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Terrorism, Porous Borders, and Homeland Security: The Case for U.S.-Caribbean Cooperation

In the hours following the collapse of the World Trade Center twin towers on September 11, 2001, the United States applied a tourniquet to the transportation arteries that feed its national economy. The first campaign in the war to protect the U.S. homeland was to impose an embargo — on its own economy. Freezing its transport networks first and asking questions later was clearly appropriate. Now comes the hard part. While domestic policing must be emphasized, considerable threat also exists in cross-border traffic. Chemical and biological weapons can be more easily loaded on a boat, in a truck, or within a maritime container than on a missile. Front-line agencies like the U.S. Customs Service, Coast Guard, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Department of Agriculture, and Border Patrol are being called upon to respond in ways for which they have neither the staff nor the training.

Last year, 489 million people, 127 million cars, 11.6 million maritime containers, 11.5 millions trucks, 2.2 million railroad cars, 829,000 planes, and 211,000 boats passed through U.S. border inspection systems by air, land and sea. These agencies, as presently financed and administered, cannot possibly eliminate every terrorist threat when faced with such numbers for inspection. Understandably traumatized, Washington is now swinging the pendulum from openness to control. "Homeland defense" has become the new national security priority. While the movement of peoples and goods between the contiguous land borders of the United States and Canada and the United States and Mexico represent the major cross-border movement, the "Third Border" of the United States, namely the Caribbean, is also critical, raising important economic and security concerns that Washington cannot afford to overlook.

Economic Impact
The Caribbean is the tenth largest trading partner of the United States, a major regional source of migration and visitors to the United States, and an important destination for both North American tourists and business investments. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, turning off the transportation spigot that carries travelers and cargo to and from the United States has jeopardized the future of already fragile Caribbean economies and added to potential scenarios for regional instability. Major sectors of Caribbean economies — air transport, tourism, agricultural commodity exports, manufacturing, mining, and capital markets — depend on ready access to the U.S. economy.
Tourism is the single largest earner of foreign exchange in 16 of 28 countries in the Wider Caribbean region. Even before September 11, tourism, which directly or indirectly employs one in four Caribbean citizens and generates income for the region in excess of US$2billion per year, had been in decline as a result of the downturn in the global economy. Weeks after the tragic loss of over 5,000 innocent civilians — including at least 160 nationals from 15 Caribbean countries — the short-term outlook for Caribbean tourism is grim. International leisure passengers are cancelling flights in droves, air carriers have reduced their services, cruise ships have shifted their destinations, and hotel staffs have been retrenched. The negative multiplier effect on businesses or investments that depend indirectly on the hospitality industry has taken hold.

Major tourism-dependent Caribbean countries have responded quickly to the crisis. Jamaica, which earns an estimated gross US$1.2 billion per year and directly employs more than 30,000 people in the industry, plans to spend an additional US$4.7 million on advertising during October and November 2001, and the government is considering a moratorium on debt owed by small hotels to state-owned financial institutions on a case-by-case basis. In Barbados — where tourism contributes approximately US$1 billion to the economy, it is anticipated that there will be a US$30.3 million decline in receipts; a 30-35 percent drop in the cruise business; $857,000 less in the head tax; and a drop of US$9.21 million in tourist spending, — the government has committed additional financial resources of US$10-12 million to the tourism industry. 

The cost of service disruptions, cancellations, air and cruise-ship traffic decline, increased security, higher insurance rates, and reluctance by leisure passengers to pay higher airfares are yet to be calculated. The overall outlook for the 2001-2002 winter season is bleak because of the unknown repercussions of the war on terrorism, the possibility of a global recession, and a dramatic loss of tourism revenue as U.S. and European travelers continue to postpone or cancel their overseas vacations.

As many of the world’s countries position themselves to combat "terrorism with a global reach" the Caribbean region will experience economic distress in other areas as well. A decline in foreign direct investment, regional inability to raise international finance, increased costs for the shipment of agricultural and manufactured exports, additional costs for insurance and reinsurance, a decline in remittances to the region (now valued at approximately US$3 billion) because of job losses among Caribbean nationals in the United States and Canada, and higher energy costs, are all expected as short- and medium-term impacts of the recent tragedy.

Offshore financial jurisdictions, already under attack by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), will come under more intense international scrutiny regarding how they are regulated to ensure that such sectors will not be used to fund terrorists or terrorism. Offshore financial centers will be under pressure to do more to meet international standards of regulation and best practice, since a major part of the money laundering connected with global terrorism is routed through banks in North America and Europe. In fact, most Caribbean offshore centers are not ignoring the renewed threats to their financial services sector and are reviewing their accounts to ensure that they were not used directly or indirectly by terrorist groups or individual terrorists to launder money.

Caribbean Regional Security
Terrorist acts can take place anywhere. The Caribbean is no exception. Already the linkages between drug trafficking and terrorism are clear in countries like Colombia and Peru, and such connections have similar potential in the Caribbean. The security of major industrial complexes in some Caribbean countries is vital. Petroleum refineries and major industrial estates in Trinidad, which host more than 100 companies that produce the majority of the world’s methanol, ammonium sulphate, and 40 percent of U.S. imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), are vulnerable targets. Unfortunately, as experience has shown in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, terrorists are likely to strike at U.S. and European interests in Caribbean countries.

