Opposition Leader Allen Chastanet did not misspeak. He doubled down. He said it clearly and without hesitation: “The gangs have served some good purposes in this country.”
In a nation where families are burying sons and mothers sleep on the floor because bullets make no distinction between living rooms and war zones, Chastanet chose to praise the social value of gangs. He is now proposing a programme called “Second Chance” not for the youths trapped in cycles of violence, but for the very criminal networks the country has been begging to escape.
This is not unity.
This is not reconciliation.
This is political theatre performed over open graves.
Saint Lucia’s homicide rate is not an abstract number; it is an obituary column. In 2022, the island had a homicide rate estimated between 36.7 and 42.3 per 100,000, depending on the data source, placing it among the deadliest per capita countries in the Caribbean. The UNODC has repeatedly stated that gangs and organized criminal networks are the primary engine of this crisis throughout the region. It is no different here.
So, when Chastanet says gangs have “served some good purposes,” it is not merely tone-deaf. It is a direct contradiction of reality.
It is also historically convenient.
Because it was under the Chastanet Administration that Saint Lucia recorded some of its bloodiest years on record.
Communities remember. Mothers remember. The morgues remember.
And so, the question now lingers, quietly but sharply:
If Allen Chastanet now sees gangs as benevolent social actors… was he working with them then, too?
Because you cannot suddenly discover moral value in the same violence networks that were slaughtering people under your watch, unless that value existed in your political imagination all along.
Chastanet speaks of gang leaders as though they are misunderstood community fathers. But the reality of gang leadership in Saint Lucia is not mentorship. It is extortion. It is execution. It is territorial rule by gunpoint. These are not youth clubs. These are parallel power structures that emerged to occupy roles the state has not effectively filled in certain communities.
To suggest that the nation re-embrace them is to tell the families of the dead that their children were necessary casualties of a system that apparently “served some good.”
The cruelty in that is staggering.
If Chastanet wanted to speak about rehabilitation, he could have spoken of investment in mental health services, vocational training, restorative justice, trauma support, disarmament frameworks, and credible community mediation. He could have spoken about dismantling networks and saving the children trapped inside them.
But he did not.
He spoke of the gangs, not the youths they exploit.
He spoke of their role, not their victims.
He spoke of embracing them, not disarming them.
A leader does not negotiate with the architects of terror while entire neighbourhoods live under curfew of fear. A leader does not launder violence into social good.
Saint Lucia does not need to embrace gangs.
Saint Lucia needs leaders who confront the violence, not soften it with nostalgia. Leaders who stand with communities, not with the men who keep them hostage. Leaders who do not try to rehabilitate their own reputations by romanticizing the very bloodshed that flourished under their leadership.
There is a difference between saving young men from gangs and saving gangs themselves.
Chastanet seems unable to tell the difference.