‘Wherever you have drugs, you have guns’: why is there an epidemic of violence in the Caribbean?

The last thing Raquel Rodriguez remembers of that afternoon is that she was playing with her neighbour’s baby outside her home in the Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) neighbourhood of Barataria.

Then came a piercingly loud explosion.

“The noise was very, very close. It was very loud. So I stood there, frozen, with my left hand on my temple. And then I started to wonder what was going on. Then I realised that my eyes were turning dark. Then it went totally blank,” she recalls.

She had been hit by a stray bullet that penetrated her left temple and tore its way diagonally to her right cheekbone.

After falling to the ground, Rodriguez could still hear her family and neighbours screaming as they rushed her to the hospital.

She survived the attack in September 2022, and her swift recovery – which she credits to divine intervention – surprised health workers. But although the mother of three has regained her speech and mobility, both eyes were ruptured, leaving her completely blind.

Now an aspiring broadcaster, she is determined to stay resilient while she learns braille and finishes a degree she had started before the shooting. But Rodriguez says the incident has been tough on her family, and she yearns for the opportunity to migrate.

Rodriguez is one of thousands who have been caught in a recent wave of violent crime across the Caribbean, with statisticians describing the region as one of the most violent in the Americas.

At the extreme end of the scale of this trend, which has been branded by leaders “an alarming epidemic”, is a rampant gang war that has plunged Haiti into bloody anarchy. Armed factions have controlled most of the country’s capital since the former president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in July 2021, and about 2,500 people were killed or injured in the first quarter of 2024.

The first detachment of an international taskforce to confront the gangs arrived in Port-au-Prince in June, but so far has had little impact on the violence.

But the effects of the rising crime rates are felt right across the region. T&T has seen “bloody weekends” of murders, drug busts and robberies. Last week, Jamaica declared a 14-day state of emergency in the southern Clarendon parish and announced plans to tighten firearms legislation after gunmen fired indiscriminately on people at a birthday party, killing eight, including a boy, aged seven.

When 21 Caribbean leaders met at their recent Caribbean Community (Caricom) summit, the crimewave dominated their conversations, Grenada’s prime minister, Dickon Mitchell, told reporters. In a joint statement, the countries expressed deep concerns about “levels of crime and violence in the region, fuelled in part by firearms and ammunition trafficking, transnational criminal networks, and a deterioration of social structures”.

The statement also refers to their previous declaration last year referencing pledges to numerous collaborative measures, including tackling money laundering and banning assault weapons, except for security forces and sporting competitions. They also promised to strengthen education and youth-empowerment strategies, which will be welcomed by anti-crime charities who say more heavy-handed measures are not the answer and are calling for greater investment in preventive strategies, such as drug-addiction treatment and skills-building programmes.

As governments and organisations work to identify and address the root causes of escalating crime levels, academics in the region have examined the legacy of colonisation and the culture of violence embedded by transatlantic slavery.

Dr Wendell Wallace, a professor at the University of the West Indies, said there was a “conflation of many factors” behind the alarming crime statistics in a region beset by climate and other vulnerabilities. Economic challenges, weak border control, the drug trade, an influx of guns from the US and the breakdown of family values were top of his list.

“Our economies are small and, in some instances, smaller than the budgets held by transnational organised [crime] groups. That in itself makes it very easy to corrupt state officials as well as infiltrate the region.

“Then, most of the Caribbean islands are situated in the middle of the north-south drug trade, so we are on the transshipment points for drugs and, wherever you have drugs, you have guns. And with that, you have that constant fight for turf,” he said.

Related: Guns and weapons trafficked from US fueling Haiti gang violence

He added that gangs and organised crime groups take advantage of socioeconomic gaps, providing jobs, fraternity and their own brand of communal justice. He warned that more and more legislation and hardline approaches, such as states of emergency, are not effective as long-term solutions. The best approach, he said, was a “judicious mix of the hard side of policing and the softer side of policing”. Wallace also proposed the creation of national youth services.

“Data shows that people involved in criminality, as well as most of the victims, are between the ages of 15 and 35. So, if they are not employed in a productive capacity, let us get them into a national youth service that provides a higher level of skills training. We should involve the banking sector to make access to loans easier for startup businesses.”

Garth St Clair said that countries in the region need to do more to address the problem of addiction. It is an issue he knows intimately: as a member of the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force, he was introduced to cocaine by a senior corporal as an aid to help him prepare for exams, and soon found his consumption had got out of control.

“I left home after stealing everything from my mother’s house, went on the streets and ended up in prison,” he said.

After leaving prison, St Clair decided to turn his life around, teaming up with communications expert Natasha Nunez, to raise awareness of the dangers of drug and human trafficking through the Eye on Dependency radio programme and their award-winning film Trafficked, which he and Nunez have screened in T&T and Jamaica and are hoping to take to other Caribbean countries.

Eye on Dependency is among a growing number of charities, police clubs and grassroots organisations using arts-based programmes, counselling, mentorship, conflict resolution, skill and confidence building, and other community approaches to rescue young people from the clutches of gangs and drug dealers. Many are now supported by their governments or international organisations.

At the regional level, Caricom’s programme manager of crime and security, Sherwin Toyne-Stephenson, said the organisation was working on an action plan to support governments in their effort to confront the full range of root causes, such as keeping children in education, rehabilitating offenders and dealing with mental health issues.

Offering an example, he added: “We’re conducting a study on the use of non-custodial sentencing for minor non-violent crime. People who’ve been incarcerated for small amounts of narcotic substances, marijuana in particular, would have a sentence. It becomes a challenge for them … to move forward because, when they try to get gainful employment, having a criminal record really pushes them in the other direction.”

Nunez said that, while governments in the region were happy to spend on law enforcement and border protection, more funding was needed to support initiatives such as more drug-treatment centres.

“The deficiency on our part in the Caribbean is that we are very heavy on law enforcement, but not enough attention is paid to prevention and treatment,” she said.