Security issues become even more critical when one considers the possible use of Caribbean countries by terrorists as bases from which to attack the United States. An airliner hijacked after departure from an airport in the northern Caribbean or the Bahamas can be flying over South Florida in less than an hour. Terrorists can sabotage or seize control of a cruise ship after the vessel leaves a Caribbean port. Moreover, terrorists with false passports and visas issued in the Caribbean may be able to move easily through passport controls in Canada or the United States. (To help counter this possibility, some countries have suspended "economic citizenship" programs to ensure that known terrorists have not been inadvertently granted such citizenship.) Again, Caribbean countries are as vulnerable as anywhere else to the clandestine manufacture and deployment of biological weapons within national borders.

Over the years, there have been efforts to strengthen the region’s security systems, particularly in countries of the English-speaking Caribbean. The stimulus has often been directed at pursuing drug traffickers and their money. However, despite the "third border" concept, the United States has paid little policy attention to the Caribbean countries as an integral part of its perimeter defence structure. Such neglect on the part of the United States, at this time, would be irresponsible. Caribbean countries should be encouraged to join an international consensus and genuine partnership to guarantee as far as possible the security of the United States and bordering countries. (In this context, the United States will have to consider even closer collaboration with Cuba in global security considerations, despite current policy that brands Cuba as a terrorist state.) This collaboration, which is in the Caribbean’s best interest, will force a review of the current policy which allows the unimpeded flow of illegal small arms to Caribbean countries, exacerbating serious crime problems, as well as the "repatriation" of sophisticated criminals who might have only the most tenuous claim to birthright or citizenship in a Caribbean country. Ironically, U.S. Customs officials have in the past argued that more vigilance in attempting to detect guns leaving their shores would slow trade. The tragedy of September 11 has illustrated that it may be worthwhile to spend time and effort intercepting the flow of small arms.

Caribbean governments are taking steps to tighten security at airports and other vulnerable locales, but terrorism is a global problem, and the region will have to decide on the right kind of approach to the issue. Many Caribbean citizens may feel that the United States is once more trying to assert its own agenda, but the recent attacks (and those that could follow) require a sea change in Caribbean thinking about regional security. National borders are porous to terrorism — no one need claim responsibility for attacks — and globalization and technology have opened up new possibilities for terrorists.

The Necessity for U.S.-Caribbean Cooperation
As cross-border trade has grown, security and those responsible for providing it have been shoved aside. For example, despite trade more than tripling between the United States and Canada since the inception of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the number of customs and immigration inspectors along the border remain at pre-NAFTA levels. The U.S. Coast Guard, which is essential to port security, is at its lowest personnel level since 1964. The United States is now experiencing the dark side of a transport system in which efficiency has trumped public security. As the country mobilizes for a long struggle against terrorism, it must face some basic realities. There will continue to be anti-American terrorists with global reach who have the capability to carry out catastrophic attacks. The United States must find a way to reduce the potential use of its global transport lifelines as conduits for terrorism. There needs to be far greater international cooperation in policing transnational flows of people and goods. At present, trying to distinguish the illicit from the licit at U.S. borders is like trying to catch North Atlantic sardines in the Caribbean Sea. Policing must move upstream. Why not place some of the U.S. immigration and customs officials overseas with their counterparts (as already done in some Canadian ports), so they can inspect and clear travelers and goods destined for the United States? Such an approach would take better advantage of law-enforcement information at the point of departure, gather transport-related intelligence into the security system sooner, and reduce the congestion caused by inspections at U.S. borders.

The private sector and traveling public both in the United States and the Caribbean also have roles to play. The overwhelming majority of international carriers, cargo shippers, and travelers in the region are legitimate, and they must be willing, for their safety, to embrace tightened security measures and provide proof of their identities and purposes as early as possible. Such cooperation would allow border agencies to determine with more confidence what risks travelers, carriers, and cargo might pose. Verifying the identity and purpose of users or operators at the point of origin could be accomplished through electronic fingerprint technology and cargo and vehicle scanning equipment. Tracking devices, such as electronic tagging and universal bar codes, could be adopted to insure tighter control over commerce. This in-transit accountability would allow authorities to act on intelligence of a potential breach in security prior to arrival at U.S. borders as well as afterward. The work of border authorities must be effectively coordinated and supported by analysts and data management systems that enable more effective targeting.

The vibrancy of a globalized economy depends on the free movement of people, goods, and services. Quarantining the transportation system in the face of terrorism cannot be the right cure for this disease. Strengthening traditional approaches to border management and control will not work in an era of globalization. Similarly, it is vital for the United States and the Caribbean to find an alternative to "hardened" borders in order to achieve homeland security. If the U.S. government finally adopts an approach that tries to stop and examine all people, goods, and conveyances at its borders, as part of its now dramatically heightened homeland security mandate, the impact on Caribbean as well as global travel and commerce will be devastating.

The most viable alternative is collaborative "point of origin" controls that require more credible national border management approaches within departure countries — approaches that also serve those countries’ national interests in dealing effectively with issues such as better facilitation of legitimate trade and travel, while thwarting the activities of arms smugglers, drug traffickers, and terrorists. A more collaborative spirit is required to combat the new challenges of terrorism with a global reach. More energy must be directed toward gaining greater control over continental maritime and aviation commercial space. If that space cannot be made secure, the public pressure in the United States to harden the border along the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico is likely to prove irresistible. 

By Stephen E. Flynn, and Anthony Bryan
Source:  http://www.cfr.org/border-and-port-security/terrorism-porous-borders-homeland-security-case-us-caribbean-cooperation/p4844

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