'State of Emergency' in Trinidad, a Marine Industry Hub

Government Responds as 2024 Murders Top 600

The Chaguaramas region of Trinidad is home to 140 marine business.

Update, 4 p.m. December 31: Telecia Campain of the Travel Sketch YouTube sailing channel responded to an enquiry about how the state of emergency may have affected the cruising community. Campain and crew have just launched their catamaran after around 20 months in a boatyard for warranty work. Scroll down to read what she had to say.

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The government of Trinidad & Tobago yesterday declared a state of emergency after a spike in gang violence. Trinidad is important to the cruising community because it couples a geographic advantage—it lies below the hurricane belt—with the most advanced marine-repair sector in the Caribbean.

Without a curfew or restrictions on people’s movements, the measure falls short of martial law. However, it does allow the military to make arrests and lets soldiers and police enter suspects’ homes without a warrant and deny bail to arrestees. From the New York Times:

The state of emergency in the Caribbean country, the first for crime in more than a decade, was announced by the acting attorney general, Stuart Young, at a news conference in Port of Spain, the capital. It comes as the government has been increasingly criticized for failing to stop a wave of gang-related killings. The government reported 623 homicides so far this year in a country of 1.4 million. Last year, the murder rate was just below Haiti’s.

The Times quoted experts as saying that there are 186 gangs with more than 1,750 members in the island nation of 1.5 million people. Gangs have been armed through a smuggling pipeline of guns from the U.S.

According to the Ministry of Trade, the leisure marine sector in Trinidad is skilled at fiberglass work, welding, woodwork, upholstery services, sailmaking, electronics and electrical work, painting and rigging.

The Ministry reports that there are about 1,700 Trinidadians working for an estimated 180 recreational marine companies, 140 of them in the Chaguaramas region. Boatyards and marinas provide approximately 470 in-water berths, as well as accommodation for another thousand boats on land.

The recreational marine sector injects about $30 million a year into the nation’s economy, but officials worry that this number will decline. One of the issues is safety and security for visiting cruisers. “The presence of crime, or the perception thereof, is a deterrent to visitation by yachts, even ad indicated by yachtsmen in the other islands,” officials wrote in a national yachting policy paper.

In July, the U.S. State Department raised its travel advisory for Trinidad and Tobago to Level 3, advising U.S. citizens to reconsider travel due to crime. The advisory specifically mentioned the dangers of “terrorism and kidnapping.”

The Caribbean Safety and Security Net, a volunteer outfit that monitors crime throughout the islands, has not reported much in the way of thefts and burglaries from boats in the water during the past year, however. In its latest report on a theft in Trinidad, victims told about how their dinghy and outboard were recovered thanks to tips from ordinary citizens and aggressive policing.

Here’s the response from Telicia Campain of Liger:

Honestly at this stage it doesn't seem to have had any impact. There's no restrictions on what we can and can't do, just greater powers for the police to search, arrest and hold people. When it was announced in the main Trinidad cruisers Whatsapp group there was very little reaction—people went straight back to talking market trips and a sail discussion that was ongoing.

I'm not sure if you've been here before but essentially all of the foreign yachties in Trinidad are based in Chaguaramas, Scotland Bay, Monos Island or Chacachacare Island. In general the only issue you run into around here is dinghy/outboard theft.

My understanding is much of the area is protected so can't be developed, meaning there's over a mile separation from the marine hub and the closest residential area, which is Carenage, and we are a fair distance from the crime hotspots.

I had a Trini friend reach out to make sure we knew about the state of emergency—her feeling is it's a knee-jerk reaction to the murders over the weekend coming into an election year, but she still had some hope it meant the government was actually going to do something about the problem.

Gang violence is a well known issue here and most of the murders stem from that. It tends to be contained to particular areas near Port of Spain, for example Laventille is a suburb many Trini's avoid due to the gangs, and they tell us foreigners to avoid it too.

We've found that many Trinidadians are friendly and generous with their time, eager to share their culture and hope that foreigners have a positive experience in their country. They hate the crime and gang violence making them feel unsafe in their own home so if the state of emergency yields results I imagine they'll applaud it, and if it doesn't they'll roll their eyes at another lot of government hype that fixed nothing.