Island States Move to Shield Witnesses to Drug Trafficking

When authorities here put Clint Huggins in their witness-protection program in 1994, most Trinidadians figured he was as good as dead.

Huggins was the star witness against the most notorious organized-crime gang in Trinidad and Tobago, this strategic twin-island nation on a prime route for smuggling Colombian cocaine to the United States.

Witnesses against the gang routinely had been shot, poisoned or hacked to death in the past, and Huggins was going to testify that gang leader Dole Chadee had ordered a hit in which four people were killed.

Sure enough, six months after Huggins moved into a military safe house, a guard tried to poison him; the plot was thwarted only through a sting in which Huggins faked his own death.

But in February 1996, Huggins died for real--shot, hacked up and burned beside a road.

Chadee and eight associates ultimately were convicted of the four murders and sentenced to death--thanks in part to Huggins’ sworn affidavit. But his slaying underscored one of the toughest challenges facing more than a dozen Caribbean nations that Colombian drug traffickers use as steppingstones to the United States.

In an effort to reverse the trend, top law enforcement officials of the Caribbean countries plan to meet here this month to finalize a regional Justice Protection Program.

The plan, which Trinidad has marshaled through the 14-member Caribbean Community and Common Market since the death of Huggins, would create a network of havens throughout the islands. Witnesses or endangered judges from one nation could be hidden and protected in another.

“Protecting witnesses is one of our biggest problems in going after the drug cartels,” said Ramesh Maharaj, Trinidad’s attorney general. “It’s hard to hide and protect witnesses on small islands where everyone knows each other from drug dealers who are determined to silence them.

“We’ve certainly lost more than our share--probably 14 or 15 key witnesses in the last five years. It has cost us a lot of cases.”

Witnesses have been killed in several Caribbean nations, but Maharaj acknowledges that Trinidad’s crackdown on drug trafficking has made the problem most acute here--so great that his government turned to the United States to provide temporary refuge.

Under agreements that have made Trinidad one of the region’s closest U.S. allies in the drug war, American authorities have agreed to harbor in the United States several key witnesses from major Trinidadian drug trials. Among them: the soldier who tipped authorities about the 1994 plot to poison Huggins.

Although U.S. and Trinidadian officials say the cooperative effort is temporary, it is part of a broader alliance that officials here say is key to attacking the cocaine trade near its source.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials say Colombian cartels increasingly have turned to Trinidad as a transshipment hub for cocaine. Container shipments from Trinidad--a major trading partner with which U.S. companies invest about $1 billion a year--draw less suspicion from U.S. Customs Service agents than those from Colombia and Venezuela, which is seven miles from Trinidad.

Drug enforcement officials say the Colombians also have found new partners in local gangs.

Breaking those gangs is key to Trinidad Prime Minister Basdeo Panday’s declared war on the drug trade. Driven by popular outrage and an election promise, Panday has relied on the U.S. more heavily--and more openly--than any other Caribbean leader.

Panday has opened Trinidad’s borders to U.S. surveillance patrols, radar systems and investigative task forces. In return, Washington has begun the temporary witness-protection program and pledged several million dollars’ worth of patrol boats, aircraft, support personnel and training.

So close has the alliance become that Edward Shumaker III, the U.S. ambassador here, remarked this week: “The United States has no greater friend in the region than Trinidad and Tobago.”