For the second year in a row, Jamaica had the highest murder rate in the region, according to InSight Crime‘s annual homicide roundup. The Constabulary Force recorded 1,463 killings in 2021, giving the country a homicide rate that reached nearly 50 per 100,000 people. Jamaicans were shaken last year by brutal slayings and spiraling violence amid a “third wave” of COVID-19.

So far this year, the island has recorded 112 murders. The government recently launched a campaign, that will pay as much as US$4,000 in local currency to persons who provide information leading to the seizure of illegal guns and the arrest of wanted criminals, though experts say it is unlikely to have real impact on crime rates. The campaign seems to be targeting persons with illegal firearms and those with information about the weapons, reports the Caribbean National Weekly.

Last year Jamaica’s government declared a state of emergency in seven police districts on the island, in response to increases in violent crimes, ranging from 16 to 57 per cent. (See Just Caribbean Updates for Nov. 19, 2021) The state of emergency ended after two weeks when the restrictions were not supported by legislators.

Public Security

• Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, and Puerto Rico all made the top ten in the region’s homicide ranking. The first two in particular are among the region’s high homicide rates: 32 per 100,000 and 29 per 100,000, respectively. Trinidad and Tobago, which has been affected by the ongoing crisis and spike in criminality in Venezuela, saw a 12 percent increase in murders last year. Other violent crimes – including shootings, sex crimes and kidnappings – increased amid the surge in violence. (InSight Crime)
  
• In Belize, homicides reached their lowest point in a decade in 2020, but rose last year due to deadly gang conflicts, according to government authorities. (InSight Crime)
  
• In Puerto Rico there were 616 homicides recorded by the National Police in 2021 compared to 529 in the previous year, causing the homicide rate to jump up to 19.3 per 100,000 people and reversing the decline that had given the island nation its lowest homicide rate in over 30 years. (InSight Crime)

Climate Justice and Energy

• The UK Privy Council granted permission to appeal to a case from the Bahamas brought by Responsible Development for Abaco. The appeal will consider whether orders for security for costs breach constitutional rights. The Bahamas’ Court of Appeal routinely requires huge sums to be paid as security for costs in environmental cases. This prevents judicial review cases from progressing to trial and raises significant issues about RDA’s right of access to the Court.
  
  RDA brought judicial review proceedings to challenge a proposed marina development at Winding Bay on the Island of Abaco. (Clayton Comments)
  
• Natural hazards and climate change impact men and women differently for a host of factors, which include their different roles and individual and family responsibilities, and policy development and service delivery by mandating bodies. The UN Women Multi-Country Office Caribbean commissioned studies on the Impact of Climate Change and Disaster Risk and Cost of Inaction for the EnGenDER programme countries, to understand the differential impact and whether institutional gender biases exist.
  
• The Biden administration and Puerto Rico have signed a memorandum of understanding and launched a joint effort to accelerate the growth of renewable energy resources and strengthen the island’s electric grid. (NBC)
  
• Cuba established a new, 728 km, marine protected area off its northwest coast in an area known as Este del Archipiélago de Los Colorados. (Mongabay)
  
• The Honduran island of Roatán is focusing on balancing the return of tourism (and divers) with the fragility of the marine reef environment — New York Times.
  
• “The race to save the world’s reefs from the climate crisis” – in pictures in the Guardian.

Regional Relations

• On the sixtieth anniversary of the U.S. embargo on Cuba, the National Security Archive posted a collection of previously declassified documents that record the origins, rationale, and early evolution of punitive economic sanctions against Cuba in the aftermath of the Castro-led revolution. 
  
• The documents show that the initial concept of U.S. economic pressure was to create “hardship” and “disenchantment” among the Cuban populace and to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, [and] to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.” However, a CIA case study of the embargo, written twenty years after its imposition, concluded that the sanctions “have not met any of their objectives.” (National Security Archive)
  
• It’s a good opportunity to delve into the complexities of the embargo, which is shorthand for a complex patchwork of laws and regulations that comprise the oldest and most comprehensive U.S. economic sanctions against any country in the world, writes William LeoGrande at Responsible Statecraft.

