By Balford Henry, Senior Staff Reporter 
Commissioner Francis Forbes at the Gleaner yesterday. - Rudolph Brown/Staff Photographer
JAMAICA IS to sign an agreement with Colombia next month to formalise their collaboration against the international cocaine trade.
Police Commissioner Francis Forbes told a Gleaner Editorial Forum yesterday, that he and Dr. Peter Phillips, Minister of National Security, are to travel to Colombia to sign the agreement with Colombian officials, possibly as early as next week.
Commissioner Forbes said this would be the first time both countries would be formulating a formal approach to the cocaine trafficking problem at that level.
"We have had some direct communications in the past, but nowhere near the level at which we're doing it now. What we are seeking now is a formal approach, so we are looking at some signing off in black and white," he explained.
(Previously anti-drug operations involving Jamaica and Colombia were usually initiated and directed by US Drug Enforcement Administration agents stationed in Colombia and in Jamaica).
Commissioner Forbes said it would take a tremendous amount of resources, collaboration and co-ordination "at the highest level" to combat drug trafficking. He said there was a need to discuss how to co-ordinate efforts more efficiently and effectively and what level of collaboration could be achieved to make co-operation more effective.
The Commissioner revealed also that the process had begun to identify an expert to be posted to Kingston from the United States, to assist in the restructuring of the Jamaica Constabulary's National Firearm and Drug Intelligence Centre to make it more efficient.
He said that the British Government was also assisting with the improvements in the operations of Special Branch, which is to be fully computerised to meet international standards.
Also, he expressed his disappointment with a view expressed by the United States Government which was expressed in the latest issue of the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report and published in Monday's Gleaner.
The view was that Jamaica needed to undertake more intensive law enforcement action to disrupt the trafficking of large amounts of cocaine in its territory and territorial waters.
Such actions, the US Government suggested, included arresting and prosecuting significant drug traffickers operating here, dismantling groups that conduct the drug trade and increasing drug seizures and eradication.
But, Mr. Forbes said he was surprised when he read the report and had requested a copy from the head of the DEA in Jamaica.
"Only on Monday, I had a meeting with the regional head of the DEA and the local head of the DEA at my office and we discussed this very issue. So I was a bit surprised when I saw this report published, because I was the one who put it on the table to them," Commissioner Forbes said.
"I was the one who put it on the table then, that we had to push the ante a bit now and we had to sit down and formulate a list of who is who and determine that you know, perhaps, we can't manage everybody on the list at once, but lest us go for the top five or the top 10. This was my proposal to them and they agreed."
He said they also agreed at the meeting to invite international law enforcement players, in a very short while, "who we have every reason to believe are holding bits and pieces of intelligence, that if they were all put on the table, the puzzle could come together."
Mr. Forbes said that a decision was taken at Monday's meeting, supported by the DEA, and repeated the following day at a meeting with "players" from the United Kingdom, "that we sit together at a roundtable in the very near future and let all the players in the business and on the law enforcement side, put what they have on the table and determine the way out."
He said he expected over the next 12 months, as specially vetted units are formed within the Narcotics Division, that the country will be able to access funding not now accessible, to fight against the drug trade. This would result in improvements in the results from local anti-narcotics efforts.
Jamaica and Colombia were among 24 countries named by US President George W. Bush last November, as major transhipment points or drug producers in the region, but which are taking steps on their own or co-operating with the United States to curb the problem.
It is reported that about 70 to 100 tons of cocaine are smuggled from South America to the USA annually.
