By Raffique Shah
Sunday, April 12th 2009
ONE agenda item that no doubt crops up at every Summit of the Americas is the illegal drug trade. The two main mind-altering drugs produced, traded and used in the Western Hemisphere are marijuana and cocaine. Note-I have not mentioned alcohol, which is also mind-altering but which has been legalised globally. At the Fifth Summit, many leaders will slosh down the finest liquors taxpayers’ money can buy. Some of them will get embarrassingly drunk-as happened at recent top-level international conferences.
Continue reading Sober suggestions for summit war on drugs
The purpose of this article is to set the record straight in regard to the Cuban issue at the Fifth Summit of the Americas that is scheduled for April 17-19 in Trinidad.
The Food and Fuel Forum of Trinidad and Tobago offers, through the General Union of Guadeloupean Workers, UGTG, its deepest solidarity with the LKP, a grouping of forty seven peoples organisations, the workers and people of Guadeloupe as you pursue your general strike against the extreme exploitation that has been the lot of the masses of people in the French colonies in the Caribbean. We in Trinidad and Tobago also suffer the effects of the capitalist economic crisis and strongly empathise with the people of Guadeloupe.
Contrary to the view expressed by Foreign Affairs Minister Gopee-Scoon the time is most propitious and ripe for the Inter-American System to be initiating dialogue with the regime of Raul Castro. President Barack Obama has signaled in clear, unambiguous language that US rapprochement with Cuba is on the cards especially with the closure of the Gitmo Detention Centre. He has also relaxed travel restrictions to Cuba by Cuban-Americans.
Many people agree that this country is in serious crisis. However, I find that many of these perspectives on the state of Trinidad and Tobago rarely touch on the roots of the issues, especially as they fail to recognize that many of the problems we face are built into the very fabric of Caribbean and Trinbagonian society. Thus, addressing these problems calls for a fundamental questioning of the origins and evolution of our society.
The people of Haiti are as poor as human beings can be.
Prior to the commencement of the TT/Barbados Maritime Boundary Arbitration I wrote in March 2004 to former Minister of Foreign Affairs Knowlson Gift advising that T&T should hold immediate consultations with our Venezuelan treaty partner with respect to collaborating on the defence of the maritime boundary that they jointly established by treaty in 1990. Points 1 to 22 of the boundary are illustrated in the chart below.