Bahamas News
Guns flow from North to South, arming Caribbean Gangs & Bad Boys
By Dana Malcolm
Staff Writer
May 27, 2022 – Illegal guns have been consistently making their way into the Caribbean for decades.
The weapons make their way from source markets overseas but the financing behind these illicit weapons remains murky.
What is clear though is that illegal firearm use in the Caribbean is almost always tied to gangs or drugs. 10 out of twelve Caribbean states who responded in a Caribbean Financial Action Task Force survey including Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and the Turks and Caicos said the guns seized in their countries were related to drugs.
The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) noted that the level of violence in the Caribbean is heavily concentrated in Urban areas and that drugs and guns use the Caribbean and Central America as Transshipment routes to enter large source markets in Europe and Central America. Despite not being the target market for drugs these transshipment points become ‘collateral damage’ the UNIDIR says, with residual guns filtering into local communities.
“External flows of guns and ammunition increase the capacity for local violence in the communities. They make
The reason the Caribbean is so susceptible to this is in part because of the socio economic situation on the ground. Poor economic conditions and a culture of reliance on gang handouts exacerbated by poor social aid and other factors creates an environment where guns are solutions to hunger, revenge and poverty.
Haiti, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago are increasingly at risk as gang violence buoys the gun trade in several of these areas.
Several high profile trials in the last few years including the trial of a three members of the Haitian 400 Mawozo gang have demonstrated the ways Caribbean gangs use members overseas to funnel drugs.
These citizens who live in Central America and Europe buy guns in retail stores and forge documents to ship those guns; guns which turn up in barrels of clothes (Haiti), inside televisions (Jamaica) and inside insulated refrigerators (Jamaica) by air.
By sea there is well documented evidence that guns have been bartered between Jamaica and Haiti in exchange for drugs with fishermen acting as middlemen and the Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas, which are multi-island nations, and especially prone to human smuggling have arrested would be illegal migrants with both homemade and professional grade firearms.
Additionally US Virgin Islands Was the second leading importer of firearms recovered by law enforcement among all states and territories in the US despite being dwarfed in land side by every mainland US State.