Democratic Governance

• Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s sweep in general elections last month was not expected, and shows that Barbadians continue to support her Barbados Labour Part, whatever its shortcomings, writes Kristina Hinds in World Politics Review. The win poses a challenge for democratic accountability, and should push other parties to find ways to reestablish their relevance and credibility in the country.

• This week marked the official end of the slain Haitian President Jovenel Moïse’s term (by some counts anyway). Political opponents have demanded that interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry step down, arguing that his administration is unconstitutional. The government was rendered unconstitutional on Feb. 7, according to an opposition alliance dubbed the Montana Accord and independent experts. (See Monday’s Latin America Daily Briefing post.)
  
• A new investigative CEPR article reveals new details about suspects in the plot to assassinate Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse in July last year, and their connections to a murky, earlier “Petit Bois” conspiracy a year ago that was supposedly aimed at ousting Moïse and resulted in the mass, illegal arrests of more than a dozen people. The article is based on interviews with individuals involved in, or close to, the supposed plots against Moïse; former US government officials; and associates of people connected to the plots; and on business records, government documents, and other primary source information.

Human Rights

• Orphanages have proliferated in Haiti over the past decade, thanks to an influx of Western funding. There are few barriers to opening one, and even fewer mechanisms to hold operators accountable for child welfare. The result, according to BuzzFeed News, is a shadowy industry where kids routinely face abuse, exploitation, living standards that don’t meet state requirements, and sometimes death, while Westerners who fund, operate, or promote many orphanages face minimal oversight.

Migration

• Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard officers fired at a boat carrying Venezuelan migrants Saturday night, wounding a mother and killing the baby in her arms. Officers were trying to stop a boat crossing the Venezuelan border into Trinidad and Tobago, in what the island nation’s officials described as an act of self-defense, reports the Associated Press.

Gender and LGBTQI

• The Concacaf and the St. Kitts and Nevis football associationare at loggerheads over coach accused of sexual abuse in Barbados, reports the Guardian.

Culture

• Set to the pulsating beats of Afro-Caribbean music, the feature-length documentary film Frenemies examines the fraught relationship between the island nation of Cuba and the United States. 
  
  
• The ABCs of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, TikTok style — Global Voices

History and Colonialisms

• Caribbean history is filled with failed slave rebellions. “Each is worthy of a place in memory through graceful and compassionate retellings,” writes Scott MacDonald in a Global Americans review of Marjoleine Kars’ Blood on the River and Tom Zoellner’s Island of Fire. “Both books are masterful tales, the first breathing life into what had been a largely forgotten rebellion against the Dutch in Berbice in 1763 and the second taking place in Jamaica from 1831 to 1832.”
  
• A History of Guyana’s Prisons — Stabroek News

Opportunities

• Funder survey to inform the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, Clément N. Voule, who will dedicate his thematic report to be presented at the 50th session of the Human Rights Council, to the study of trends, developments, and challenges regarding the ability of civil society organizations to access resources, including foreign funding. (Deadline 11 February.)
  
• The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights calls for applications for a fellowship program for the protection of the rights of children and adolescents in the region, aimed at professionals from an OAS Member State with experience in human rights, specifically in the rights of children and adolescents.  (Deadline 16 February)

Events

• 17 February — “Gender, Violence, and Politics in Haiti,”  — The Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies (RAICCS) The panel will include Haitian organizers, activists, and scholars Danièle Magloire, Fania Noël, Pascale Solages, and Dominique St Vil. Registration.
  
• 26 February — Online Seminar: Discriminatory Laws Affecting LGBTQ+ Individuals in SVG: State-Sanctioned Homophobia?  — Equal Rights Access and Opportunities SVG Inc.
  
  
  
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