I woke up on a recent morning with Hunter on my mind. Yes, of all people, the writer Hunter S. Thompson who, while on the phone at his residence in Aspen, Colorado, could think of nothing better than to shove a loaded Luger into his mouth and pull the trigger. Reportedly, his last words were: “No more games, no more bombs.” Luckily for the millions of us who live for whatever had earlier tumbled out of his Selectric typewriter while he was on a variety of mind-bending drugs, Hunter left behind countless articles exclusively published by Rolling Stone when it was still America’s rock bible and main social commentator.
There’s also the singular Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Also Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and The Rum Diary. The last-mentioned novel was in 2011 made into a movie, with Hunter’s life-long friend Johnny Depp as producer and lead star. It also featured Amber Heard, abruptly less famous for her on-screen performances than for her peculiar bedside manner.
Hunter S. Thompson invented gonzo journalism, defined as a form of journalism written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative. The Godfather of Gonzo was not above “enhancing the reality.” Consider the following from a piece he wrote for Rolling Stone, ostensibly about the 1976 presidential campaign that planted a peanut farmer in the White House.
This is how it begins: “This news just came over the radio, followed by a song about faster horses, younger women, older whisky and more money . . . and then came another news item about a Polish gentleman who was arrested earlier today for throwing more than two dozen bowling balls into the sea off the pier at Fort Lauderdale because, he told arresting officers, he thought they were ‘nigger eggs.’ We are living in strange times, and they are going to get a lot stranger before we bottom out.”
The day before the remembered morning when I rolled out of bed with recollections of Hunter S. Thompson churning in my head, I’d spent several hours poring over local and regional news bulletins, recent and not. One of the items that caught my special interest was about an unidentified body that the sea had deposited on a popular beach on one of our sister islands. No sooner had photographs been made public than the police were flooded with calls from concerned citizens who claimed they had seen the pictured individual all alone on a particular street several hours before the grisly discovery. None of the callers said why they had not notified the authorities, despite that the diapered teeny streetwalker in question was all of three years old. The report spoke not a word of the deceased kid’s parents.
Then there was the story about the leader of the British Virgin Islands government who was taken into custody by the Miami police in the course of a sting operation and slapped with several serious drug charges. One published account claimed the BVI premier was negotiating a deal with the authorities that would require him to finger accomplices in the States, at home, and in governments throughout the Caribbean.
Another media source announced the suspect had been released on a $500,000 bond, fitted with an ankle bracelet and ordered not to leave Miami. The story reminded me of an article by Ivelaw L. Griffith published by the Penn State International Law Review, entitled: Illicit Arms Trafficking, Corruption, and Governance in the Caribbean, wherein the author claims: “Arms trafficking in the Caribbean has been both intra-regional and extra-regional. The disastrous consequences of the drug-weapons connection have been felt in Puerto Rico, St. Kitts-Nevis, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad & Tobago and elsewhere in the region.”
The article cited an inquiry by English jurist Louis Blom-Cooper that uncovered “an incredible arms trafficking scheme involving Israelis, Antiguans, Colombians and Panamanians.” This is how Blom-Cooper summed up the motivation: “Greed, the thirst for power, and finally, unbridled corruption.”
Griffith’s article also identifies a law scholar who said that given Antigua’s distasteful record of corruption, maladministration and general sleaze, few were surprised by the findings of the Blom-Cooper investigation. But there were “other pristine places that sometimes offered surprises,” Griffith noted—”one of them being Saint Lucia.”
He recalled an interview with the country’s then police commissioner. “The drug problem consumed much of our attention and he waxed eloquent in declaiming against the drug barons and their accomplices.” As underscored in my most recent STAR feature entitled ‘Did Someone Steal Pierre’s Record Budget’s Thunder?,’ in 1997 this island’s governor general had stated in his Throne Speech that “corruption has been identified as the number-one issue on the minds of Saint Lucians . . .” and in conformity with the promises made during its election campaign, the new government would establish a commission to investigate all cases of alleged corruption and to establish which warrant further legal action and prosecution.
