Dear Editor,
The Guyana political opposition is all up in arms about the story of the group of Mormons who have clearly broken the country’s immigration laws. Interestingly, the lawbreakers are all Americans and opposition activists are keenly playing up this aspect rather than seeing their departure as merely a procedural aspect of law and order. The government has said that the church may send in replacement missionaries provided their paperwork is intact.
Recently, the opposition has taken to cozying up to anything American, even writing to the American government and asking the Obama administration to meddle in local politics.
Observers are noting that the Mormon episode could be yet another poor attempt by the opposition to create tension between the US and Guyana governments. Is the American government so gullible that it would base its foreign policy on a group of Mormon lawbreakers? Who knows?
Some in Guyana go so far as to say that US policy regarding this country should be based on the testimony of an admitted gangster who testified against an American lawyer in a Brooklyn courtroom. Apparently desperate people imagine desperate things.
Is the Mormon Church so in need of followers that it would allow itself to be used as political cannon fodder in a country where they are guests?
Meanwhile, an Associated Press (AP) story quoted attorney Nigel Hughes as saying that the Mormons have about $2 million in Guyana and so he asked, “Why then expel them?” This lawyer is clearly not familiar with the laws and the consequences of breaking them or maybe, in Guyana, once you dangle $2 million the law no longer applies.
Mormons “do great missionary work and cultivate farms in the country,” Hughes said, and I immediately thought, how strange, he could have said exactly the same thing about the Jim Jones cult!
Yours faithfully,
Justin de Freitas
