(Draft-do not quote)
THE CARIBBEAN AS A REGIONAL NODE IN THE GLOBAL DRUG TRADE
Klaus de Albuquerque
Department of Sociology/Anthropology
The College of Charleston
Charleston, SC 29424
albuquerque@cofc.edu
and
Jerome L. McElroy
Department of Business and Economics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Introduction: Three Waves of Globalization
"All these people, these diversities of cultures, have been concentrated in that
archipelago. You are very conscious of the ocean as a gateway out to other worlds.
In this report, one thing I argue about, really, is that the Caribbean society was
perhaps the first global experiment in human history. We have always been globalized. From day one, we were dealing with Europe and Africa and Asia and the indigenous population. This intersection of a great diversity of people is not new to us; it is, in
fact, how we started." (George Lamming in E.J. Waters, 1999:201)
The distinguishing feature of small island economies is their relative powerlessness in the global marketplace. They are so-called price-takers not price-makers and simulate the behavior of the atomistic firm in the classical economist's theoretical model of perfect competition. Their small size at the macro-social scale suggests that island societies are receivers rather than inventors of economic, demographic and political systems. In effect, they are primarily the result metropolitan forces and ipso facto vulnerable to policy initiatives originating in core
economies.
This is graphically illustrated in the profound impact which European imperialism, the first wave of globalization, had on the insular Caribbean in the post-Columbian era (Richardson, 1992). These external imprints include the stamp of dependent export monoculture on island economy, i.e. a high-volume low value-added production structure geared to foreign demand in the global network of center-periphery trade. In addition, monoculture has had a damaging effect on insular ecology and biodiversity, and its labor demands resulted in the creation of multi-ethnic societies of transplanted peoples. Unable to sustain population growth, the post-emancipation period saw widespread livelihood mobility/migration which has continued through the twentieth century. Since the 1950s the islands of the region have struggled to reduce
dependence and achieve political and economic autonomy.
Although the Caribbean has experienced repeated rounds of externally imposed laissez-faire capitalism (Klak, 1998), the second epochal wave of globalization has been the sustained growth and worldwide spread of tourism in the post-World War II era. International visitor arrivals have increased at a robust rate above 5 percent per year since 1950 (Vellas and Becherel, 1996). Today tourism is the world's largest industry accounting for roughly 10 percent of all global trade and employment and 7 percent of capital formation. In part, this growth has been facilitated by the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program favoring tourism as a lucrative export strategy for debt-burdened LDCs to improve loan repayment performance.
Nowhere has this process been more visible than in the island periphery. In addition to the pull of tourism opportunity, island decision-makers have been pushed to alter reliance on traditional staples because of falling terms-of-trade, the worldwide expansion of staple
supply, and the development of synthetic substitutes in the North. In the past generation, because of deliberate restructuring away from colonial crops like sugar and copra, island economies have diversified toward tourism, related construction and offshore financial services. The intersection of this restructuring with multinational hotel/airline investment, the advent of low-cost jet travel and the creation of aid-financed transport infrastructure has connected northern demand with southern supply and created the so-called "pleasure periphery": the insular and coastal Mediterranean for Northern Europe, the island Caribbean for North America and Europe, and Hawaii (Guam, Marianas) and the South Pacific for Japanese and other affluent Asian travelers.
This internationalization has especially intensified in the small-island Caribbean where neoliberal free-market policies favoring exports, deregulation, foreign direct investment and
political stability have long dominated the political economy (Gayle, 1998; Klak and Myers, 1998). Tourism directly and indirectly now accounts for a third of all regional trade, a fourth of foreign exchange earnings and a fifth of total employment (McElroy and de Albuquerque, 1998). Caribbean landscapes from Bahamas to Aruba are visibly altered by ubiquitous hotel and condominium clusters and connecting road arteries, sunlust visitors, rental cars and touring vans. Establishing the infrastructure to support the mass tourism visitor industry has altered insular coastlines and mountain faces, commercialized and quickened the once quiet pace of island life, and damaged the operation of natural terrestrial-marine weather and water buffering systems (U. S. Congress, 1987). Questions are now raised about the length of the product life cycle in island destinations-whether resort areas rise in popularity but inevitably lose appeal-and whether tourism is a sustainable economic base or just another short-run chapter in a long-period history of shifting export specializations and boom-bust economic and parallel demographic
cycles.
Island tourism is also threatened by a third epochal wave encompassing the globalization of organized crime in general and the international restructuring of the production and distribution of illegal drugs (mainly cocaine and heroin) in particular. According to Pearson and Payaslian (1999), "while prior to the 1960s the Italian and French 'connections', extending from Palermo to New York, were the primary networks for smuggling drugs, during the past three decades Asian and Latin American drug production and smuggling have emerged as major competitors." This increasing cross-border traffic has led to the dollarization of some hinterland South American producers, the alleged decline of the Cosa Nostra in the United States and, some argue, the increasing informalization of the traditional financial sector through growing money laundering of
drug profits.
