Editorial

Edwin Carrington’s announcement last week that he will declare an end to his innings as Caricom’s longest serving Secretary General is, as we suggested in Wednesday’s editorial (‘Changing of the guard at Caricom’), not altogether surprising.

In another day or two or three or so, residents of Georgetown can begin to breathe again; maybe.

Few will really be surprised at the decision of Caricom Secretary General Edwin Carrington to end his tenure at the Secretariat towards the end of this year.

Sojo Nedd, a 24-year-old mother of four, was sentenced to four years imprisonment last week after she was found guilty of trafficking in marijuana.

As harbingers of the fast approaching electoral season there were two noteworthy developments in recent weeks.

The British are more insulated from the intrigues of their politicians than is the case in a small society like Guyana, where any number of people know some of their representatives personally, and where various of them can be encountered at one watering hole or another.

Six months ago, in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, a convoy of SUVs and trucks pulled up in front of a house party.

Neither Fidel Castro nor the Cuban Revolution is in the best of shape these days, but in spite of reports of serious threats to their health, neither seems ready to give up the ghost just yet.

A member of the local magistracy has come out against the abuse of alcohol, claiming that it is the root cause of domestic violence, and stating that 100 per cent of the domestic violence cases that come before him in Berbice, where he is based, are related to alcohol.

Early in March 2008 the Government of Venezuela announced that it would begin to block imports from Colombia in response to a Colombian military incursion into Ecuador in pursuit of anti-Colombia FARC guerrillas allegedly hiding in Ecuador.

Commissioner of Police Henry Greene, at least twice every year at the Guyana Police Force’s Annual Officers’ Conference in February or March and the Force’s Anniversary Awards Ceremony in July, would choose to disclose a few choice statistics on crime to the public.

President Jagdeo’s iteration of plans to equip poorer households with a laptop will no doubt be subject to intense dissection by critics and supporters alike.

Emancipation is the great watershed in Guyanese history, when those who were in bondage were afforded some official space within the society to pursue goals of their own choosing for the first time in two hundred years.

Think, for a minute, about the room you are in. Is it lit by natural light or electric light?

Dennis Pantin, whose death on July 13, 2010, at the relatively young age of 61, was reported in this paper, has been deeply mourned across the Caribbean region.

What do the numbers 70, 600 and 1,000 have in common?

Forty-three years ago this month, in 1967, the island of Anguilla voted in a referendum in which its leaders sought to confirm their secession two years before, from the then British colony of St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, re-baptised as an Associated State of the United Kingdom.

Had the public security situation throughout the country not been so dreadful, the public might not have realised just how much time the Minister of Home Affairs spends on issues which have little to do with everyday violent crimes. 

Amid the daily diet of crime, unprecedented violence against women and children, the divisive and bitter politics that suffuses every part of life and the increasingly oppressive hands of the government and the opaqueness of its business, it is easy to forget that positive things are also happening.

Considering that as far as the public was concerned Venezuela has not been on the foreign policy radar for so long, last Wednesday’s visit by President Bharrat Jagdeo to Caracas came as something of a surprise.