Guyanese-born political scientist and regional security specialist Dr Ivelaw Griffith says that while the country’s gold industry is an important economic asset, it has also emerged as a source of security vulnerability.
“Security is not only military, it involves economics. It is also political and environmental and in the context of my broader paradigm of what security is, gold as a resource can be both a positive and a negative; a challenge. If you define security as more than military, then gold, in the case of Guyana is a big plus but also a source of vulnerability in a variety of respects,” Dr Griffith said in an interview earlier this week.
The comment by the specialist on Caribbean security comes even as local watchers continue to weigh the economic gains of the gold industry against increasing evidence of both internal and trans-border security challenges. These security challenges have emerged in recent years.
Woefully inadequate policing of most interior mining locations has seen an explosion of serious crime while the absence of an effective military presence on the country’s borders with both Suriname and Venezuela has seen a proliferation of ‘gold seekers’, drugs and weapons across the country’s borders.
“Some of the people who do illegal gold prospecting don’t care about borders, don’t care about sovereignty, don’t care which side is Venezuela, which side is Guyana,” Griffith said. He said the sole focus on gold was likely to persist “especially if there is no [security] presence…” or if that presence is underpinned the kind of collusion and corruption that can arise out of the fact that “you do not pay your defence adequately; you do not pay your police adequately… You create opportunities for corruption which are in some cases exacerbating the challenge.”