Scope This chapter focuses on the geographic and institutional infiltration of the global narcoeconomy across the insular Caribbean. It has six sections. The first reviews patterns of serious crime in the region that suggest the escalating presence of narco activity. The second indirectly links these phenomena to the expansion of the archipelago as a corridor for South-to-North drug transit and money laundering. The third examines the internal and external forces that have nourished the growth of narcoeconomy. The fourth describes the specific mechanics of the illicit trade routes and methods of conveyance through the region, while the fifth briefly discusses the economic and political impacts. The conclusion broadly assesses the future, particularly the potential effectiveness of anti-drug counter-measures.
Island Crime Patterns
It is clear that there is a different threat to island tourism other than natural amenity destruction and loss of cultural capital. Serious crime rates have risen in the region since 1970 in tandem with the globalization of Caribbean tourism and the rise of the region as a node in the global drug trade. Some trends illustrate this danger. Over the past two decades, violent and property crime rates have risen in almost all Caribbean islands for which published and completely reported data are available. The most dramatic increases have occurred in those destinations most penetrated by tourist development: Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI). In addition, some of the sharpest increases have been in robbery, burglary and larceny,
types of crime routinely associated with the presence of tourists (Fuji and Mak, 1980) as well as the spread of narcotics addiction.
For example, between 1970 and 1990, murder and rape rates (per 100,000 population) have risen 50 percent in Jamaica and the USVI while robbery has tripled in the latter (de Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999b). Between 1985-1996, robbery rates doubled in Barbados and rape rates doubled in St. Kitts-Nevis. Similar sharp increases have been recorded for burglary and larceny over the same period for Antigua, Barbados, Dominica and St. Kitts-Nevis (de Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999b). More importantly, there is some evidence that visitors are more likely crime targets than residents. Similar to the experience of Hawaii (Chesney-Lind and Lind, 1986), a case study of Barbados (de Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999a) revealed that visitors were almost twice as likely to be victims of serious crime than residents. In particular, visitors were much more vulnerable to property crime: triple the resident rate for robbery and for larceny. Residents were much more likely to be victims of violent crime: murder, rape and major
assault. One anomalous finding, however, is that crime rates were not influenced by tourist seasonality as others have suggested (Walmsley and others, 1983).
The causal connection between the presence of visitors and property-related crime has been stressed in the theoretical literature. Carefree visitors tend to carry much portable wealth and are easy marks because they are on holiday. They do not take the normal precautions they would have observed at home, are unfamiliar with their surroundings, and less likely to report crimes, correctly identify their assailants or return as witnesses at trial. However, a follow-up study (de Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999b) on longitudinal crime patterns in Barbados between 1980-1996 identified the impact of worsening local economic conditions (misery index)
on crime rates with only modest secondary effects from visitor density levels on property crime. The study further suggested (1999:36): "...the operation of other important unmeasured factors - a growing subculture of violence, the proliferation of posses (gangs), rising drug activity and addiction, the increasing number and use of guns..," that is, behaviors suggestive of the spread of the narcoeconomy.
This conclusion is based on the following evidence: (1) police reports across the Caribbean that most serious crimes are drug-related (de Albuquerque, 1996a); (2) a noticeable change in the pattern of violent crime from domestic disputes to gang feuds and robbery (de Albuquerque, 1995); (3) the increasing use of firearms in violent crime (Williams, 1997); (4) the increasing role of a hard-core cadre of marginalized youthful perpetrators (Harriott, 1996); (5) the increasing number of apprehended perpetrators who are addicts (de Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999b); (6) the rising prominence of home-grown posses in organized crime; (7) and the increasing menace of returning felons deported from the U.S. and elsewhere (6,000 by 1996; see Becker, 1996) who are known to be engaged in narcotics and firearms importation.The Caribbean Narcoeconomy
The global drug trade is fostered by the general tendencies of globalization to reduce restraints on cross-border trade and capital flows and to uphold private property and bank secrecy (UNDP, 1999). It thrives in an environment of secrecy, trade intensity, sophisticated finance and communications, anonymity, lax regulation, and external and internal economic vulnerability. The Caribbean closely fits this profile. Above all, the region is strategically situated to expeditiously link supply with demand (see Figure 1). The insular Caribbean lies between the Andean region of South America where over 80 percent of world cocaine is produced and the major market of the United States where most cocaine is consumed. In addition, proximity to South America plus a long historical tradition as a transcontinental trade emporium in British, Dutch, French and Spanish commerce make the islands a natural corridor for supplying cocaine to Europe and for re-exporting heroin produced in the Far East, which arrives via Europe, to North America (Griffith, 1996). Moreover, the geography of the region is conducive to the large scale movement of drugs. The larger islands and mainland countries (Belize, Jamaica, Guyana, Dominican Republic and Haiti) provide remote hinterlands to shelter production and manufacture of cocaine, and heroin to a lesser extent. Many others are archipelagic states (Bahamas, Grenada, USVI, Turks and Caicos, St. Vincent and Grenadines) with numerous unguarded points of entry and exit for transporting narcotics. Particularly the more remote outposts lack resources for either monitoring, much less intercepting contraband.
