Dear Editor,
In their comments on illegal drug intervention activity in Guyana a while back, both the President and the Minister of Home Affairs, by words and inference, called for greater law enforcement targeting of bottom house and street drug users and dealers. It seems that while law enforcement is encouraged to harass and pursue the mites of the drug industry, the big fish are allowed to operate in relative freedom, coming to the attention of the public and law enforcement only by happenstance.
The US recently issued an arrest warrant for a Guyanese/US citizen, whose family was kidnapped by Venezuelan thugs most likely involved in large-scale drug trafficking with Guyana as an important conduit point. The activities of Datram and these Venezuelans did not come to light as a consequence of law enforcement investigations and targeting, they came about as a result of a falling out. And if that kidnapping had not been fortuitously interrupted by a slew of inadvertent circumstances, does anyone really believe that the police and army would not have been rampaging through the village and backlands of Buxton in response to hysterical demands from certain sectors.
Imagine that people are able to carry on construction of an airfield wider than Timehri and longer than Ogle in an area relatively easily accessible by land and water, and but for inadvertent circumstances, would still be engaged in that process today. That they were able to transport a bulldozer into the work area is much less alarming and interesting to me, than the fact that they privately owned such heavy earth moving equipment in the first place. Were these people contract engineers involved in projects that required such machinery?
And if not, how come their acquisition of it failed to excite official curiosity or speculation? What kinds of sensors are at work in Guyana that can immediately cast a wide net of suspicions on African Guyanese members of the military when a firearm becomes missing, but remain placidly dormant in other situations? What ludricous times we live in. And I say this because ordinary law abiding citizens of villages like Buxton are being told by the state that they bear some accountability for the actions of criminals in their backyard. Isn’t it about time for the state to be held to the same standards it sets for some members of the populace?
As we examine the unfolding circumstances of these last two drug related events in Guyana, and the “bronco billy” antics of a sitting Minister of the State that has apparently been accorded the usual wink and a nod response by officialdom, we are left to wonder whether notions like “equality under the law” really have any value any more. It is unequivocally apparent that we have a multi-tiered justice system weighted in favour of those politically connected to the centres of administrative power.
So much so that some Guyanese can be arrested, beaten and tortured without reasonable cause, cut down by gunfire in law enforcement operations, and protestations of these excesses are greeted with official harangues on the importance of the rule of law. But consciousness of that importance is poignantly missing in action when the wrongdoers belong to a certain class of citizenry.
The prisons of the USA and Guyana are filled with low level drug users and dealers who can easily be replaced faster than they can be removed from the streets and the bottom houses. But they are easy and convenient targets.
They are at the bottom of the social order, and are not likely to have the means to buy their way out, or the connections to avert legal scrutiny. Politicians and Law Enforcement will go after them because by doing so they construct an illusion that they are really serious about the declared war on drugs. In addition, confining and concentrating law enforcement and judicial attention on those who inhabit the social dungeons of nations like Guyana, conserves equilibrium at the mesospheric levels of social stratification. It works because the myopic masses accept that placebo as an effective remedy for their concerns and trepidations.
It is said that the criminal whose tool is a pen is likely to steal more than one whose tool is a gun or a knife. What is seldom deliberated publicly, however, is the fact that criminality, regardless of its texture, is more socially tolerable when the practitioners are your next door neighbours, frequent your social clubs, and are as scornful as you are of “those people” at the bottom who rob and steal. It is a lot more comfortable to relate to a drug dealer who owns a business and a bulldozer, than one who rides a bicycle and operates from Buxton or some other poor environment. Because when it comes to the science of hypocrisy, it is clear that we are pioneering new frontiers in Guyana.
Yours faithfully,
Robin Williams
