TriniWarao can be contacted at: triniwarao@ymail.com

The purpose of this blog is to document the details of the ongoing scourge of abduction in Trinidad and Tobago. This activity is only one of the many criminal activities that our fellow Trinbagonians are perpetrating against their own brothers and sisters. I have little interest in the outside parties which sometimes provide the incentives for locals to betray each other and I am thinking here of the human trafficking trade which I believe is gaining a foothold in Trinidad and Tobago.

The ugly fact remains that every day reprehensible decisions are being made by our own people to tear our brothers and sisters, and especially the innocent among them, away from their families to use them for the satisfaction of sadistic and greed driven purposes.

This blog will also include articles on prostitution in Trinidad and Tobago as there is some connection between human trafficking and the sex industry. No one can say with certainty that some of the local females and the foreign females working in brothels in Trinidad and Tobago have not also been abducted and traded. While, I am personally repulsed by the prostitution industry, I prefer to withold my opinions about the actions of consenting adults. I cannot remain silent though about the real possibility that some of the women in this trade are not consenting and maybe are not even adults. I wonder about their distressed and waiting families. I wonder how men can use other people’s daughters and sisters and mothers in ways that they would not wish their own flesh and blood to be exploited.

Unfortunately, this blog must also include the activities of persons who stage kidnappings, who cause false reports of kidnappings due to misunderstandings and other hoaxes. Although we are always relieved to learn that individuals are safely reunited with their families, I wonder if these persons understand what a mockery they make of the real suffering of their own families and the families of their fellow Trinbagonians who are really lost and how these incidents are often used by overburdened or slovenly police officers as an excuse for treating genuine reports of disappearances lightly.

Among the missing, there can also be individuals who have chosen voluntarily to disappear. I can never assume however that this is the case with any report and especially not with reports of missing minors but perhaps they too are victims of circumstances which they believe they cannot solve by any other means.

This blog cannot include the cases which have not been reported to the police or those which are not easily retrieved from published sources. As regards the former, my heart goes out to those who have to make the decision to face their trials alone whether to protect the victims or to negotiate, unaided by our police service, in the hope of securing speedy resolutions and a return to some degree of normalcy.

I have been aware of this problem for many years and this awareness has resulted in vivid dreams which have brought me face to face with the terror that is felt by the victims. I have also found it very difficult to distance myself from the grief being felt by the families and cannot begin to imagine how their health and daily lives have been impacted.

I had difficulty finding a name for this blog so I chose “Set our people free…” to include not only what must have been the most fervent desire to be released of the captured and already murdered but also what continues to be the cry of those still in captivity along with their waiting families in a limbo of continuing nightmares. It is also meant to include the rest of us who feel like we are locked down in our own country and those of us who seem to have made the decision that life can and must go on as usual with or without our missing brothers and sisters.

As we thicken our hides and dull our sensitivity, the news of yet another abduction causes nothing much more than a bovine rolling of the eyes and does not interrupt for a second our mechanical chewing. We also need to be set free from our apathy and the willingness to conserve our alarm for the day when it happens to us or someone close to us.

What goes around comes around.

We cannot afford to tolerate this hemorrhage, or the agencies which try to lull us into believing that we can, because with this betrayal flows away the last drops of human dignity and intelligence to which we like to lay claim.

In case you are wondering, I have never been abducted and not one of my blood relatives in the immediate or extended family has been abducted but since I also belong fully and immediately to the family of Trinbagonians, I feel each disappearance as a personal tragedy.

I hope that you do too.

“Vengan, hermanos, ir nosotros no podemos. Grande es su fuerza de ustedes si una se hace.
-Zapatista Communique, March 12, 1995.”

See Also:
- Rules Of Engagement
- Site Managment
- Your intellectual property
- Set Our People Free…Some blog statistics.