The United States (US) Drug Enforcement Administration’s notification of its offshore interception of a semi-submersible vessel with a 2,370 kg cocaine cargo by a US Navy Guided Missile Cruiser on 21 March 2024 confirmed Guyana’s ‘major league’ status as an international narco-trafficking entrepôt. This year’s revelation was a reminder of the discovery of a similar self-propelled, semi-submersible vessel in the Barima-Waini Region ten years ago on 14 August 2014 which provided evidence that Guyana was sailing into narco-statehood
Former President David Granger, in examining the importation and exportation of cocaine on the programme – The Public Interest – pointed out that Guyanese are still writhing from the secondary impact of the massacres and murders of the ‘drug-gang warfare’ during the ‘Troubles’ under the PPPC administration earlier this century. Despite a five-year hiatus under the 2015-2020 APNU+AFC administration, industrial scale narco-trafficking resurged in the absence of a coherent strategy, strong structure and political will to eradicate the crime.
Mr. Granger iterated the fact that Guyana is particularly vulnerable because its hinterland – which comprises over three-quarters of its territory – has unpatrolled open spaces; unmonitored airstrips, unpoliced land borders, an unwatched coastline and numberless rivers and creeks which can be channels for illegal narcotics. Narco-trafficking seems to be rising in response to a ‘surge in both supply and demand for cocaine.’
The former president reminded that the People’s Progressive Party has been in government for twenty-seven of the last thirty-two years since 1992 – a period that coincided with Guyana’s emergence as transnational cocaine-exporting state. Memorable confiscations of cocaine include 3,000 kg on MV Danielsen in October 1998; 1.5 tonnes in a container of rice in Hamburg, Germany in August 2020; 11.5 tonnes in a container of scrap metal in Antwerp, Belgium in November 2020; and 50 kg in a container of rum in Rotterdam, The Netherlands – all shipped through Guyana. Five foreign, cocaine-laden, light aircraft are known to have landed, illegally, since August 2020.
The PPPC administration had created its cherished Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit 30 years ago but the unit has been deformed by birth defects which crimped its capability and competence from its conception. The PPPC, on re-entering office in August 2020, quickly disestablished the National Anti-Narcotics Agency and dissolved the National Drug Strategy Master Plan initiated by the APNU administration to curtail narco-trafficking comprehensively. The PPPC administration resists deploying the defence and police forces in sufficient strength to patrol our land borders and to secure our airspace, seaspace and rivers, preferring, instead, to employ the security forces on glamorous municipal missions on the coastland.
Granger expressed the view that Guyana needs the restoration of a strong National Anti-Narcotics Agency; an enforceable National Drug Strategy Master Plan and an intelligent Ministry of Public Security which has a grip of the task of suppressing transnational crime and knows the importance of keeping citizens safe from the violence of narco-trafficking.
Narco-traffickers will continue to bring cocaine into the country and will find ways and means to get it out to foreign markets. The PPPC and CANU have had decades to demonstrate their resolve to curtail the importation and exportation of cocaine by air, land and sea. They failed.
