The Caribbean cor­ri­dor fa­cil­i­tates the tran­sit of over $17 bil­lion worth of co­caine to the Unit­ed States. Au­thor Trevor Munroe writes in Caribbean Se­cu­ri­ty in the Age of Ter­ror that this ac­counts for half their mar­ket.Trinidad is a well-doc­u­ment­ed tran­sit coun­try for nar­cotics leav­ing the South Amer­i­can pro­duc­ers, but the in­ter­est­ing fact is that re­searcher and crim­i­nol­o­gist Dau­rius Figu­iera said T&T has been "switched on" as ma­jor trans­ship­ment point, in­creas­ing the amount of drugs fil­tered.

Ac­cord­ing to Figu­iera, there's a known nexus be­tween pro­gres­sive crime and drugs. Since guns are not man­u­fac­tured in T&T, he said that it was ob­vi­ous it's brought in through the nar­cot­ic trade, even­tu­al­ly mak­ing its way to the streets. Un­of­fi­cial sta­tis­tics show that 71 per cent of mur­ders in T&T for 2014 were due to fa­tal shoot­ings. Ac­cord­ing to the 2012 Small Arm Re­port, our fig­ure is al­most dou­ble glob­al av­er­age of mur­ders com­mit­ted with firearms, stand­ing at 42 per cent.

In­ter­na­tion­al or­gan­i­sa­tions like the UN, the Unit­ed States' DEA, and the In­ter­na­tion­al Or­ga­ni­za­tion for Mi­gra­tion all doc­u­ment T&T as a coun­try with porous bor­ders.In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions Prof Andy Knight said more can be done to se­cure our bor­ders, while Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Gary Grif­fith said our bor­ders are com­par­a­tive­ly se­cure.

Crack–the street form of co­caine–has been the sec­ond most-pre­ferred drug on the street af­ter mar­i­jua­na. And ad­dic­tion has been a so­cial prob­lem for gov­ern­ments since the 1960s.In this five-part se­ries–"Cracks in our Bor­ders"–which starts to­mor­row night on CNC3 and on Tues­day in the Guardian, re­porter Ur­vashi Ti­wari-Roop­nar­ine takes an in-depth look at T&T's role in transna­tion­al crime.

She ex­plores the con­nec­tion be­tween drugs and crime, gets ac­counts from fish­er­men of what hap­pens at sea, and looks at what makes our coun­try an ide­al trans­ship­ment point. She al­so ex­plores the ef­fec­tive­ness of the Coastal Radar Sys­tem, shares the sto­ry of a con­vict­ed drug mule, and walks the streets with a crack ad­dict.