Caribbean News Updates (Dec. 9, 2020)

Migration

• Twenty-six Haitians detained in Guyana have been granted a temporary reprieve from deportation while the country's High Court determines the legality of their detention. Human rights groups, including the Caribbean Centre for Human Rights, Stand up for Jamaica and the Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc (TIGI), have objected to the migrants' detention as possible subjects of human trafficking, noting that detention is an inappropriate response for victims. (Kaieteur News, Demerara Waves, Jamaica Observer) Sir Ronald Sanders criticizes prejudice Haitian migrants face in other Caribbean countries. (Kaieteur News)

• Guyana's government suspended ferry service between the country and Suriname in order to block entry of more than 1,000 Cubans who say they want to come to the American embassy to seek asylum in the United States. Authorities believed that the Cubans want to enter Guyana to eventually enter Brazil. (Demerara Waves)

• A High Court judge in Trinidad and Tobago ruled that an 11-year-old Venezuelan child can be deported. The girl's mother lives in T&T and has United Nations High Commission for Refugee (UNHCR) asylum-seeker status, but the judge said the application by the child’s mother was void of evidence that she or her daughter were facing persecution in Venezuela, reports News Americas. (See Nov. 27's post.)

• The judge's decision hinged on the fact that the child's legal submission was based on the 2014 Draft Policy on Refugees and Asylum Seekers, a document that has been approved by Cabinet, but not by Parliament, explains Global Voices.

• One of the 13 prisoners deported from the UK to Jamaica last week has tested positive for Covid-19, the Jamaican government has confirmed. Many concerns were raised about the Covid risk of chartering a flight to Jamaica during the pandemic, reports the Guardian. The plane containing 13 prisoners took off on Wednesday - 23 were left off it following legal challenges. Campaigners said there was a risk people were being wrongly removed as had happened in the Windrush scandal, reports the BBC. 

• Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Latino chosen for U.S. president-elect Joe Biden's cabinet, will head a Department of Homeland Security that is expected to drastically overhaul President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. Biden’s selection of Mayorkas was supported by several immigrant advocacy groups despite record deportations under the Obama administration, notes NBC.

• Security at the land and maritime borders between the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica will be reinforced through a cooperation program with five million euros from the European Union (EU). (Dominican Today)

Climate Justice

• This year's Goldman prize winner, Kristal Ambrose, had to overcome prejudice about class and race in her campaign against plastic waste in the Bahamas. Ambrose started her campaign close to home and among the young, before branching out to address the structural and political causes of the plastic problem, reports the Guardian. Ambrose helped draft the Bahamas' ban on single-use plastic that came into place this year.

• This year's record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season is officially over: 30 named storms, 13 or which developed into hurricanes, six of which became major hurricanes. (Cayman Compass)

• Weather experts say that global warming has upended old assumptions about Atlantic hurricanes -- storms are more frequent, stronger and later in the season than before. A larger portion of Latin America and the Caribbean may now be vulnerable to them, reports WLRN.

• The University of the West Indies' "State of the Caribbean Climate Report" notes that the extreme weather affecting the Caribbean requires a regional response.

• Environmental activists are protesting Disney's plans to build a multi-million dollar cruise destination in South Eleuthera in the Bahamas. (Caribbean News Service)

• Jamaica has assumed chairmanship of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (5Cs), which the government sees as an opportunity to advance its position of leadership on issues of climate change in the region. (Jamaica Observer)

• Aggressive algae is the latest deadly threat to Caribbean coral reefs -- Loop.

Human Rights

• At least 84 high schoolers became pregnant in a small Haitian town following Covid-19 school closures this year. In most cases students from rural areas were coerced, reports the Haitian Times.

• Trying to comprehend and explain what is happening in Cuba by reducing it to the San Isidro movement is to miss the forest for the trees, argues Alina Bárbara López Hernández in Jóven Cuba.

• All Dominicans will receive access to the Covid-19 vaccine once it is made available, according to Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit. (Caribbean News Service)

Economy and Finance

• CARICOM's members are mostly above the threshold for soft-loan and debt-forgiveness initiatives, despite the Caribbean being the most highly indebted region of the world. Because of this, the regional bloc has sought to implement a universal vulnerability index to determine countries’ eligibility for development assistance from the IMF. (Jamaica Gleaner)

• A new, 20-year treaty that will broadly define relations between the EU’s 27 member countries and 79 nations that belong to the Organization of African, Caribbean and Pacific States. It will replace the Cotonou Agreement, which was enacted in 2000 with the aim of reducing poverty and helping to integrate ACP countries into the global economy. The agreement focuses on six broad areas: human rights, democracy and governance; security; human and social development; environmental sustainability and climate change; sustainable growth; and migration and mobility, reports Politico. 