As a result of their geography, the islands have become a major player in the global narcoeconomy. According to the most recent Human Development Report (UNDP, 1999:41), in the mid-1990's the illegal drug trade worldwide was conservatively estimated to be roughly $400 billion. This represents about 8 percent of world trade, compares with the shares of textiles and
gas and oil, and exceeds the shares of iron and steel and motor vehicles. It is roughly four-fifths the size of world tourism. Conservatively, at least half of worldwide cocaine and heroin are consumed in the U.S. It is estimated that at least 40 percent of cocaine and 30 percent of heroin transit through the island Caribbean (Nurse, 1999; U.S. Department of State, 1998: 31). In recent years, the region's role has increased significantly. This is mainly due to the breakout of lawlessness in Columbia where Marxist guerillas have increasingly taken over drug production in non-traditional hinterland regions in response to successful U.S.-financed joint drug eradication
efforts in traditional areas of cultivation in Bolivia and Peru (Tidwell, 1999). Since 1995 drug production has increased 50 percent, and now Columbia produces over 80 percent of worldwide cocaine and two-thirds of the heroin consumed in the U.S. (La Franchi, 1999).
The highly open character of the insular economic structure is also a narco-asset. Intense dependence on export-import trade provides traffickers with a wide array of air and sea transit opportunities. The burgeoning tourism industry based on on-site consumption of environmental amenities and imported goods (food, liquor, luxuries, and most basic items) significantly expands the menu for shipping contraband inter-continentally by freight on the one hand, as well as by courier because of the increasing anonymity created by busy airports in the many popular tourist destinations across the region.
Money-laundering - the conversion of drug profits into legal assets that cannot be traced to their illegal roots - is a third ingredient in the narco-triad along with drug transit and arms traffic. It approaches $500 billion worldwide (Griffith, 1997:94) and approximates in gross volume two percent of world GDP of $30 trillion. One estimate suggests that half the countries in the world "have criminalized money laundering" (U.S. Department of State, 1998). The
Caribbean boasts a long history of offshore financial centers and tax havens that have proliferated from Bermuda and Bahamas in the north to Barbados and Aruba in the south (Thomas, 1988). Their growth and development has made them an integral component of the economic infrastructure. In some small islands like Bermuda, offshore finance is the dominant sector and accounts for half of all economic activity. In the Cayman Islands, one third of GDP is sourced in offshore services and related business (Gallagher Report, 1990: 94). In the British Virgin Islands (BVI), 35 percent of government revenue is from bank and international business registration fees (Griffith, 1997: 106).
Not surprisingly, the same conditions which have fostered offshore financial success have facilitated the laundering of drug profits (MacDonald and Zagaris, 1992). These include: proximity to markets, well developed communication systems, political stability, transactions secrecy, low or no taxation, accessible entry and exit, and a competent cadre of local professionals (lawyers, bankers, accountants). As a result, a number of islands where trafficking is on the rise, for example, Antigua and the Netherlands Antilles, are now considered top-tier money-laundering states by the U.S. State Department along with the traditional Latin American giants: Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela (Griffith, 1997: 109ff). Countries where financial infrastructure and regulation are weak are particularly susceptible. For example, "The number of banks in Haiti has quadrupled in the last few years, and there are reports that cash is coming in mostly on private planes" (U.S. Department of State, 1998: 106).
The narcoeconomy is especially nourished by the climate of economic instability and uncertainty that pervades the region. During the past decade, the Caribbean has been buffeted by a series of external forces that have weakened traditional sectors, clouded the investment climate, and measurably reduced the opportunity cost of trafficking. In recent years the region has become "increasingly irrelevant in economic and political terms" (Klak, 1998:12). As a result of the diplomatic downgrading of the Caribbean (the Cuban threat in particular) consequent upon the demise of Communism, U.S. aid to the region has declined over 80 percent. Export preferences for traditional staples like sugar and bananas have shrunk in the face of shifting tastes in the U.S. toward artificial sweeteners in the former case, and the consolidation of the European Union and World Trade Organization regulation in the latter (Pantin, 1995).
