Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves says what has been undermining a sense of social solidarity in fighting crime is a model of political economy based on dog-eat-dog capitalism, stating that authorities have to follow the money.
Gonsalves, speaking at the CARICOM crime symposium, said across the Caribbean people complain that the small man is caught but Mr. Big escapes because they’re linking the crime naturally and there’s much linkage between that and drugs or other kinds of economic activity from the proceeds of crime.
“We have a lot of regulations and a lot of laws dealing with money laundering. If you make a lot of money off drugs, you import the drugs illegally, you sell the drugs, and you get foreign currency. You can’t change the foreign currency easily or lodge it in the banks, so it has to be cleaned somewhere else. And it is often cleansed in perfectly respectable enterprises by people who are restaurants, people who have supermarkets, people who have legitimate businesses where it is very difficult to say where this money comes from”.
Gonsalves said he has been saying some very uncomfortable things, but we are not going to address this problem very seriously unless we speak of uncomfortable things and take action regionally in relation to these uncomfortable matters.
