PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad – A staunch critic of the Trinidadian government who is a popular and successful bottled water entrepreneur, as well as his wife and her aunt, have been imprisoned in Trinidad under a preventative detention order from their emergency laws. Those orders were issued as prejudicial to public safety by the American doppelgänger or twin, the Homeland Security minister.
In the scorching heat of summer two women, one of advanced age, have been incarcerated in a prison without conditions of release. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles and fraudsters have all been released on bail while others are denied a fundamental human right. Next they will be giving preventative detention to children.
The government case is so weak they have avoided the courts or Trinidadian firewall.
This is not the first arrest of a woman from a prominent business family in Trinidad under similar circumstances.
Where is it all going to, asset deprivation?
The local airlines, owned by Trinidad and Jamaica, have prohibited that water from their planes. There has been no comment from the Jamaican government owners, the private sector or civil society on what may be a new but communist way to takeover businesses in the Caribbean.
Shame on those who have replaced that water. Their competitors may be laughing now until tears when their time has arrived. The Jamaican people who also own the airline may beg to differ in a substantive way.
American Airlines would never allow this.
There will be the obligatory faux murmurs of displeasure on the patios of Port of Spain or Port of America before the loud silence of the streets, civil society, the private sector or professionals, especially the retired from prominent posts, more concerned to press enter for the next pension payment.
This is a format that is familiar with the dictatorships of Russia, China, Cuba and Nicaragua. This should strike a chord with the family of Marco Rubio, who presumably prefers to let sleeping dogs lie.
The Great Migration
Jamaicans and some members of the ruling government will remember a highly criticized similar emergency powers action in the Seventies that saw relatives, colleagues and friends put in prison for extended periods. None of these connections has made any utterances on this unsavoury development or the packing of cabinet with integrity cowboys and cowgirls. Those people should hang their heads in shame.
It was the start of the great migration or diaspora today who should never again tolerate corruption or misbehaviour in government or any public office.
That period saw many leave the island, only to have their assets obtained for cents on the dollar. Those well connected procurers are still there today with those assets.
It included the family owned American Motors.
This is how the Nazis and their friends operated while pursuing the holocaust.
In case Caribbean populations have missed the narrative for the road to Rome or dictatorship:
Firstly, have under resourced, ineffective crime prevention lead to the exercise of emergency powers over the island or parts of the island, to establish wider government control of the society while putting it forward as effective.
Secondly, ignore or imprison government critics from the private sector, civil society or the man in a loud street while letting all those in leadership positions put their snouts deeply in the trough, sufficiently deep that their hearing is ineffective.
Thirdly, make corruption a normal event within government while pointing fingers elsewhere with frequent, meaningless government press releases to imitate actual progress.
You get the gist.
Do as I say not as I do and you will wake up in North Korea.
