Released unfailingly on March 1, every year, the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, issued by the United States Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, injected a dose of objectivity into the debate even as Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee tried to create the illusion that progress was being made in the war on drugs.
The latest US report opened with the familiar axiom: “Guyana is a transit point for cocaine destined for North America, Europe, and the Caribbean.” Nearly three years after its fake launch of the National Drug Strategy Master Plan for 2005-2009, the administration was adjudged to have accomplished “few of the principal goals laid out in its ambitious plan.” All the Minister of Home Affairs could promise was that the largely unimplemented plan will be “thoroughly reviewed” in the first quarter of this year. Rather than install the institutional components of the plan, however, he erected the impotent Inter-Agency Task Force on Narcotics and Illicit Weapons, which “meets monthly.”
The administration’s neglectful approach has generated a vicious cycle. Its inaction has been rewarded with reduced foreign financial assistance, which, in turn, leads to reduced counter-narcotics enforcement, which leads to increased narco-trafficking which flourishes because of official inaction. And so the cycle rolls on. The administration’s counter-narcotics efforts, evidently, are being undermined more by its own languor, lack of political will and stingy supply of resources for law enforcement than by the vigour of narco-traffickers.
Two years ago, former US Ambassador Roland Bullen had seen through the administration’s charade. He warned: “There is plenty of room for improvement in fighting narco-crime in Guyana. We have dedicated many resources to this fight. For my government to invest more, it will need to see a greater return. Resources are success-driven and it is demoralizing to see drug shipments originating in Guyana, seized abroad, while narco-criminals roam freely here.”
Now, the Port of Spain-based United States Drug Enforcement Agency bureau has said much the same thing. Although it continues to work cordially with the administration and law enforcement agencies on counter-narcotics initiatives, it promised that it “will not augment resources for investigation and interdiction in Guyana. Instead, it will continue to channel any future assistance to initiatives that demonstrate success in treating substance abusers.”
Unfazed, the administration provides paltry resources to the undermanned Defence Force and Police Force to control the numerous entry points along the porous borders with Brazil, Suriname and Venezuela through which drugs flow. The US report repeats the familiar fact that aircraft can land on the numerous unmonitored airstrips in the hinterland or make airdrops where the drugs can be retrieved. Indeed, it was only last December that the most recently constructed 1,100-metre narco-aerodrome was discovered at Wanatoba on the Corentyne. Rather than go where eagles dare and prevent narcotics entering the country by the tonne, however, authorities relish arresting drug mules attempting to smuggle a few grammes of cocaine out of the international airport.
While it dithers and dallies, the administration ignores the plight of the most vulnerable victims of its failed “war on drugs” that has now degenerated into a war on women. The New Amsterdam prison that houses female inmates, is home to some of the most unfortunate prisoners of war ? mothers and grandmothers ? whose first brush with the law on non-violent narcotics charges resulted in their being locked away for years.
Ignoring this issue is costly and not only for the more than $250,000 a year that the state spends to maintain each inmate in prison each year. A much higher price is paid in the privation of children during their mothers’ incarceration and in their shattered families which result. Elsewhere, execution-type murders, kidnappings, and social problems such as insanity, mendicancy and vagrancy have become the narcotics trade’s visible quotidian social consequences.
To its credit, the administration has gone through the motions of proclaiming a drug strategy, establishing yet another committee and signing all the right international conventions. What it has not done is to appoint appropriate personnel, provide adequate resources or enforce the relevant legislation it passed. Despite these obvious deficiencies, it is clear that a change in the failing counter-narcotics strategy is the farthest thing from the minister’s mind at the present time.
Guyanese have had enough of the phoney war on drugs. Everyone knows that the administration is not winning yet it goes at great lengths to pretend that victory is at hand.
