The Caribbean Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is named a state of emergency in response to a spike in gang violence over the weekend.
The declaration gives police additional powers as they try to stop revenge killings and other gang-related activity.
“Declaring and declaring a state of public emergency is something that is not taken lightly,” Acting Attorney General Stuart Young said at an event press conference Monday.
He explained that information from the Trinidad and Tobago police service “ordered and dictated the necessity of this major action that we took this morning”.
The state of emergency gives the country's police the power to arrest people “on suspicion of being involved in illegal activities”. It also allows law enforcement to “search and enter public and private property” and impose bail.
A government statement specified that no curfew would be imposed, and that the freedom to meet in public or demonstrate in processions would not be restricted.
Young pointed out that an increase in violence over the weekend in the capital, Port of Spain, helped prompt the emergency declaration in the early hours of Monday.
“You will remember that there was a shooting on Saturday, just after 3 o'clock in the afternoon outside the Besson Street police station, using a high caliber automatic weapon,” explained Young.
Local media described the shooting as an ambush.
Suspected gang leader Calvin Lee had arrived at the police station to sign the bail book, but when he and the attackers left, the Daily Express reported that gunmen from a nearby van and started shooting.
One person was killed. Lee himself managed to escape. But Young explained that the shooting had led to revenge killings between local gangs.
Within 24 hours, he said, six people were dismembered in Laventille, a suburb of Port of Spain. Five of them were killed. Young said more revenge attacks are still expected.
“Increased acts of revenge by the criminal elements in and around certain places in Trinidad and Tobago can be expected which immediately warranted and took away from what we may have been normal,” explained e.
He declined to name specific locations where gang activity may be concentrated.
“But I can say that throughout Trinidad and possibly Tobago, (criminal groups) are likely to increase their acts of violence in revenge shootings on such a wide scale that it threatens people and puts their safety public at risk. “
Young said the decision to declare a state of emergency was partly due to the high-quality weapons used in the attacks, which increased the potential for bystander deaths.
He noted that AK-47 and AR-15 rifles were involved.
“Over the last month or so, and really building on this, the government has been concerned about the use of high-powered, illegal firearms – high-caliber firearms into automatic weapons that are unfortunately a scourge throughout the entire Caribbean region,” Young said.
Caribbean countries do not manufacture own guns, and many of the guns used in gang violence were imported illegally.
One source in particular stands out: United States. It is the largest arms exporter in the world.
In March, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute was found that the US was the source of about 42 percent of global arms exports.
A 2017 analysis the Small Arms Survey also found that the US had the largest number of private firearms per capita, with US civilians owning 40 percent of the world's firearms.
Guns from the US have been linked to crimes throughout the Caribbean, from Haiti and Jamaica to Trinidad and Tobago.
The US has cooperated with 13 countries in the Caribbean to prevent the illegal gun trade. Between 2018 and 2022, approximately 7,399 firearms collected from crimes in the region were sent to the US for traceability.
In October, the US Government Accountability Office published a report with their findings. Of the firearms recovered and recovered in those four years, a total of 5,399 were – or 73 percent – originated in the US. Another hundred or so had uncertain origins.
The number of illegal firearms has been linked to increased violence in the Caribbean. Trinidad and Tobago, for example, has been struggling with the highest suicide rate.
In December alone, there were 61 murders, according to the government. The country had a total of 623 murders so far for 2024.
“Agencies accounted for 263 of them,” MP Fitzgerald Hinds, the national security minister, said at a press conference on Monday.
“As a result, we believe that this declaration of public emergency is to confront the criminals and allow law enforcement to access them more easily than usual, due to the crisis they have presented to this country.”
