Caribbean: Machine Guns in Paradise

U.S. forces arm, and alarm, the Spice Islands

Is it necessary to have so much soldiers in this small country?

No, no, no, no.

Is it necessary to shine soldiers' boots with taxpayers' money?

No, no, no, no.

Well, don't tell Tommy, he put them in St. Lucy

Unemployment high, and the Treasury low.

And he buying boots to cover soldiers' toe.

I see them boots, boots, boots and more boots

On the feet of the young trigger-happy recruits.

—Boots, by Anthony Carter

The "Tommy" of that popular calypso song is Barbados Prime Minister Tom Adams, 53, whose 1979 decision to dispatch friendly troops to the nearby island-nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines moved one local songwriter to tuneful protest. Adams' aid to his neighbor enabled St. Vincent to send its own security force to suppress an uprising on outlying Union Island. Now, almost five years later, that Barbadian intervention still upsets many in the usually placid eastern Caribbean. Adams is sensitive about the matter too. Boots has been banned in Barbados.

Nonetheless, the ditty is on local lips more than ever these days as conversation piece and as cautionary tale. The U.S.-led invasion of Grenada last October has been followed by a sudden and sizable militarization of the six other island states in the eastern Caribbean.* The U.S. is sending $15 million in military assistance to the region this year, 75 times more than in 1981. The aid package includes machine guns, automatic rifles, grenade launchers, radio equipment, uniforms and, of course, boots. At the same time, eight-to twelve-member U.S. Army Special Forces teams have been conducting training courses for soldiers and policemen on five of the sweet-smelling Spice Islands. Those developments are reassuring to some islanders, who feel that a build-up is long overdue and that by strengthening their defense forces they can resist leftist insurgencies. Other residents, however, fear that larger local armies will bring more war than peace to the region, turn their islands into U.S. satellites and thrust them into the middle of superpower conflicts. Says Dominica's former Finance Minister Michael Douglas: "During the last few months, we have seen a lot of military assistance akin to that in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras."

That may be something of an exaggeration, but the languorous region is certainly unaccustomed to military force. Until now, the eastern Caribbean islands have generally done without armies. St. Kitts-Nevis established a defense force in 1967, but found it to be so expensive and unproductive that nearly 14 years later it converted all its soldiers to policemen and firemen. Dominica disbanded its military force in 1981 after many key officers were implicated in a failed coup attempt. Indeed, with the exception of Antigua and Barbados, the islands have been guarded mainly by policemen since they began to win independence from Britain in the 1960s. "They had no form of transportation or weapons for use in the field," says Donald Dunn, the Barbados-based U.S. Navy commander who is the liaison officer for the new American training operation. "The British left them at the mercy of anyone who wanted to cause them mischief."