Trinidad’s Violence Blunts Its Promise

Among the countries with the worst crime rates in the world, sixth-place Trinidad and Tobago might not seem out of place at first, sitting alongside similarly violence-torn Haiti and Jamaica in the Caribbean, and several Central American nations. However, as an island state with oil and gas, Trinidad has a GDP per capita that is not only significantly higher than its “peers” but also higher than most developing nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. That it is overwhelmed by violent crime, driven by gang violence and the drug trade, is a tragedy for the country where I grew up, which has produced the likes of historian Eric Williams, batsman Brian Lara, and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul.

This July, the country surpassed 300 murders, putting it on pace to potentially exceed last year’s record annual murder toll this year. With just around 1.4 million people and over 600 murders last year, it already has one of the world’s highest murder rates, driven by the proliferation of guns, gang warfare, and a drug trade.

Trinidad’s proximity to Venezuela and Guyana makes it a convenient location for the smuggling of cocaine to the West. This has fueled a rise in gang violence and an influx of illegal guns. That crime wave has gone on since the early 2000s, with murders rising from 171 in 2002 to 605 in 2022, as successive governments proved to be largely unable to do anything about it.

The country has a unique multicultural society as it has no racial majority and “mixed” people make up the third-largest ethnic group, behind Indo-Trinidadians, the descendants of indentured workers who came from India in the 19th century, and Afro-Trinidadians. Ethnic Chinese like me; whites of British, French, Spanish, or Portuguese descent; and ethnic Syrian/Lebanese form prominent minority groups. A recent major addition is tens of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing the economic and political strife in their homeland.

This mix of peoples, along with their different cultures, traditions, and religions, produced great 20th-century intellectuals like Williams, a noted historian who became Trinidad’s first prime minister; Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001; and radical Marxist author and cricket writer C.L.R. James. Trinidad can also lay partial claim to St. Lucian-born poet and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, who spent much of his career in Trinidad. Trinidad’s cultural heritage is focused on its annual Carnival, the centerpiece of the year, which has inspired similar festivities from New York to London.

Yet the oil and gas wealth, multiculturalism, intellectual heritage, and Carnival spirit are severely undermined by crime, corruption, and race-based politics dating back to British colonialism that have fostered tensions and hindered cross-party cooperation.

Trinidad’s politics are dominated by two main parties—the ruling People’s National Movement (PNM), mainly supported by Afro-Trinidadians and mixed people, and the United National Congress (UNC), made up largely of Indo-Trinidadians. There have been multicultural parties in the past, but power has been held by either the PNM or UNC for all but one electoral term. The political division creates significant racial distrust and tensions that while thankfully not severe enough to result in communal violence, produce biased government spending, resource allocation, and project contracting. Companies and communities belonging to the same ethnic group as the party in power are more favored, and when one community is in power, the other loses out, creating a zero-sum mentality that holds the island back.

Racial politics also facilitates or is accompanied by the corruption that pervades various levels of society. Politicians are unwilling to investigate their side or to risk disturbing the networks of community, family, and personal connection that brought them to power. In Transparency International’s 2022 rankings, Trinidad is 77th out of 180 countries with an unimpressive score of 42 out of 100 points for perceived corruption. As with race-based politics, corruption has prevented the revenues brought in by the country’s oil and gas wealth from being effectively spent on improving infrastructure, relieving poverty, and reducing inequality.

Despite Trinidad’s relative wealth, the high rate of poverty, exemplified by but not limited to several low-income, high-crime neighborhoods and slums next to the capital, Port of Spain, means there is no shortage of gangs.

But while many murders involve gang violence, which accounted for 241 out of 2022’s 605 murders, a substantial number of victims are regular law-abiding people. My father was one of them—killed by robbers at his grocery in 2021. Born in Hong Kong, he had lived in Trinidad for over 45 years and had run that business at that location for 25 years. While ethnic Chinese are a tiny minority, my father was just one of many businessmen in the community who have been targeted in the past decade due to the common perception that Chinese businesspeople are both wealthy and, thanks to their lack of connections and protection, vulnerable.

The effects of crime are visible as many businesses often close by 6 p.m. and visitors are warned against venturing outdoors at night except in groups. The U.S. government’s Level 3 travel advisory for Trinidad warns its citizens to “reconsider travel to Trinidad and Tobago due to crime,” while the British authorities warn about the “high and increasing level of violent crime” in their travel advice for the country.

There is also a disturbing number of female victims, some of whom were abducted before being sexually assaulted and killed. Besides murders, rape and violent robberies are also common, sometimes in broad daylight. A female driver, who was one of the only people I met during a recent trip who remained confident about the state of the country, still confided in me that her teenage niece was not allowed to take public transportation.

And the situation may be set to worsen. While Trinidad is one of the world’s top exporters of liquefied natural gas, its economy actually contracted during the 2010s as energy prices fell and oil production declined. With energy prices having risen in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trinidad benefited slightly, though it remains to be seen if it can sustain this growth as it faces declining oil and gas reserves and the need to diversify its economy.

Given that its economic prosperity is not guaranteed to last, the country needs to curb its violent crime crisis. For now, that is clearly not happening. One of the developing world’s most fascinating countries continues to be shackled by its own inability to protect its citizens.