JO - Time to care again for Caricom

From my archive of press clippings:

Jamaica Observer

Time to care again for Caricom

Sir Ronald Sanders

Sunday, April 26, 2009


IT seems that every time the countries of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (Caricom) make one step forward in the quest for deeper integration, they take two steps backward, and the goal becomes even more elusive.

Sir Ronald Sanders

There have been several recent manifestations of this, one of them being the approach to ALBA - the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas - created by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Read the whole article here.

Snippet(s):

"One member government of Caricom is formally a member of ALBA and two others have indicated that they might join the organisation.
The government that has joined ALBA is Dominica and the governments that have announced their intention to do so are St Vincent & the Grenadines and Antigua & Barbuda."

"The known members of ALBA are: Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Dominica.

When ALBA was conceived, it was not a treaty organisation and its principles resided in economic co-operation arrangements which appeared to benefit countries that joined it with Venezuela being the principal donor."

&

"Since then, however, a military dimension has crept into the organisation. Both Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega have argued that the member countries of ALBA "should work to form a joint defence strategy and start joining our armed forces, air forces, armies, navies, National Guards, and intelligence forces, because the enemy is the same, the empire (meaning the United States)"."

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Responses to: ronaldsanders29@hotmail.com

Sir Ronald Sanders is a consultant and former Caribbean diplomat.