A United States Government watchdog says hundreds of traced firearms, the majority of them originating in the US, are believed to have been used to commit crimes in Barbados in recent years.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is the audit, evaluation and investigative arm of the US Congress, also reports that a number of guns destined for Barbados are being seized by the US Customs and Border Protection.
This is in addition to the hundreds of firearms the office said data showed were legally exported from the US to Barbados.
The information is shared in the report Caribbean Firearms, which recommended that the US State Department improve its assessment of how the US government’s antigun trafficking partnerships with the Caribbean were working.
The office conducted an investigation after some members of Congress asked it to report on American efforts to counter firearms trafficking to Caribbean nations.
The probe included a review of data on the number of recovered firearms Barbados and other Caribbean countries submitted to the US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) eTrace service for tracing.
ETrace is a web-based application that is used to track the purchase and/or use history of firearms used in violent crimes.
“ATF processed 7 399 traces of firearms recovered in crimes in the Caribbean from 2018 through 2022. GAO analysis of these data showed that 73 per cent of these firearms, most of which were handguns, were sourced from the US,” the office reported.
It said that based on ATF eTrace data, 224 of the recovered and traced firearms for Caribbean countries between 2018 and 2022, were from Barbados.
The report also concluded that 80 per cent of firearms recovered in Barbados between 2018 and 2022 were US-sourced and traced to a US retail purchaser.
The office said too that 24 firearms destined for Barbados between 2018 and 2023 were seized by the US Customs and Border Protection between 2018 and 2023.
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