A floundering economy in the 1970s left the country desperate and encouraged some within the leadership of the governing PLP to to make the conscious decision to partner with drug lords, Majority Rule MP Ed Moxey told The Tribune.
“They needed to help the economy, they needed the money so they sold the country out to these drug pushers,” the former PLP MP said.
“There were drug colonies in Andros, in Exuma, in Guana Cay and Norman’s Cay. Everyone knew what was going on and it touched everyone. Even Sir Lynden knew and he turned a blind eye to it,” Mr Moxey said.
Before Independence, Nassau had a reputation as a haven for fashionable winter tourists from North America and a few visitors from Europe.
These visitors brought with them a significant amount of capital to buy land and joined their counterparts from the United States and Canada in becoming investors in the Bahamian economy.
As the decades passed, travel, especially by air, would become cheaper and more accessible. The Bahamas, like many other destinations around the world, opted for the quantity of guest over quality.
These realities made the 1970s a watershed decade for the Bahamian tourism industry. In addition, the great social upheaval within the Bahamas, starting with the advent of majority rule in 1967 and ending with independence in 1973, would force the government of the day to investigate alternative sources of income – new investors, if you will, that would replace the foreign investors that became gun-shy after independence.
According to Mr Moxey, the economy was wounded and the PLP was worried, not only about the dire straits in which the country found itself, but they had an election, the 1976 general election, coming up and feared going back to their constituencies with “their hands swinging”.
At the time, the only people with enough money to float the economy and who were willing to invest it in the young nation were the cocaine cowboys of South America.
Mr Moxey said it was a conscious decision by some members of the party’s leadership to respond to the courtship of the druglords.
“That is one of the areas where we went totally off course when we allowed and participated in the drug trade in this country,” Mr Moxey said.
However, it did not stop with the country’s political class.
