Caribbean no longer preferred choice of drug pushers
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
UNITED NATIONS (CMC) — The importance of the Caribbean as a conduit for cocaine imported into the United States has "greatly diminished" over the past 15 years, according to a new report issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
The report, released here on Friday, said during the early days of the trade, traffickers preferred the Caribbean corridor and it was used preferentially from the late 1970s.
"In the 1980s, most of the cocaine entering the United States came through the Caribbean into the southern part of the state of Florida. But interdiction successes, tied to the use of radars, caused the traffickers to reassess their routes.
"As a growing share of cocaine transited the southwest border of the United States, Mexican groups wrested control from their Colombian suppliers, further directing the flow through Central America and Mexico."
But UNODC said that the decline has not necessarily led to increased stability or lowered violence in the transit countries.
"On the contrary, it seems that once the drug is introduced, instability in the market can drive violence," UNODC said in its global report, noting that Jamaica provides a case where violence has become the norm despite the efforts to eradicate the trade.
It said that estimates of the cocaine flow through Jamaica dropped from 11 per cent of the US supply in 2000 to two per cent in 2005, and fell to one per cent two years later.
"This is reflected in declining seizures in Jamaica and declining arrests and convictions of Jamaican drug traffickers in the United States. It is also negatively reflected in the murder rate, which rose from 34 per 100,000 in 2000 to 59 per 100,000 in 2008.
"There are historical reasons for this paradoxical effect. The importance of Jamaica as a transit country in the cocaine trade really rose after the violent 1980 elections in that country. A large number of important crime figures -including some so-called 'area dons' and their enforcers- left Jamaica for New York, where they became key suppliers in the crack cocaine boom."
The report said that this period of growing criminal opportunities represented a time of relative calm in Jamaica.
"When this market died out and cocaine flows began to shift westward, these men returned to Jamaica to find a much less well organised crime scene, where 'neighbourhood dons' had turned to more direct means of income generation: violent acquisitive crime, including extortion and robbery.
"The Jamaican cocaine trade suffered another blow when cooperative efforts between Jamaican law enforcement and the United Kingdom sharply reduced the air courier traffic to Europe around 2002."
It said that street-level competition for diminishing returns has fuelled growing homicide rates; the highest in the Caribbean and among the highest in the world.
UNODC said a similar, but more compressed, effect could also have occurred in the Dominican Republic where the share of the US cocaine supply that transited Hispaniola dropped from eight per cent in 2000 to two per cent in 2004, before rising again to four per cent 2005 and nine per cent in 2007.
"Around this time, the murder rate in the Dominican Republic doubled, from 13 per 100,000 in 2001 to 26 per 100,000 in 2005. It has remained at high levels, and the drug trade in the Dominican Republic is still volatile.
"Dominican traffickers have grown in importance in Europe since about 2005, and today are second only to the Colombians among foreign cocaine traffickers arrested in Spain, the primary point of entry," the report added.
It said that another shift that may have affected local stability is the reduction in air courier traffic though the Netherlands Antilles.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Caribbean-no-longer-preferred-choice-of-drug-pushers_7746928
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