Fed up! - US frustrated by four-and-a-half-year wait for MOU with Ja
Published:Sunday | June 21, 2020 | 12:24 AMLivern Barrett - Senior Staff Reporter
The United States (US) has been waiting four and a half years to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Holness administration that would help to stamp out corruption at the Jamaican ports that allow the importation of illicit items, the top American diplomat in Jamaica has disclosed.
What’s worse, Donald Tapia, US ambassador to Jamaica, has suggested that senior Jamaican officials involved in negotiating the MOU, including Prime Minister Andrew Holness and lately Attorney General Marlene Malahoo Forte, have not been clear on the issues that are holding up the agreement.
The proposed MOU or ‘CMAA agreement’, according to Tapia, would allow American intelligence and customs authorities to partner with local law enforcement to build cases against persons involved in the shipment of illegal items into the island.
Tapia declined to discuss specifics of the 20-page document.
He said three of the four areas covered in the proposed MOU were “easy”, while the fourth centred on the legal issues around the building of cases to be placed before the courts based on the information that was gathered.
“That’s why the attorney general was involved, and I requested her because I wanna know what is the legal issue that is holding this up. If there is a legal issue, well, tell me what it is so we can work through it,” he said during a Gleaner Editors’ Forum at the newspaper’s central Kingston office last week.
Tapia acknowledged that both sides are “getting close” to signing the agreement, but did not hide his frustration over the long-drawn-out process.
“We are getting close, but we are not close enough where it takes four and a half years. As I told them, it only takes nine months to make a baby, and we are talking about four and a half years and we still don’t have a MOU,” he said.
CLEAR IDEA
Malahoo Forte sidestepped questions about the proposed MOU and the sticking points for the Holness administration.
“The prime minister has asked me to assist in finalising the agreement,” was the only response she offered when contacted by The Sunday Gleaner on Friday.
Tapia acknowledged that there is a strong possibility that the MOU would involve the use of intercepted communications or wiretapped conversations “because the fact is that’s how most of the information today is transmitted”.
“We are trying to get more of a streamlining that when we find something and we find out who the person is, we prosecute them. That helps at the port from the standpoint that we move some of the corruption at the ports,” said the ambassador.
“The fact is that the information that they would pick up would be intercepted somewhere along the line, be it from your telephone or your text, or whatever it is.”
The focus of American authorities on the Jamaican ports, Tapia explained, is fuelled by the ease with which illicit items such as guns and drugs enter the island.
Pointing to a case uncovered just over a month ago, he suggested that American authorities have a clear idea of how these items end up on the streets of Jamaica.
Tapia declined to discuss the case.
“We know that this happens. We’ve seen it happen. We’ve seen it happen in the last 45 days. I won’t get into the case, but we’ve seen how it happens.”