Moreover, the islanders' attempts to diversity toward light industrial exports (textiles, assembly, regional manufactures) have been thwarted on two broad fronts. On the external side, the heavy impact of NAFTA has resulted in the relocation of over 120 apparel plants to Mexico since the mid-1990s (Rohter, 1997). On the internal side, a host of domestic structural constraints continue to hinder viability. These include mineral scarcity, fragmented and inadequate transport systems, relatively expensive (by LDC standards) labor and utility costs, and other diseconomies of scale (Wiley, 1998). Problems have been compounded by the declining policy autonomy of island states during globalizing processes (Klak and Jackiewicz, this volume) in a dependent price-taking region characterized by economic policy impotence (McElroy and others, 1990). Even tourism has been damaged in some destinations in recent years because the strength of the U.S. dollar--to which their currencies are tied--has discouraged long-staying, high-spending European visitors in preference for short-staying, budget-conscious North Americans (Rosenweig, 1986; Watson, 1997). In addition, chronic emigration has spawned demographic imbalances (surpluses of old and young and deficits of technicians and innovators) that disfavor the skills and entrepreneurial talent required to prosper in a global economy (Conway, 1998). In many islands, the economic uncertainty and malaise caused by these external and internal constraints have been further compounded by natural disasters.
These macro shocks have combined with other internal problems, notably the growth of a subculture of violent youth, daily aware of the "good life" from the tourist hordes but lacking the education, skills, and motivation to participate in the mainstream. The drug trade worldwide flourishes in such urban areas with an underclass of impoverished unemployed youth (UNDP, 1999). Their ranks are increasingly led by the organized posses that originated in the 1970s in Jamaica. Originally these local gangs emerged in West Kingston trafficking in the domestic and regional marijuana trade. At roughly the same time, rival political parties began arming ghetto youth and pitting poor urban communities against one another (Stone, 1983). These "garrison" constituencies of violence and intimidation were largely responsible for the meteoric rise in violent crime in Jamaica during the 1970s that culminated in 889 killings during the 1980 electoral campaign (deAlbuquerque, 1996f). In the late 1970s, they came under the control of ganja gangs increasingly sustained by marijuana exports to the United States and led by posse "Dons" with considerable stateside experience who were responsible for internationalizing the ganja economy.
These Jamaican style posses have emerged in other urban centers in the region. They have become embedded in other Eastern Caribbean societies like Antigua and St. Kitts and are responsible for escalating violence and the establishment of overseas branches of the narcoeconomy across the island chain. Such gangs are heavily engaged in arms and drug running as well as "...money laundering, fraud, kidnapping, robbery, burglary, prostitution, document forgery and murder" (Griffith, 1997: 124), and they have virtually taken control of South-North drug transmit through the islands. This increasing responsibility of narco trafficking shared by local groups in the Caribbean is a significantly new delegation or decentralization strategy employed by the Columbian-based crime organizations that dominate the regional drug trade (DEA, 1998). Each year local gangs are swollen by felons deported mainly for drug offenses from North America and elsewhere. They are sophisticated criminals with extensive experience in the U.S. cocaine trade, and notorious for introducing American-style drive-by executions, the recruitment of juvenile runners, lookouts (Harriott, 1996), and a whole range of semiautomatic
weapons in Jamaica and elsewhere (Trinidad, Belize, Guyana).
The Role of Structural Adjustment
The larger and more heavily indebted islands like Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana and Antigua have also had to contend with IMF-designed structural adjustment programs (SAPs) to satisfy donors that repayment is more likely than default. While some argue from single case studies that the mandated policies associated with SAPs--trade and exchange liberalization, privatization, deficit reduction etc.--have had deleterious effects on the poor and, by assumption, have nourished the growth of illegal activities, the link is difficult to empirically establish. Three
methodological problems plague such attempts (Killick, 1999). First is the problem of the counterfactual. We cannot directly observe for comparative purposes what performance might have been in the absence of the de facto SAP policies. Second, cross-national comparisons are complicated further because the implementation of fairly standard SAP programs has varied considerably from one national context to another. Third, research is further complicated because there is no single class of the poor since different segments of the marginalized are differentially affected by the same policy. For example, currency depreciation and/or market (high) as opposed to controlled (low) prices for food staples may harm real wages for urban workers but raise incomes of peasant exporters.
Although these analytical difficulties make generalizations about SAP impact on the poor at the regional and international levels very cautionary, two recent reviews (Killick, 1999; Bourguignon and Morrisson, 1992) suggest some general conclusions are warranted. First, SAPs have had very little positive impact on economic growth. Second, SAPs have often been associated with rapidly growing inequality and poverty (Berry, 1995) and often place the working poor particularly at risk. Caribbean case studies, however, are less tentative although they fail to directly establish a clear empirical link between debt burdens, structural adjustment, poverty and growth of the drug trade. In the context of reduced foreign exchange from declining traditional staples, manufacturing exports and aid, regional authors argue that neoliberal SAP policies have indirectly nourished the narcoeconomy.