The man chosen for the job of cleaning out the Augean stable was none other than the earlier mentioned no-nonsense jurist Sir Louis Blom-Cooper, who famously “discerned in Saint Lucia a culture of studied indifference to the practice of public accountability . . . a cultural climate in which malpractices in government, including corruption, can thrive unhampered by detection . . .”
From as far back as the mid-1980s, every general election held in Saint Lucia has focused on “the scourge of corruption”—usually with the Labour Party as accuser and the United Workers Party the accused. Despite the oftentimes shocking noise, however, no related case has come before the courts. Hardly has there been a House debate when fulminating frothy-mouthed MPs did not hurl at one another allegations of corruption, including money laundering and putting public funds to private use.
In 2008, when Stephenson King was prime minister, the opposition party led by Kenny Anthony described the day’s government as “the region’s most corrupt.” The revocation by U.S. immigration authorities of two high profile visas shortly before the 2011 elections was effectively served up as more proof of the opposition party’s corruption pudding.
The most recent general elections were all about corruption, if flavored with a bit of black-peppered racism. The ultimately victorious Labour Party has every good reason to believe its 15-2 victory over Allen Chastanet’s UWP confirms yet again that Saint Lucian voters are more tolerant of murder, firearm-related robberies, drug-trafficking, rape, child molestation, police brutality, sexual harassment, domestic violence and a barely functional justice system than they are of corruption. At any rate, corruption allegations!
If the government needed further convincing, the evidence was to be found in Blom-Cooper’s 1998 Commission of Inquiry report that speaks only of suspect former government ministers—at a time when crime was at its highest level. The most recent Throne Speech contains the following reminder—almost word for word similar to that of 1997: “A matter which featured repeatedly on the minds of Saint Lucians during the run-up to the 2021 elections was corruption. Corruption creates waste and inefficiency in the delivery of vital services. It therefore must be stamped out of our public affairs with due haste and vigor.”
Every government plan “will be rotten inside if corruption abounds,” warned acting governor Errol Charles, presumably including the government’s often stated promise to put the people first. It was therefore to be expected that the new government’s first priority would be to remove the road block that successive administrations had blamed for the non-delivery of “vital services to the people”: corruption.
By now most citizens are convinced that in Saint Lucia what most urgently demands remedial attention is “the rotten inside” of the St. Jude Hospital project. Even as I write, over two decades later, the long-suffering people are no closer to a delivery date than we were one year after the still unresolved fire that in 2009 had destroyed the original St. Jude facility. The unconfirmed word is that the government has identified a Special Prosecutor, expected imminently to begin sifting through accumulated piles of odious files, perchance to uncover court-admissible proof of widely publicized allegations by now as familiar to the average Saint Lucian as are the locations of their favorite rum shops.
It is widely bruited about that two particular members of the previous government are the prime targets for the special St Jude investigation, akin to a team of surgeons attempting to rescue a heart-attack victim by giving him a pedicure.
In the United States the average construction costs of a 60-bed hospital is typically $60-$90 million. By last official count the envisaged 68-bed St. Jude has already swallowed up some EC$300 million—almost twice as much as it had cost to build the OKEU! As if to make matters more bizarre: at least six members of the present finger-pointing government—which includes two former prime ministers and ministers of finance—were involved in the St. Jude project between 2009 and 2016! (Is there a good reason why the idea of a pre-fab hospital has evidently never crossed our genius minds? By all I’ve discovered, in the U.S. the cost of constructing a 60-bed pre-fab hospital is under EC$200 million!)
The day’s big questions: Will the prime minister honor his repeated election pledge to put the people first by bringing to justice the most often accused culprits in the alleged $300 million St. Jude scam? Will he put the people’s money where his mouth is? As things stand, $3.9 million has been allocated to the DPP’s office, inclusive of the DPP’s annual salary of close $400,000—wasted money, judging by the ever-mounting public complaints, mainly about gross inefficiency. Home Affairs, the ministry responsible for the police, is to receive $129 million, out of which $54 million will pay for “police services.” Hopefully that includes not only increased manpower but also the caliber of key personnel. The stated figures indicate increases over last year’s, but not by much!
