Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness on Thursday called for “a global war on gangs” while assuring that Jamaica will “take its own security in its own hands” and assume responsibility for stopping the flow of illegal guns into the island.

Delivering the keynote address at the 2025 Security Seminar of the Office of the National Security Advisor at AC Hotel in St Andrew, Holness, who chairs the National Security Council, said his Administration will be making “a significant investment in ensuring” that all the necessary scanners are placed at the island’s ports so that a higher percentage of containers and goods coming into Jamaica can be appropriately inspected.

“We have given a directive to the Customs Agency to ensure that there is, through various public-private partnership modalities, a full roll-out of all the scanners we need at all our formal ports of entry,” the prime minister said while emphasising that the major security threats Jamaica faces are not confined to its national borders.

“We have to be brutally honest with ourselves; we have not placed the effort and resources behind strengthening our security apparatus to ensure that illegal guns don’t make it across our borders and we can’t conduct our security policy depending on another country to secure our borders for us,” he said.

“For too long we have been ineffective in putting in place the measures at our airports and our seaports to properly scan our containers, to put in place a well-developed and robust integrity mechanism for those persons who operate security at our ports; for putting in place the radars necessary to have domain awareness and control to track vessels coming into our waters that may be illegally carrying weapons and other contraband,” he added.

“Jamaica, like many of our Caribbean neighbours, faces the acute threat posed by organised crime, which is responsible for the extraordinarily high murder rate with which we have lived for decades,” Holness argued.

“This problem has been made worse and amplified by illegal firearms brought in from countries where they are probably much less regulated and where illegal activities such as the international drug trade may be present,” he said.

Noting that “Jamaican gangs and other vile actors import the tools of their violent trade through our porous borders via connections they have cultivated and maintained in other jurisdictions” such as Haiti, the prime minister said the ongoing crisis in Haiti “is perhaps the most alarming example of what can happen when organised criminal groups grow powerful enough to challenge the very integrity of the State”.

“I have never been under any illusion in this regard, and Jamaica will never be threatened to the point of instability of the State by gangs if I have anything to do with it. Currently, we have several armed groups threatening states right across Latin America, South America, Central America and in the Caribbean in island paradise such as Turks and Caicos, Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia, St Kitts. Haiti is the extreme; Venezuela the extreme; Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador and Colombia,” Holness pointed out.

“Certain developments, however, make me optimistic that as a region we are waking up to the reality that the threat posed by armed groups is not one of run of the mill criminality. Most recently, the new Administration in Washington officially labelled cartels in Mexico as terrorists; that may have struck some as an extreme designation but not me,” he said, while dismissing arguments that the individuals had morphed into hardened criminals because they were denied proper housing and amenities.

“They use violence to create this fear that brings the citizens under their control because they feel helpless that the State is able to protect them, and the longer the State is unable to protect those citizens in those spaces, the greater the control the gangs will have,” Holness stated.

“If we are going to make a change in Jamaica as it relates to the level of violence and murder that we have, we are gonna have to make significant impact on controlling guns coming into the country and deal with the criminal violence we euphemistically call gangs,” the prime minister stated.