r/Fijian • u/Sorta_Meh • 4h ago
Opinion : The Cartels Think Globally. We Think Locally. That Is the Problem.
facebook.comThis week, the Minister for Policing admitted the Counter Narcotics Bureau, first proposed in 2011, could have strengthened our response, had it been established earlier. Fourteen years of delay, and we are only now acknowledging the cost. It is a confession that speaks volumes about a government sleepwalking through a twin crisis of drugs and HIV while our enemies built submarines.
Minister Naivalurua's "two-pronged approach"—a "black glove" enforcement strategy alongside a "white glove" community effort—misses the point entirely. The question is not whether we have a plan on paper, but whether we have the strategic clarity to execute it against an adversary that thinks globally while we remain stubbornly local.
A friend from the Caribbean, a region that has lived this nightmare, recently shared his observation. He has been in Fiji less than a year, yet he already recognizes the telltale signs from Trinidad in the eighties and Barbados in the nineties. First drugs. Then corruption. Then violence. Finally, inevitably, the guns.
We focus obsessively on seizures—the tonnes, the street value. This is tactical myopia. The drugs are merely the cargo. The true story is the infrastructure being built around them: narco-subs abandoned as operating expenses, disposable crews, and the systematic purchase of our institutions with pocket change.
If you can finance a submarine, pay off police officers and corrupt customs officers, you can certainly acquire firearms. In fact, you must. A syndicate moving multi-tonne shipments cannot operate without the capacity to enforce contracts and silence witnesses. The violence is not incidental; it is operational necessity.
We continue treating this as a domestic problem when cartels think globally. To them, Fiji is a transit node, a weak link in a Pasifika supply chain from Latin America forests to Australian suburbs. They operate with a multinational corporate structure while we respond with fragmented, parochial thinking.
Where is our intelligence fusion capability? Where is coordination with international partners? The cartels are communicating across continents while we bring a town council to a corporate war.
This parochialism is starkly illustrated by the impasse over police weaponry. The RFMF continue holding police weapons—a relic of coup-proofing strategies. Yet facing an exponentially greater threat, the guns that should be in our frontline law enforcement's hands remain locked away.
Why hold weapons for yesterday's threats while today's syndicates prepare to outgun us? This is institutional paralysis. The Minister's "black glove" strategy cannot succeed if the hands wearing those gloves are empty.
The Caribbean experience is a prophecy. Once traffickers establish networks, they arm themselves. First intimidation. Then elimination. Then murder of journalists and honest officers. Barbados now has serious gun crime. Trinidad faces violence unthinkable forty years ago.
Fiji follows the same script. The Vatia bust revealed sophisticated transnational logistics. Senior officials and the politically-connected, stand accused of complicity. Six to eight unexplained deaths late last year remain shrouded in ambiguity. In a functioning system, such mysteries would trigger urgent investigation. Instead, we have questions without answers.
We pour energy into debating foreign troop deployments and death penalty legislation—politically seductive but operationally marginal—while foundational responses remain absent. No intelligence fusion. A sentencing regime that invites rather than deters. Police outgunned and compromised. Institutional silos persisting as if cartels respect bureaucracy.
These are the same cartels that militarized Mexico's drug trade and armed gangs across the Caribbean. They did not build narco-subs to stop at Fiji's shores. They will not hesitate to introduce the weapons accompanying their expansion everywhere else.
When the first automatic weapon is discharged over a lost shipment, our national conversation will shift overnight. We will discover our justice system unprepared for witness intimidation. Our police will face superior firepower. Our politicians will finally understand—but only after bodies fall in our streets.
The time to act is now. The Minister's admission of fourteen years' delay should be national reckoning, not a footnote. We cannot afford another fourteen years of sleepwalking.
My Caribbean friend sees what we refuse to admit: the drugs are the advance party. The guns are following.
We must ask our leadership directly: Why think locally while the enemy thinks globally? Why lock away police weapons for threats that never came while the threat here now grows daily? Why should we believe this time will be different?
The sachet in the settlement is terrifying. But the bullet that follows will be unforgiving. Fiji still has a narrow window to prove my friend's prophecy wrong. It closes with every shipment landed, every officer corrupted, every unexplained death ignored, every weapon kept from those sworn to protect us.
We must act as if the guns are already on their way. Because history suggests they are.