Caribbean Initiative Has Its Limits

Official Washington seemed particularly pleased with the efforts.

Brian Nichols, director of the State Department's Office of Caribbean Affairs, said: "The Cricket World Cup was a great success logistically.

... The planning and preparation that they certainly led, and we supported, paid big dividends."

An event like the World Cup has the advantage of a neat beginning and an end that lends itself to easy determination of failure or success. The region's deeper problems are ongoing and entrenched. Their devastating effects remain largely unaddressed due to faltering international cooperation.

Andrew Morrison, lead economist at the World Bank and author of the report "Crime, Violence, and Development: Trends, Costs and Policy Options in the Caribbean," acknowledged that Caribbean countries can and have done a lot on their own. But their bigger problems -- drug trafficking, guns and deportees -- "require a response that transcends national and even regional boundaries," the report accurately argues.

Between 2001 and 2004, for instance, the United States, Canada and Britain deported an annual average of 2,700 convicts to Jamaica, more than half the country's entire prison population. This type of exportation of criminals, The World Bank warns, "could contribute to the building of transnational criminal networks." According to Morrison, the "exporting countries" would serve their own interests much better if they helped finance programs to reintegrate the deportees into their countries. Today, that cost is exclusively financed by Caribbean countries.