For example, Ghai (1991) associates substantial declines in Caribbean GDP and per capita income with rises in inflation and debt repayment outflows. In Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad-Tobago, Grant-Wisdom (1994) suggests that SAPs have coincided with infrastructure deterioration because of capital budget cutbacks, the contraction of public employment, and the proliferation of self-employment "indicative of the growth of informal sector" (171). In the same large-country context, Bernal (199) finds that SAPs have negatively affected the delivery of basic services to poor urban communities. Similarly, Phillips (1994) argues that general reductions in living standards have coincided with declines in social service spending in Caribbean SAP countries. She concludes (147-148): "...SAPs formulated and supported by the World Bank and the IMF are associated with the worsening of the health status of the people of the Caribbean." In the first of two careful analyses of Jamaica, Anderson and Witter (1994) found initial budget tightening and trade and exchange liberalization in the early 1980s coincided with increases in inequality and poverty. In the second, Handa and King (1997) found similar outcomes associated with market friendly reforms in the early 1990s. However, both studies noted relatively sharp recoveries shortly after SAP implementation, tending to undercut the indirect "narco nourishment theory." Nevertheless, according to Pantin (1989:145), a strong proponent of the SAP-crime thesis: "Amelioration of the drug trade is impossible without a reduced burden of the so-called structural adjustment, which creates the fertile environment for drug activity."
Mechanics
The mechanics of drug transit through the island corridor including both routes and modes of conveyance shift continually according to national, regional and international counter enforcement measures (de Albuquerque, 1996b). During the 1970s and 1980s, Bahamas, Belize and Jamaica dominated the cocaine trade (Griffith, 1996). The more common air routes involved the following: from the north coast of Colombia to remote islands in the Bahamian archipelago where air-dropped cargo was loaded onto high-speed "go-fast" boats for a final run to the U.S. mainland; from South America to one of Belize's many isolated (radar-proof) airstrips in the interior and then into Mexico; flights (legal and illegal) from Colombia to Jamaica and then to the Bahamas or to the U.S.
However, successful anti-drug countermeasures mounted with U.S. support have spawned alternative routes. Dealers have displayed a remarkable resilience and ingenuity in keeping one step ahead of enforcement and detection (Krauss, 1997). In addition to the tightening of the Mexican border (Katz-Stone, 1996), notable efforts include Operation Buccaneer in Jamaica to eradicate marijuana cultivation and arrest traffickers, and Operation Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos (OPBAT) to apprehend airborne and maritime smugglers and drugs in these archipelagoes and adjacent waters (U.S. GAO, 1990). The Leeward Islands of the Eastern Caribbean have provided a new corridor to North America. The new routes include Puerto Rico, the "new Miami," and the USVI where shipments arrive by sea and air, are repackaged as domestic freight, and are transported north by cargo or courier taking advantage of the anonymity created by large-scale tourist traffic and perfunctory customs checks through these U.S. territories (de Albuquerque, 1996b).
They stash cocaine on the U.S. Virgin Islands, and their boats lurk in the waters
off St. Eustatius and Cuba. St. Lucia has a growing population of cocaine addicts
and the second highest murder rate in the world. Drug gangs terrorize Trinidad.
St. Martin is the new meeting place for the Columbian and Italian drug Mafias--a
real Star Wars bar of drug riffraff, claim DEA agents. Antigua has become the
newest offshore banking center for shady American and Russian businessmen. . .
Puerto Rico. . .the focal point for the exportation of cocaine to the mainland from
the Caribbean. . .has paid a steep price for its leading role in the drug trade. Its
murder rate has been higher than that of any state for three years straight. Ninety
percent of all violence on the island is believed to be drug related. (Booth and Drummond, 1996: 46)
"In 1994, 26 percent of documented cocaine smuggling attempts into the U.S. came through these Caribbean portals" (Griffith, 1997: 84). Sophisticated satellite positioning systems as well as the latest communication technology are often employed by the traffickers to coordinate drops in the least policed waters (DEA, 1998). To elude U.S. radar, traffickers are now using "stealth boats" made entirely from wood and fiberglass as well as semi-submersible vessels (de Albuquerque, 1996b).
