Excerpts from the book “Cocaine and Heroin Trafficking in The Caribbean – The Case of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Guyana”, by Darius Figueira. This book is available at the UWI Bookshop and online on Amazon.com.
“The dominant race based illicit drug transhipping organisations/race groupings are:
The Syrian/Lebanese grouping. This grouping consists of crime families descended from Syrian and Lebanese immigrants to Trinbago and generations since born in Trinbago. ..The Syrian/Lebanese organisation has created a division of labour in which their illicit drug transhipping is masked by the legitimate front businesses and drug money laundering operations that pass for legitimate businesses.
…The Syrian/Lebanese organization was in the 1980s and 1990s heavily involved in the retailing of crack through Afro and Mixed Trinbagonians primarily in the East-West Corridor ofTrinidad. Crack retailing generated the cash flow for expansion in retailing and real estate speculation, which broke members of the group out of traditional pursuits as the importation, wholesaling and retailing of fabrics and garment production. In the late 1980s in Trinidad a number of illicit drug trafficking entrepreneurs had arisen moving product out of Trinidad to the rest of the Caribbean as the US Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos, St.Maarten, Europe and the US. In the late 1980s a turf war developed between these Afro-Trinbagonian independent illicit drug traffickers and the Syrian/Lebanese organisation. In the early 1990s this conflict would escalate into open turf warfare and the Syrian/Lebanese organisation provided the evidence to the DEA, British Customs and the illicit drug interdiction agency of theNetherlandsto bring these nascent independent trafficking organisations down. Zimmern Beharry and Dole Chadee would be famous victims of the Syrian/Lebanese backlash but a series of Afro-Trinbagonian traffickers unknown to the wider public would be killed, fled from Trinbago or were imprisoned in the US, Britain and other members of the European Union for daring to challenge Syrian/Lebanese hegemony over illicit drug retailing in the East-West Corridor of Trinidad. It is no coincidence that after the heady days of illicit drug interdiction and extradition of indicted traffickers to theUSin the 1990s there has been no activity of this intensity in the early years of the 21st Century inTrinidad and Tobago. There is no turf war between Trans-shipping organisations and the Afro-Trinbagonian threat has been neutralized and the race put back in its place as consumers of illicit drugs and as corrupt state officials and politicians serving the interests of the illicit drug trade.
The Syrian/Lebanese organisation has always made sure that it cultivated and wielded influence over the political parties ofTrinidad and Tobago. It is organically tied to the PNM but it has ensured that it exerted some influence over parties which formed governments other than the PNM from 1986 to 1991 (NAR) and from 1995 to 2000, and 2000 to 2001 (UNC). Its war against the Afro-Trinidadian independents prosecuted under the PNM government of 1991 to 1995 was continued and in fact expanded under the UNC government of 1995 to 2000, for it was under the UNC government that Zimmern Beharry was extradited to the US and Dole Chadee was hanged for murder. Under the UNC 1995 to 2000 the new generation of money launderers and illicit drug traffickers of the Syrian/Lebanese organisation rose to positions within the stat sector and wielded political influence previously denied them under the preceding PNM regimes. The UNC empowered a new generation within the Syrian/Lebanese organisation which influenced tensions within the organisation over succession of power that threatened to tear apart the organisation in public eyes for the first time ever in its career in illicit drug trafficking.”
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