Meanwhile, as announced by the prime minister in his recent budget presentation, $1,000,000 dollars has been set aside for the as yet officially undeclared purposes of the unidentified Special Prosecutor—for whose purposes a new law may be required. It’s uncertain whether he or she will work under the DPP’s supervision or whether the reverse order will prevail.
Since I started writing this article a 54-year-old woman has reportedly been raped and slaughtered within walking distance of her home. Neighbors claim she had earlier attended a funeral. A family comprising some 30 individuals including children have by the order of a court been rendered homeless. The land on which the home stood before a demolition squad struck had been at the center of a family dispute for more than a decade. By informed account there are no available government shelters for such citizens in distress. Typically, such public discussion as has centered on the two mentioned incidents has amounted to a continuation of the polarizing war of words that was the campaign leading up to the 26 July 2021 general elections.
Invited by reporters to comment on the earlier mentioned suspected rape-murder of an elderly woman, the prime minister said: “We hope the people who committed this deadly crime are arrested and brought to justice. But then again, we have to learn to deal with conflict resolution. You have to understand we cannot all of the time fight to resolve our conflicts. We have to resolve our conflicts by dialogue, by inclusion. This why the country must get more united. I am urging people who want at some time to be in government to come together. The elections are over. We must learn to control our tempers and deal with conflict in a peaceful way!”
Did the prime minister know he was commenting on the island’s latest case of suspected rape-murder? As for his Home and Gender Affairs minister, this was her statement on the matter, reminiscent of Louis Blom-Cooper’s words on corruption in Saint Lucia: “The issue of domestic violence is engrained in our culture. This is what our young people have known. It will take some time before we change our behavior and attitude . . .” Is the minister privy to information yet to be made public by the police? As I write there have been no related arrests. (Twenty-three homicides have been reported since January!)
Meanwhile I’m unable to shake off Hunter S. Thompson’s line, taken from his earlier cited Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail, first published in 1976: “We are living in strange times, and they are going to get a lot stranger before we bottom out!”
Your slant is so obvious, that it’s almost comical. Have no problem with this piece except for these seems to be geared almost exclusively towards one party. I’m a big fan of your opinion pieces for its history and disregard what seems to be the bias that seems to infiltrate your pieces towards either one individual or party. Maybe…just maybe, you will see it fit to investigate what lots of St. Lucians think are very obvious decisions made by politicians and parties that drastically effects; either our security in terms of limiting movement, or using the people’s money on issues that are not well thought out. Your last paragraph speaks volumes, for this could have been written possibly four years ago. One might want to start with investigation of the Pearl of the Caribbean or St. Jude’s. People are still hungry for information and in the dark on these. You are a great investigative journalist…you need to put your skills to better use and be one for all the people. Try to be more fair and balance with your opinion pieces. This will go a long way in mitigating what your last paragraph suggest. It should be beyond the conscience of both parties that we are still debating St. Jude’s. We are asking for better standards while we do not have, or do not follow the policies presently in place to even maintain the standards we already have for some of the present day buildings that serve specific needs. We need to think of simplicity and not get tied up with the high tech stuff that we as a nation cannot support. Your St. Jude’s idea is very typical. Something so simple, inexpensive and meets the basic requirements for giving the people of the south some measure of hope and not constant despair. As Edwards Deming once said “In god we trust, all other must give data”
The more things change the more they remain the same. What can we expect? As a people we continue to elect and reelect the very people who have failed us time and time again. The fingers that point to the opposite side have their own fingers also pointing back at themselves. None in our present elected “leaders” are untainted. Now I am ashamed of the lame responses given by the PM and the other Minister, who tried to deflect the question by answering a totally different question than the one asked. It is too glaring to even warrant excuse for it.
As a country we can do better, but in order to do so what must change is our political culture of acceptance of inept politicians under the of party support, and the blind loyalty to the party mentality that has being cultivated and the dependence on politicians for handouts and for solving issues that they have no business in. We need to begin to inculcate in the next generation a sense of integrity, and an overall sense of responsibility for nation building. A very tall order, given the composition of our present generation, but not an impossible mission.