Further to the north, cocaine and marijuana traffic has been deflected toward Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Navarro, 1998). These states are ideally suited because of their location, poorly monitored coasts, mountainous and underpopulated interiors, significant poverty, poorly paid and under-equipped security forces, and history of clandestine activity. South American cocaine shipped to Haiti quickly finds its way to the Dominican Republic, and then by "go-fast" or fishing boats to Puerto Rico or the Bahamas (U.S. Department of State, (1998). The Dutch Antillean ABC Islands (Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao) and St. Maarten have become prominent as transit routes to the U.S. and Europe for heroin and cocaine smuggled by passenger and cargo flights as well as on cargo vessels and cruise ships (de Albuquerque, 1996b). In addition, Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines now function as a break-bulk pipeline for drugs en route north via the American and the French territories (Guadeloupe and Martinique). Likewise, St. Lucia and St. Kitts-Nevis have become staging and stockpiling points for Columbian cocaine to be on-loaded into "go-fast"or fishing boats to Puerto Rico and the USVI (U.S. Department of State, 1998).
Guyana has also become a drug trafficking corridor because of its large size, numerous isolated small airstrips, remote hinterland, extensive unpoliced borders with producers in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela, and its plentiful inland waterways to unguarded spots on the Atlantic coast. As a result of traffickers' attempts to avoid detection and interdiction, the free-market forces of the global narcoeconomy seeking least-cost transit have engulfed the entire insular Caribbean. Moreover, the payback for regional accomplices, both financial and in-kind, has institutionalized the trade into the socio-economic fabric of island society through increasing conspicuous consumption and rising local addiction rates (de Albuquerque, 1996a).
These drug flows are facilitated in part by the lack of drug-sniffing dogs at Caribbean airports and sophisticated concealment methods. Traffickers have demonstrated considerable ingenuity in conveyance tactics. In addition to hidden compartments and fuel tanks in maritime vessels, drugs have been stashed in every possible human orifice, especially the swallowing of cocaine sealed in condoms and heroin in latex-wrapped pellets (U.S. Department of State, 1998). They have been hidden in every type of clothing and footwear, fruits, vegetables, furniture, appliances, vehicles and so on. These have included fish, coconuts, bananas, cheese, cigarette cartons, disguised coffee beans (brown-colored cocaine pellets), false amputee limbs, bibles, surf boards, mouthwash, live and dead animals, and even a "ganja guitar" fashioned completely of compressed marijuana (Griffith, 1997: 82). Lax customs inspection and local corruption facilitate the lucrative trade. The former is particularly true of cruise ship passengers and crew as they disembark in Puerto Rico or Florida ports. Couriers are often women recruited for up to $3,000 per trip, cruise ship crew members, or older couples on a cruise.
Impacts
The growth, spread and success of transshipment across the region directed by experienced traffickers using sophisticated networks and methods suggest the Caribbean narcoeconomy is highly organized, well planned and increasingly embedded in the insular political economy. This is clearly evident in the ubiquitous rise in violent and property crime across the region reviewed above, and the incidence of high-powered firearms and American style tactics: gang warfare, drive-by shootings, home invasions (de Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999b). It is visibly suggested by the alarming rise in citizen gun purchases, the spread of private security agencies and high-tech alarm systems, and the proliferation of guard dogs, high-wire fencing and grilled windows (de Albuquerque, 1995). Griffith (1997: 123) reports the telling example of former Governor Roy Schneider of the USVI who carried "a Glock semiautomatic pistol when he did not have his official security detail."
Few segments of island life have been untouched by drugs. The grim realities include the following: (1) the growing presence of drug-addicted youth in low-income urban areas and around resorts; (2) the active daily complicity of some local police as well as shipping and customs officials and more recently airline personnel (Richey, 1999); (3) collusion at the highest levels implicating top law enforcement and elected officials in what one regional writer calls "massive public corruption" (Reese, 1997) from nearly a dozen nations- Antigua, Aruba, Bahamas, Curacao, Haiti, Puerto Rico, St. Kitts-Nevis, St.Maarten, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos, and the USVI (de Albuquerque, 1996d); (4) prison overcrowding primarily because of drug-related offenses; (5) and for the same crimes the clogging of over-taxed court dockets and resources plus the associated problems of evidence tampering and witness and jury intimidation (de Albuquerque, 1996a; 1996e). In this last regard, one of the more celebrated examples is the case of Charles "Little Nut" Miller, a deportee, who is alleged to have successfully avoided extradition from St. Kitts to face narcotics violations in the U.S. by threatening American students at the island's offshore veterinary school (Larmer, 1998). According to Payne, (1998:17), there is no greater threat to democracy in the region than the globalized spread of organized crime.
