In the 1976 thriller film The Marathon Man, Hollywood legend Dustin Hoffman stars as university student and distance runner Thomas ‘Babe’ Levy, who is captured and tortured over his brother’s activities as a spy, of which he knows nothing. During the torture, which involves holes being drilled in his teeth without the benefit of an anaesthetic, he is constantly asked the question, “Is it safe?” He did not know the answer.
It is a question that someone who has never visited Guyana might easily ask, given that gun crimes are now the order of the day. Unlike Hoffman’s character, no Guyanese would have to be tortured to give an honest answer to such a question today.
Is it safe to visit Guyana when on leaving you run the risk of being randomly selected to become a drug mule by having cocaine slipped into your suitcase at the airport? There have been at least three known instances of this occurring over the past year or so and a couple a few years earlier. Quite possibly, knowing the tenacity of drug smugglers, there have been others, which managed to escape the notice of the authorities.
Some years ago, after the first couple of incidents, one airline began ensuring security by plastic-wrapping travellers’ luggage. The others have been slow to follow suit and the government has not seen it fit to date to acquire and operate the necessary equipment, which could be a revenue earner as in other countries a fee is charged for this service.
Is it safe when you could again randomly be targeted at the airport to be robbed, trailed to your home or hotel or an appropriately lonely stretch of road and be set upon by gun-toting bandits? This has happened countless times over the years. That there has not been such an incident in the very recent past is not because of any action by law enforcement authorities. Rather, it’s because travellers have become much more alert and employ subterfuges to confuse any would-be ambusher.
Is it safe, when like the Chinese team whose expertise built the Skeldon diesel plant or the Cuban doctors who contribute in the public health care system you could be attacked and robbed by thieves with little or no redress by the authorities?
Could it possibly be safe when you might be at a public place, which turns out to be the wrong place at the wrong time? Tuesday night’s shooting near Bonny’s Supermarket might have been an isolated incident, but it raises the scary ‘what if’ question. Any of a number of foreigners resident here or visiting might have been at the supermarket that evening and could very well have been injured or killed, not because they were deliberately targeted, simply because they happened to be there.
As it is, two local men were injured – apart from the targeted individual who was killed – and several other people traumatised. Perish the thought, but there could even have been children in the supermarket at the time. In Wednesday morning’s incident, where bandits targeted a Moleson Creek-bound minibus and killed its driver in an apparent attempt to rob its passengers, a small child was reportedly involved.
The police will rush to produce their statistics, which show a lower crime rate last year as against the previous year, but this is no indication that they have a handle on the situation. What would prove their mettle, would be if there were arrests and convictions in all of the incidents referred to above. As long as there continues to be a situation, where bands of heavily-armed enforcers can run around the country with seeming impunity, attacking, kidnapping and executing people at will, the lower statistics, sadly, point not to improved police work, but periods of inactivity by the other guys for whatever reason.
Police intelligence has never been able to discern who or where the other guys will strike next in order to pre-empt them and perhaps arrest a few. With visitors expected for Mashramani next month and Carifesta later in the year, surely more can be done to make it safe.
Trinidad, that hotbed of kidnappings and murders, has pulled out all the stops to ensure public safety at its annual Carnival on February 4 and 5. Despite warnings being issued about the rampant crime there, that country’s major tourist attraction is expected to do just as well this year as it has always done.
Mashramani has so far not managed to evolve into the tourist attraction it has been touted as. And this will never happen as long as doubts about security and the seeming ambivalence about the issue continues.
