Dear Editor,
I encourage all the respectable to look closely at the bottomless levels to which this society degenerates daily. I urge especially those upstanding citizens who prefer the surreptitious sweeping of troubling matters under the thickest of carpets to look at themselves even more closely. They should ask: how much more silence, how much more objection to public ventilation of where we truly are?
Men mow down and kill people with vehicles and pay their families for the sport of it all. Men shoot people in passion, or for business purposes, or for a range of other purposes, and pay their way away from apprehension and towards uninterrupted unchallenged freedom. It is firmly believed that the recipients of perpetrators’ largesse include witnesses, investigators, and finders of facts, among an established expansive pantheon of the compromised. Justice is weighed in the reaching hands, crafty eyes, and calculated overtures of a den of barterers. Case closed, next item.
It is easier, quicker to ask who is not on the take, as opposed to those who are. It is less messy, a far less populated corner in this underground bazaar of domestic jurisprudence. Now here is the pulsating, muscular heart of the matter.
Whether killing, paying, misdirecting, intimidating, or protecting, there are mountains of money to make all of this happen. There is a whole heap of dirty money to make things go away, to buy freedom, to derail any semblance of justice. Stated differently, no matter how expensive the fix for the defending parties – be they washers, pretenders, or other frauds – the monies handed over represent mere pebbles in the wealth pyramid. The layers have more money than Middle East oilmen. There is one small problem, though: the locals have no oil. This same dirty, blood money has invaded and poisoned, with radioactive velocity, significant segments of Guyanese society, such as its politics and its commerce. More obscure is its presence in charities and churches and elsewhere, but it is very much there, too.
It is why forensics and videotapes and eyewitnesses do not matter, have no bearing. Money is the heart and soul of what passes for justice in this country. For those in need of examples and corroboration, simply pick up one of the independent dailies. Do the crime, pay the dime, save the time. Yes, in this besieged, lawless society dirty money crescendos into a primal scream of pure unmitigated evil to reverberate into almost every forlorn nook and cranny of the land. It threatens the helpless and voiceless, it taints all. Money talks with unparalleled power here; it gets the unthinkable, the profane done; it makes all things possible.
To those who smirk and laugh at the vast presence of corruption in Guyana, I say this: let us all laugh, too, at the towering buildings, the guns, and the crimes. Perhaps, those too are overblown and imagined. Then, let us laugh at (or with) our purchased system of justice.
I close where I started: those who wish to clamp a heavy immovable lid on all that is terribly wrong in this shared space may still want to hide and deny; deny the extent and depths to which we have fallen. But please, don’t ask others to do the same.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