Certainly the palpable evidence of narco-traffic's role in island society is the visible daily economic impact. This includes the substantial payroll to the drug workforce: growers (marijuana), pilots, boat captains, engineers, shippers, baggage handlers, couriers, lawyers, accountants, street pushers and enforcers (de Albuquerque, 1996c). Given the risks, these employees are clearly paid above the going local wage, and their spending plus the payoffs for services of compliant police, customs and other officials supports a diverse array of local businesses. The rise in addiction associated with the spread of the narcoeconomy is partly due to the recent practice by the Colombian cartels of paying local transit organizations in kind, sometimes up to 50 percent of the cocaine shipped (DEA, 1998: 111). In addition, a considerable amount of drug profits are invested (fronted) in legitimate enterprises serving residents and laundered into hotel facilities and casinos etc. catering to visitors. The impact is major. According to de Albuquerque (1996c:4), in Jamaica in the early 1980s "illegal income from marijuana, estimated then at U.S. $3.5 billion a year, (was) larger than the country's GDP." In 1993, U.S. officials estimated that $1 billion in cocaine was smuggled through Antigua, a figure eight times the size of the island's budget. Marijuana's current financial significance is illustrated by the December, 1998 uproar in St. Vincent, the second largest Caribbean producer after Jamaica, when U.S. troops helped destroy over one million plants; and growers began "a petition drive to ask President Clinton for damages" (Navarro, 1999: 4).
The volume of drug-related cash cris-crossing the region has become so large that money-laundering threatens to undermine legitimate offshore activity. The Cayman Islands is estimated to be the fourth largest money-laundering destination in the world (de Albuquerque, 1996c). Given past offshore irregularities in the Turks and Caicos, Montserrat, Anguilla, and Antigua, and the rise in "smart cards" and "cypercash," and recent destruction from hurricane Mitch of basic transport infrastructure in Central America, authorities from the industrial countries fear a new wave of increased drug traffic and money-laundering through the islands. As a result, G7 member nations are targeting jurisdictions in the region perceived to allow very low or no tax rates and to encourage transaction secrecy, i.e. which "do not effectively exchange information with other countries" (Associated Press, 1999). The islands identified include: Antigua, Caymans, Turks and Caicos, BVI, Barbados, Bahamas, and Bermuda. Very recently, the U.S. State Department charged Antigua - - long suspected of sheltering traffic in drugs and arms with alleged links to the Medellin cartel (Booth and Drummond, 1996) - - with undermining anti-money-laundering efforts "by strengthening bank secrecy rules and inhibiting investigations" (Massiah, 1999). In response, Antigua has replaced its offshore bank overseers, but the new overseers have raised additional questions regarding Antigua's resolve.
Implications
Caribbean economic history is largely the creation of global capitalism. The first wave of globalization created the plantation system and established the region as an inter-continental transshipment node in international commerce. The second major wave during the post-1960 era created modern air, sea and inland transport and communications infrastructure to successfully diversity the colonial economy into tourism and offshore finance. The third narco-wave at the dawn of the 21st century threatens the sustainability of export agriculture, tourism, and offshore finance, the major anchors of the contemporary economy. As elsewhere particularly in poor regions and transitional economies, narcotraffic has undermined the long-term stability of the economic base. On the one hand, it tarnishes the investment climate; on the other hand, through creeping public corruption, it reduces the credibility and effectiveness of government policy and the potential for regional enforcement cooperation (UNDP, 1999). The narco trade has been accelerated by the worldwide economic changes unleashed by the fall of Communism and nourished by the region's economic uncertainty, withering export markets, and limited and often uncoordinated enforcement capability.
According to mushrooming U.S. Custom's seizures of illicit heroin and cocaine since the early 1990s, the Caribbean narcoeconomy is flourishing (DEA, 1999). Further expansion seems likely for several reasons. First is the increasing development of strategic alliances between organized crime syndicates in China (Six Triads), Colombia (Medellin and Cali cartels), Italy (Mafia), Japan (Yakuza), Mexico (Juarez, Tijuana and Gulf cartels), and the U.S. (Cosa Nostra). Together they represent a global network that grosses roughly $1.5 trillion a year. They pose an almost intractable mega-multinational threat to enforcement and control authorities because of their criminal sophistication and adaptability, financial power and increasing political influence (UNDP, 1999: 42). The small windward and Leeward Islands of the Eastern Caribbean are particularly vulnerable (see Figure 2).
Located in the drug transshipment vector from major producing to major consuming nations, these small Eastern Caribbean states are vulnerable to the negative influences of criminal organizations. Drug trafficking and the related crimes of money laundering, drug use, financial influence, violent crime, and intimidation threaten the political stability of these nations. The social fabric of civil society is being threatened by the corrosive nature of the drug trade (U.S. Department of State, 1998:9).
