United States Ambassador to Guyana, Sarah Ann-Lynch today said that “multiple” US visas were restricted following several warnings to officials in this country to desist from attempts to undermine the democratic processes of the March 2nd General Elections.
While not giving a number or names of persons because of confidentiality reasons and US immigration law, the US Ambassador said the revocations came after a number of pleas by Washington for a fair and transparent process.
“There were visa restrictions, I can’t give a number but there were multiple,” Ambassador Lynch told Stabroek News in an exclusive interview, via Zoom, this morning when asked how many visa restrictions the US had imposed as a result of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s determination that persons had undermined democracy here.
“It is not a road we wanted go down at all. We really hold back on that tool of US foreign policy to the last possible moment, to be honest. Secretary Pompeo spoke multiple times from the podium that you need to call yourself a democracy, you need to hold to democratic principles and get this elections resolved. It was so many, many times before going down this path of restricting visas,” she added.
A career US Foreign Service member since 1993, the Ambassador said that in her decades of serving throughout the Caribbean and world she has never experienced an election like Guyana’s where there was a five-month wait for results along with efforts at fraudulent declarations.
Lynch said that she hopes the visa restrictions act a “learning experience” for all going forward as no one, including her country, wants a recurrence.
“We hope going forward that it is a learning experience,” she said.
While the US support for democracy here has been heartening, critics say that very democracy in Washington is now under threat in various ways including the maligning of postal ballots and what could be a plan for the Donald Trump administration to not to accept the results of the November 3rd elections. The Ambassador was asked by Stabroek News to respond to these criticisms and said, “Well you are right. We are having an elections season ourselves in the United States and in fact tonight is the first debate between President Trump and former Vice President (Joe) Biden. So I suggest that everybody who is interested in the US elections watch and perhaps get answers to some of those questions.
“We certainly do have an elections coming up on November 3rd and I think we will see good voter turnout…and there will be a President installed on January 20th,” she added.
The 20th amendment to the US Constitution specifies that the term of each elected President of the United States begins at noon on January 20 of the year following the election.
