Seizures, evidence, prosecutions, convictions, foreign-based official reports and a few local admissions and confessions all point to a now accepted fact: our once-innocent Guyana is a leading South American transshipment point facilitating the export of illegal cocaine from South America to North America and Europe.
Wow. That long non-journalistic sentence above is merely a now well-known basis for the economic facts and moral dilemmas I’ll attempt to describe. Knowing full well that the “facts” are difficult to prove in a court of law and the moral dilemmas are mostly now rationalized and excused in the court of public opinion.
Besides some almost superficial reading about the subject, the issue of a Parallel Economy struck home to me from the mid-to-late-seventies. Recall the banning and restrictions on a number of basic consumer items? What? Not old enough? Well in the wake of punitive shortages and scarcities, resilient – and some exploitative – Guyanese implemented innovative, creative and uncanny methods to keep an agreeable population supplied with obvious needs. Most of those means were deemed illegal by the authorities who claimed to be protecting, fiercely, a parlous national foreign exchange situation. Indeed, many innocent law-abiding citizens who participated in the parallel economy’s black-markets were criminalized.
Into that bread-and-butter context came the increased presence of marijuana and the dreaded cocaine. In the tinkling of an illegal eye Drug Barons and Sharks surfaced, known to many but too protected and shielded by subterfuge, wealth and connections to be successfully prosecuted. Informed, rumour has it that the emergence of many businesses – both as laundering fronts and as legitimate enterprise born of narcotic evil – was due to cocaine funding. “They” said some hotels, auto-spare shops, salons, marketing agencies and import companies owe their existence to the “White lady’s” funding. I still blink at these allegations.
Though I have seen articles, analyses and reports purporting to acknowledge the significance of the underground finances vis-
