After Reading all 16 pages, I have some questions having never been to the island before.
What percentage of divers are burglarized:
1.) At the Hotel/Condo?
2.) At the dive site?
Where do you keep your passports if as people make it sound the hotel safes are not safe?
Per capita the petty crime may be higher then say small town USA. But how does crime compare to other 2nd and 3rd world countries.
Hope this does not fan the flames.
All joking aside, you're questions are reasonable and valid for anybody traveling to Bonaire or any vacation destination.
As I posted in another thread, based on a whole lot of time searching the internet, what my unscientific finds are that the drug trade from South America is the biggest factor influencing crime on the ABCs with different variations and intensities of drug related crimes.
The international airport on Curacao appears to be a direct pipeline to the Netherlands for the drug trade, due to the close proximity of the ABCs to Venezuala and the mainland of South America.
Anyways it started my digging and I turned up some interesting information. I found and constructed sort of a lose timeline of the crime reports on Bonaire.
From what I found there are indications that prior to 1998 things were a bit different. Around 1999 the first reports of crack cocaine start appearing with regularity on Bonaire, along with crack came the beginnings of petty theft. Around 1998 you start to see reports of larger dive gear thefts being reported from shore divers, indicating that prior to that time many divers routinely left valuable dive gear in their rental vehicles. Indicating a much different dive experience then is common today. Appearing that prior to 1999 many divers felt safe leaving dive gear in rental vehicles. Of course today we are at the point that no diver would even think of leaving expensive BCD or computers in a locked or unlocked rental car.
Around 1999 you start getting more and more warnings about break ins at dive sites. You also start getting the first reports from people indicating that the police are ambivalent to the situation and indicate that you are insured, so there is no crime. Around 2001 and growing through 2003 there are more and more reports about condo and rental house break ins becoming a problem. Around 2004 you start getting more articles about the drug trade to the Netherlands as being from Latin America through the ABCs to the Netherlands. There is a german article about the drug cartels in 2004 using the airport on Curacao as their main artery after bringing the drugs over on speed boats from the main land and discusses the increase in crime over the last few years and the climbing murder rate on Curacao.
Anyways a lot of it is disseminated through out a lot of different places throughout many links to documents found on the internet.
This was an interesting read -
Bonaire E-News July 1998
Percentages and comparisons about the crime on Bonaire are difficult to say since like many tourist destinations there is a lot of pressure to sugar coat or under report anything negative that might effect the tourism market.
Based on the information available, the first hand reports and any other bits of information that can be assembled, it appears that chances of crime based on your personal items in your accomodations go up dramatically for condos and private residences not part of resorts or diving complexes. The vast majority of the reports over the last year seem to be from people staying at rental units and condos, where there is less security and less people around such as hotel staff and such.
Many reports of break ins while people are sleeping in their rooms, reports of people seeming to wake up to discover somebody in their room and then wake up again in the morning to find their room ransacked, seemingly pointed to some sort of chloroform like drub being used on them.
Some reports of safes being broken into etc...
There has been some attributes of the recent up swing in the crime there to a gang that got out of prison and went back to what got them sent away in the first place. Reports were that they were caught and were going away again. But the tendency for little reporting of these things hasn't seen many updates or verifications of this.
Does it mean you'll be a victim on Bonaire? No it doesn't. It means your chances will go down if you stay in bigger hotel/dive operations, your chances will go down if you take some of the unfortunate safe guards you might need to take because of the crime issues and reduce your risk.
Most of this has been documented here and on bonairetalk.com.
I think you'll find the information a lot different on that forum, there tends to be much more realistic treatment and discussion of the crime reports on that board then on this one.
but have no accurate data to back that up. They keep avoiding the questions, give no verifiable answers, but want everyone else do that. yeah, right!
