunity, yet, the politicians have failed to move against these developments in Tobago.

The media reported recently about the exchange of gunfire between a joint police and military unit in Egypt (a village in Tobago), a mother reported the abduction of her daughter, a minor, for the purpose of prostitution, and successive travel advisories from the British Foreign Office on Tobago have indicated the escalating level of crime against British visitors to the Sister Isle.

The unreported reality is that in Tobago, as in Trinidad, there is a wave of sex crimes being perpetrated, as policing is inadequate, inappropriate and incompetent to deal with the escalation.

As such, the sexual predators are wreaking havoc.

The nitrous oxide to crime in Tobago is the illicit drug trade.

The major form of illicit drug trafficking in Tobago is swallowing. The destination is usually Europe and other Caribbean islands.

The swallowing trafficking industry is now an organic component of the Tobagonian tourist industry.

STANFORD
CALLENDER

EUDINE JOD-DAVIS

RENNIE DUMAS

Swallowers who come in on flights from Europe, are housed in Tobago, loaded up with the illicit products and shipped back to Europe.

Women and minors are recruited locally or brought in from other Caribbean countries, loaded up with illicit products, and shipped back to the Caribbean islands where they offload the product, prostitute and return to specific Caribbean countries awaiting their call up for another trip out.

Swallowing is, therefore, driving the sex industry in Tobago and the Caribbean, and the sex industry is now dominated by the persons that manage the swallowers.

The swallowing/sex industries actively recruit minors to both swallow and prostitute, and Tobago is clearly showing signs of this development.

In Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles on two separate occasions, swallowers were interdicted on their journey to Holland.

As brutal as it may sound, these swallowers were two and three-year-olds, and their adult travel companions were also swallowers.

This is the direction Tobago is heading in, if it has not already arrived.

The operational cells of swallowers and their handlers attract predators seeking to rob these cells, and this escalates into armed militias and gun violence.

The illicit drug trade spawns an alternate way of life and an alternate social order that is challenging the existing one for dominance, hence the social instability, violence and criminality.

Crown Point International Airport has then to be closed as a swallowers’ portal.

How you do this is to install the ion scanners that effectively and efficiently smell out the swallowers as they enter the departure lounge, which leads to interdiction.

It is ion scanners that closed down the swallowing traffickers of Jamaica and the Netherlands Antilles.

The ion scanners have to work in tandem with a leading edge surveillance system that places the airport under effective shutdown.

Together, the swallowers would be forced to take their business elsewhere, thereby relieving Tobago of this cancerous scourge.

With the swallowers effectively banished from Tobago, the crime wave will be effectively reduced in intensity, thereby making it manageable, provided there is a concerted and ongoing effort to reform and modernise policing in Tobago.

Firstly, a sexual predator/sex crime unit has to be formed, trained and released upon the sexual predators of Tobago.

There is no safe and secure citizenry of Tobago without relentless policing of sexual predation.

Secondly, a major crime unit has to be formed, trained and released upon the violent criminals, especially those who commit violent crimes as a group or gang.

Thirdly, the criminal justice system of Tobago has to be upgraded and created to serve the assault on crime by the policing agency.

Justice must be swift, effective and transparent.

At this present instance, Tobago can be saved.

Failure to act would mean the end of the Tobago I love, by the end of 2006. Walk the talk MPs Stanford Callender and Eudine Job-Davis.

Walk the talk Senator “Stretch” Dumas.