Government has defended the decision to remove Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit (CANU) ranks from wharves, saying that the handing over its responsibilities to personnel from the Customs and Trade Administration (CTA) was a “calculated risk” that was based on restructuring.
Criticisms of the move, which happened last year, flowed following the recent interception by Jamaican authorities of 122.65 kilos of cocaine on board a ship that left the John Fernandes Wharf with customs officers none the wiser.
PNCR Presidential candidate and former National Security Adviser David Granger last week had criticised the move and indicated that the CTA officers had no training in the detection of narcotics.
However, Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon, when questioned on the issue, pointed out that while CANU ranks are no longer stationed on the wharves, they are not excluded from carrying out investigations there. He said that CANU’s work is intelligence-driven and they have the authority to respond to intelligence-led operations anywhere in the country. “Moving them from there does not say that if information is provided about a narco trafficking event that is likely to take place, that does not mean they would not be there,” Luncheon told reporters on Friday. He said that “they can still respond to intelligence led-information.”
Asked what prompted the move, Luncheon said that the GRA has been restructuring and “has acquired considerable resources, training and manpower and it was a decision about who would be best to be static.”
He pointed out that that CTA officers were at the wharves at all times as they conduct the revenue collection aspect of their duties and it was decided that they should be given the resources and training. This, he said, was better than having CANU ranks standing at wharves all the time. “It is sort of a calculated risk, we never [removed] them from responding to intelligence-led operations anywhere in the country,” he explained.
Granger, who has come under fire from Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee for calling for a comprehensive, independent judicial inquiry into all aspects of drug trafficking in Guyana, took issue with the transferring of responsibility between the two agencies.
He said that this was done even though it was common knowledge that the CTA had neither the organisational structure nor the financial resources to support its new counternarcotics function. “At a practical level, it was known also that CTA inspectors were not given sufficient training to enable them to conduct counter-narcotics searches,” he had said.
He added that at the technical level, a new shipping container scanner which was received on in June of last year seems to have been either disabled or to have become inoperable in less than one year. “The result of transferring responsibility from the trained CANU to the untrained CTA was that no successful narcotics interdictions at the port of Georgetown has been recorded although about 500 containers are shipped from the port every month,” he said.
And Alliance For Change (AFC) leader Raphael Trotman had also zeroed in on the fact that the scanner has been none functional for some months after it was installed. The installment of the scanner was a requirement of US authorities to partnering country following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.
“That we cannot even have the scanning machine functioning speaks volumes as to the extent of the incompetence and general sense of defeat and hopelessness,” Trotman told this newspaper in an invited comment. Trotman said that nothing he reads any longer surprises him “because this administration long ago gave up the challenge of changing things and is now content with managing them without drowning.”
“I repeat that Guyana needs a new Republic, a new start with something different. There are good people within the political system and in all parties and good people in the private sector, churches, university and elsewhere who can turn things around if we acknowledge the problem and commit to work together,” Trotman said.
The GRA announced last week that the scanner was up and running as of last Tuesday.
Meanwhile Luncheon, who had earlier said the cocaine found in a container of logs shipped from here “displayed weakness across the board that need to be attended to,” has revealed that there is an ongoing investigation to find out why the scanner was not working.
He told reporters that when the manufacturer installed the scanner last year, it functioned but as soon as he “jumped on a plane and left” the scanner developed all sorts of problems and “was a scanner that was not scanning.” He said the investigation would ascertain whether the non-functioning of the scanner was as a result of sabotage, while adding that this is an instance where monitoring and supervision comes into play. “These kinds of issues we have to deal with and technological support must be provided to supervisors to assist them in supervising and monitoring,” Luncheon said.
According to Luncheon, the biggest hurdle that needs to be overcome in the fight against drug trafficking is monitoring and supervision. He said that too often the work that is done fails to attract the right incisive supervision so people “get away with murder.”
“Their work is not timely supervised, so they get away with inaptitude [and] very often it is a carefully orchestrated departure of norm to facilitate this sort of behaviour,” he said. He added that often there seems to be sabotage of equipment and as a result there needs to be improved supervision. “That is where the real weaknesses lies right now; it is not the need for more people as they will be falling all over each other,” Luncheon said.
He said that the constellation of forces at the different sea and airports enjoy maximum deployment presently but “there is some expectation of improved performance because in most of the cases it is not that there were no forces” present when illegal exports occur.
On March 16, Jamaican authorities busted the cocaine, with a street value of $700 million, among logs in a container on the MV Vega Azurit.
The vessel had left Guyana on March 12. The container in which the drugs were found was switched to the MV Vega Azurit, after being originally booked to leave these shores on another ship.
A day after the bust, Commissioner of the GRA Khurshid Sattaur said preliminary investigations revealed that the CTA officers were vigilant and diligent in the execution of their duties, but that the container with the cocaine had not been subjected to a customs search. He had stated that customs procedures in this case were well tested and questioned how the container could enter a ship when it was not booked on the shipping record.
But sources have said it was highly unlikely that a container would have been allowed to leave Guyana on a ship without someone from customs being aware of it. It also was pointed out that if there was no record of the container, then there needed to be an investigation as to why this is so.
A seemingly frustrated Trotman told Stabroek News that he was not sure what to say any longer “except that Guyana is the classic ‘Tale of Two Cities.’”
“One group feels that we are a paradise and that all these things that people feel and experience are false, and the other group, the rest of us, feels it and knows it on a daily basis,” Trotman said.
“What we see whenever we get a report of a cocaine bust or torched safe, we are really witnessing the symptoms of a sick system that needs urgent surgical intervention,” he stressed.
