No work, no pay, no mercy: Bloody maths of a broken economy

THE EDITOR: The dominoes are falling, and they are landing right on our heads. Merry Christmas, TT. While the radio stations blast parang and the politicians pontificate about "resilience," the streets are telling a different story, a story written in blood, desperation, and the ink of pink slips.

We are witnessing the inevitable, brutal physics of a broken economy. It is a domino effect as clear as day: mass lay-offs equal mass crime. You cannot gut the workforce, send breadwinners home with nothing but a handshake and "good luck," and expect peace on earth. When the stomach is empty, the conscience goes quiet. Desperation has a way of turning a hard-working man into a "badman" overnight. The equation is simple: no work, no pay, no food...so they take yours.

Look at the madness that unfolded this week. In Aranguez, a bandit didn’t even bother to change his clothes before hitting a 68-year-old pastor. He wore a reflective construction vest – the uniform of the honest labourer – while he shot a man of God for $100,000. Is there a starker symbol of our collapse? The tools of the trade have been swapped; the shovel has been replaced by the firearm. That bandit in the high-vis vest is the ghost of the workforce past, haunting the present with a vengeance.

And it’s not just the "big fish" getting hit, though the kidnapping of Derek Tardieu and his wife Claribel for a cool US$2.5 million proves that the ambitious predators are swinging for the fences. The rot has seeped down to the bone.

On the Caroni Savannah Road, a 64-year-old taxi driver, a man trying to scratch out a living in his twilight years, was choked and carjacked by three men. These weren’t masterminds; they were scavengers. It is the poor eating the poor. It is the desperate crushing the struggling.

This Christmas season is shaping up to be a harvest of sorrow. The lights are up, but the darkness is spreading. People are terrified because they know the state’s safety net has holes big enough for a Nissan Almera to drive through.

Yet, in the face of this carnage, the police service seems more interested in public relations than public safety. Commissioner Guevarro stood before us barely a month ago and swore there was "no resurgence" of kidnappings. Tell that to Tardieu and his wife, with a grenade under their heads. Tell that to the family of Vishnu Lalla.

The authorities are playing a dangerous game of "cooking the books." Stiffing the statistics and suppressing the reports do not stop the bullets. You can massage the numbers until they look like a fairytale, but you cannot hide the shooting of a pastor in broad daylight or the terror of a family negotiating with Colombian voices for their lives.

We are in a pressure cooker. The lay-offs were the fire, the unemployment is the heat, and the crime is the explosion. The government can pretend the state of emergency is working, and the police can pretend the numbers are down, but the man with the gun at your window doesn't care about pie charts. He has bills to pay, a family to feed, and a society that told him he’s on his own. So now he’s coming for you.

HUGO MAYNARD

via e-mail