How many reports on trafficking in persons does this country need? Apparently annoyed by the uncomfortable comments contained in the United State’s Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons annual Trafficking in Persons Report, Guyana’s Ministerial Task Force on Trafficking in Persons simply decided to write its own anodyne version. Does having two contradictory reports improve public safety?

Released on June 4, 2008, the USA report stated soberly that “Guyana is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor… Amerindian girls are trafficked to brothels near the mining camps and to coastal areas for sexual exploitation and domestic servitude. Young Amerindian men are exploited under forced labor conditions in mining and logging camps.”

More seriously, the USA report added “The Government of Guyana does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking, however, it is making significant efforts to do so. While the government has undertaken a commendable initiative to increase public awareness of the dangers of human trafficking through a nationwide outreach campaign and advertising of its anti-trafficking hotline, Guyana is placed on Tier 2 Watch List for a second consecutive year for failing to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat trafficking, particularly in the area of law enforcement actions against trafficking offenders.”

This unflattering US report was a rebuke to the administration and a blemish on its reputation. But it is delusional to disregard it because it is unfavour-able. Rather than correct the specific problems that the report identified, the administration simply wrote its own vacuous version. Presented on July 28, 2008 and launched on December 1, the local report for the year 2007 aimed less at collecting fresh evidence than at contradicting the US report’s findings.

Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee, Chairman of the task force, said that the local report was born out of a desire to present to citizens a “factual and authentic” picture of the nature and magnitude of trafficking in persons in Guyana.  “Too often we have external agencies of the donor community compiling reports on various phenomena in our country as if we Guyanese do not have the capacity and objectivity to compile such reports on our own,” he said. Even former President Mrs Janet Jagan criticised the local media for publishing foreign reports that, she wrote, are “frequently false, malicious or just produced by persons or groups that know little about Guyana, pick up bits and pieces of information that are not researched, put them together and issue so-called reports.”

To no one’s surprise, the sanitised local report determined that trafficking in persons was “not a major problem,” finding only 10 reported cases of persons “presumed to be trafficked” in all of Regions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 9 for an entire year. The local report oddly omits references to Regions 7 and 8 where many mining and logging camps are located. This report masks the realities of activities in the ‘E & F’ hinterland divisions where, owing to the vast size of the area and the small number of policemen, trafficking in persons is hugely underreported and, perhaps, undiscovered.

Self congratulation does not solve crime. It is a dangerous delusion to believe that a spurious report can airbrush underlying social and economic problems − particularly youth unemployment in Amerindian villages – and their consequences out of hinterland actuality.

Rather than writing fake reports, the administration should intensify anti-trafficking training for police and magistrates; increase its efforts to employ more efficient law enforcement techniques; improve policing in ‘E & F’ divisions; investigate and convict offenders; and enhance assistance for victims of trafficking.