Second, the effectiveness of U.S. led counternarcotics activities in the region, which have not materially reduced drug availability over the past decade, has been hampered by fluctuating funding levels, conflicting objectives, and lack of operational coordination (GAO, 1997). Specifically, it has been significantly blunted by the recent closure of Howard Air Force Base, the center of U.S. anti-drug operations, as part of the Panama Canal Treaty. As a result, today "the U.S. has less than half the personnel and equipment it employed in the region before 1990..." (Abel, 1999: 1). Third, at least two further problems are associated with U.S. anti-drug enforcement in the region. As policy has shifted gradually from mainly interdiction toward increased eradication at source, the U.S. military has become involved in search and destroy missions across the insular interior (Anderson, 1995). This strategy may be risky in the longer run since recent history suggests such efforts have resulted in the drug mafia infesting military ranks (La Franchi, 1999; Simons, 1998), thus further weakening effectiveness.
A related complication is that the heavy-handed exercise of U.S. policy "coordination" in the region has somewhat jeopardized the newly won sovereignty of Caribbean states. Local policy autonomy is not only battered by downsizing, structural adjustment policies, and the borderless free-market flow of global trade and finance (Thomas, 1988). It is also threatened by the perceived aggressive hegemony of the U.S. unilaterally implementing anti-drug countermeasures "in her backyard." These include sending in Marines on sporadic missions to search and destroy marijuana plants at remote island outposts (Stump, 1995), as well as the recent Shiprider Agreement that allows U. S. (helicopters and Coast Guard cutters) incursions into Caribbean territory and waters "in hot pursuit" of drugs and traffickers (de Albuquerque, 1997). The sacrifices of local sovereignty caused by these U.S. pressures to stanch the narcotics trade have been difficult to swallow for Caribbean leaders who perceive the underlying problem to be primarily North American addiction, as opposed to lackluster regional eradication and anti-transit enforcement. Moreover, the climate of cooperation has obviously been weakened during the 1990s by declining U.S. trade and aid to the region and by the rising deportation home of known drug felons from overcrowded U.S. prisons.
The growth of worldwide drug traffic fed by the free-market forces of globalization has outpaced national and regional institutions of control. However, like their counterparts in South America, Caribbean leaders are ambivalent about joint enforcement. They "find themselves caught between the proverbial rock and hard place: to meet narcotrafico's frontal assault on their sovereignty, they must follow Washington's supply side lead. In the process, some have concluded that the cure may be worse than the disease" (Craig, 1999). Yet the alternative is foreboding and surfacing in neighboring Latin suppliers like Bolivia and Colombia where narco political cultures have become deeply ingrained in the fabric of society. Drug-related crime and violence have become passe, and according to Leons and Sanabria (1997: 209), "a new era of lost values has been created where ethics are regarded as Utopian." If over time the island economies become ever more dependent on drug revenues, there may similarly develop a growing social consciousness that tacitly ignores drug activity, and narcotrafficking becomes almost as commonplace and acceptable (albeit more clandestine) as other conventional pursuits in the formal economy. If such changes emerge, they will be accompanied by "a decreased sense of the value of life, a lack of respect for property, and a lesser appreciation for honest work" (Griffith, 1997: 151), outcomes already surfacing among marginalized youth in Jamaica, the Bahamas and elsewhere.
Conclusion
In the tradition of the dependent satellite economy, all three waves of Caribbean globalization were created by external capital and powered by foreign demand. Similarly, all three share the same high-volume, low value-added throughput structure designed to maximize the profit imperatives and minimize average fixed costs of heavily capitalized global investments. As such they also share the same large intrusive scale that has left deep and lasting imprints on the fragile insular ecology and demography. Given this history, the highly lucrative nature of the drug transit trade, the durability of metropolitan consumer demand, and the continuing problems of North-South cooperation and coordinated enforcement, the narcoeconomy should continue to flourish and weaken the region's political economy. According to Richardson's (1992: 131) 'business as usual' comment, the narco trade resembles an extension of the colonial economy: "In producing and transporting narcotics for metropolitan consumption, Caribbean peoples simply are providing tropical staples for external sources, just as they have for the past five centuries."
This pessimistic prognosis is likely unless a new international anti-drug counter offensive is mounted and sustained by developed and developing countries alike. To be effective, this effort must be anchored by three principles. First, it must seriously address innovative ways to reduce burgeoning demand in the United States and Europe. Second, it must involve a comprehensive attack on supply embracing eradication and crop substitution programs, enhanced airport, border and customs security, the international distribution of narcotics intelligence, the relaxation of bank secrecy codes and so on. Third, the cooperative enterprise must be a true partnership combining the financial and technical resources of the North with the Caribbean's on-the-ground expertise and initiative. Only such a concentrated and concerted program can stanch the growth of a narcoeconomy that, in a sense, has been centuries in the making.
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