Prime Min­is­ter of St Vin­cent and the Grenadines Dr Ralph Gon­salves says he does not al­low op­po­si­tion lead­ers and their par­ties to im­pose on his fight against crime.

In re­marks at the Cari­com Re­gion­al Sym­po­sium: Vi­o­lence as a Pub­lic Health Is­sue - the Crime Chal­lenge at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain, Gon­salves said while he is not call­ing for to­tal­i­tar­i­an mea­sures, he does not tol­er­ate be­ing swayed from do­ing his work on be­half of the peo­ple he serves. He claimed op­po­si­tion par­ties al­most nev­er have any­thing pos­i­tive or ben­e­fi­cial to con­tribute to their gov­ern­ment’s ef­forts to com­bat crime.

“Around the re­gion, op­po­si­tion par­ties are say­ing, ‘I want to work with you in deal­ing with crime.’ Don’t be­lieve that at all,” Gon­salves said.

“Op­po­si­tion par­ties are in­ter­est­ed in the fol­low­ing things: to op­pose, to ex­pose and to de­pose con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly. They not fool­ing me.”

He ad­vised Cari­com lead­ers not to let ob­sta­cles get in the way of cre­at­ing a safer so­ci­ety: “The last thing you need to want to help you is an op­po­si­tion leader politi­cian who wants to get in­volved with you, to try and un­der­mine you in do­ing your work to make the place safer.”

Gon­salves, who has had a long ca­reer in law, went on to con­demn the jus­tice sys­tem for be­ing too easy on crim­i­nals.

“Too many of our judges and mag­is­trates are too soft. Some­times you get the im­pres­sion that some mag­is­trates, de­pend­ing on who is the lawyer, their clients seem to get bet­ter treat­ment,” he said.

Gon­salves said he be­lieves the death penal­ty will as­sist great­ly in elim­i­nat­ing homi­cides through­out the re­gion.

“I’m a Ro­man Catholic. The Catholic church preach­es that we shouldn’t have the death penal­ty and my moth­er was a Catholic, Le­gion of Mary. I hap­pen to think that both my moth­er and the Pope are wrong. For crimes, for mur­der, oth­er than a crime of pas­sion, you should get the death penal­ty.”

—AN­GE­LO JE­DIDI­AH