Is this country addicted to drugs and drug trafficking? Hardly a week passes without fresh revelations of some ingenious initiative by inventive local entrepreneurs to send drugs to destinations somewhere in the western hemisphere.
The current series of stories that started in Canada last December are the latest chapter in the decade-long chronicle of serious trafficking. They seem to be revealing a bewilderingly widening network of culprits and show how deeply the drug trade has become embedded in the parallel economy.
In a flush of newness last October, US Ambassador John Jones said that the US Drug Enforcement Administration was “very keen” on working closely with local officials to establish a bureau of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. But he seems not to know that his predecessors have been trying unsuccessfully to do so for a decade. Up to March last year, President Bharrat Jagdeo repeated a request to US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Thomas Shannon for the DEA to have a permanent presence in Guyana.
It is well known that the biggest impediment to the establishment of a DEA bureau has been this administration’s strange inability to provide safe and secure premises requested by the USA. That is just one sham skirmish in the administration’s phoney war on drugs. The launching of the National Drug Strategy Master Plan in June 2005 and the establishment of the Fuel Smuggling and Contraband Task Force in April 2007 are merely tactical feints to create the impression that there is a real campaign to eliminate narco-trafficking.
At present, the press is agog over the recent interception of several hundred kilogrammes of cocaine concealed in various commodities shipped from this country. But these crimes were uncovered by the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the Canada Border Services Agency not by Guyanese law enforcement agencies. That is the way it happens. The US and UK authorities have seized several shipments of cocaine concealed in coconuts, frozen fish, molasses, rice, timber and other commodities over the years.
The President has again called for developed countries “to do more to aid the fight here against drug traffickers” and asked for more equipment and training. But both the USA and the UK have provided assistance to the police and defence forces, the Coast Guard, the Customs Anti Narcotics Unit (CANU) and the judiciary. The problem, as the US Department of State’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Report iterates, is not about assistance, it is with the administration’s resistance to implementing important initiatives prescribed in its own National Drug Strategy Master Plan!
Meanwhile, the main existing counter-narcotics agency — CANU — remains starved of financial, human and physical resources. How can this small unit with six vehicles, no boats or aircraft, and employing only three dozen persons, half of whom are office-bound, deploy sufficient personnel to secure the country’s main legal international transit points, much less monitor the more numerous unofficial and illegal transit points on the Brazil, Suriname and Venezuela borders? How could CANU prevent the construction of illegal narco-trafficking airstrips in the near hinterland?
It is time to acknowledge that narco-trafficking is endemic in this country’s parallel economy and traffickers will thrive as long as the administration fails to fully implement a realistic strategy. US Ambassador John Jones should be reminded of the counsel of former Ambassador Roland Bullen who saw through the charade and told this administration frankly over three years ago: “For my government to invest more, it will need to see a greater return. Resources are success-driven and it is demoralising to see drug shipments originating in Guyana, seized abroad, while narco-criminals roam freely here.”