• Covid-19's economic toll in the Caribbean remains high, even as partial reopening boosts some recovery, according to the International Labour Organisation. (Caribbean News Service)

• Could the World Trade Organisation's Dispute Settlement system be a recourse for Caribbean countries blacklisted by the EU? Shridath Ramphal Centre 

• The United Kingdom’s representative in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) has so far declined to sign off on a new law to permit medical cannabis production and sales -- a move that has delayed the nascent industry, reports Marijuana Business Daily.

• Guyana’s multiple major oil discoveries beginning in May 2015 may have set the country on the path to realising a level of wealth not before seen in the Caribbean, but a recent World Bank Review still regards the country as being “one of the poorest in South America," notes Stabroek News.

• Guyanese President Dr. Irfaan Ali said his administration is currently having discussions for the development of a second city in Guyana. (Caribbean National Weekly)

Regional Relations

• Two joint projects announced by Guyana and Suriname -- a bridge across the Corentyne River linking the two countries and the construction of a US$1-billion offshore base to support huge oil discoveries -- will deepen the beneficial relations between the two countries and could have a positive effect for Caricom, argues Sir Ronald Sanders. (Jamaica Observer)

• Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente and Annita Montoute question the "South-South" characterization of Sino-Caribbean relations in Third World Quarterly.

Corruption

• Despite legal and policy-related advances, corruption ratings for Suriname have worsened in recent years -- Ine Apapoe explores why in Global Americans.

• Dominican Republic authorities carried out more raids within “Operation Octopus” that so far has left 10 former officials arrested and charged with corruption. (Dominican Today)

Gender

• Forty-five women and two girls have been murdered in Trinidad and Tobago so far this year -- 13 percent of the homicides to date. (Trinidad Guardian)

• St. Vincent and the Grenadines' first female Speaker of the House of Assembly, Rochelle Forde, was elected last month, and urged MPs not to equate “a particular gender” with weakness. (iWitnessNews)

Public Security

• Healthcare staff at many Haitian facilities went on strike last week in protest of an intern's kidnapping. The intern was released after a ransom payment, but the case indicates a broader problem with kidnappings, some of which may involve the police, reports AFP. Prominent journalist Guyler Delva was also victim of a kidnapping last week, reports the Caribbean News Service.

• According to the United Nations,there was a 200 percent rise in the number of reported abductions in Haiti in the first five months of 2020. But the real number is much higher according to some estimates -- Global Voices.

• Haitian small farmer and human rights organizations — including Grassroots International partners — denounce the ongoing violent land grabs in north and northeastern Haiti.

Anti-Colonialism

• Significant electoral gains by Puerto Rico's left in November's elections should be appreciated as a vote for decolonization and social change argues Luis Fernando Coss in NACLA.

• Aruba and Curaçao have agreed to liberalize their economies in order to qualify for continued financial support from the Netherlands, without which the islands would almost certainly have gone bankrupt. Sint Maarten, the third autonomous Dutch island in the Caribbean, has yet to meet the terms of Dutch aid, which include cutting public-sector salaries by 12.5 to 25 percent. (Atlantic Sentinel)

Culture Corner

• UK-based writer and curator of Bajan and Jamaican heritage, Aliyah Hasinah, muses on the disconnect between the Caribbean diaspora from the politics or culture of the lands they hail from, in a blog post about her Fresh Milk residency. (Repeating Islands)

• New publications by Daniel A. Rodríguez and Don Fitz demonstrate that there are deep historical roots to Cuba's twenty-first century medical exceptionalism. (NACLA)

• Two Trinidad and Tobago writers, Monique Roffey and Ingrid Persaud have been nominated for the 2020 Costa Book Awards. (WIC News)

• A "Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean," by Jeppe Mulich, analyzes the nature of imperial politics and colonial law in chapters centering on free ports and black markets, imperial warfare and colonial violence, prize courts and privateers, slave laws and free communities, abolition and the illegal slave trade, among other topics -- Repeating Islands.