On November 4, former Commissioner of Police Floyd McDonald, Assistant Commissioner Seelall Persaud and Head of CANU James Singh went bounding off to Caracas for a meeting of the Guyana-Venezuela Mixed Commission on Drugs. A release more than two weeks later from the Ministry of Home Affairs said the delegations had agreed that co-operation between the two countries to combat the drug trade should be strengthened and intensified. Whatever that means.
The most that the ministry would say was that the matters discussed had ranged from mutual co-operation to the exchange of information, and that thirteen items had been identified for follow-up action to be taken by both countries.
This meeting seems to have had its origins in an unannounced one-day visit to Caracas by Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett in July, when she met with her counterpart Mr Nicolás Maduro, and discussed among other things the resumption of the UN Good Officer process, the construction of a road link between Georgetown and Caracas and a gas pipeline from Venezuela to Guyana and Suriname. In the same report in our July 13 edition, we cited GINA as saying that the Guyana-Venezuela Mixed Commission which oversaw co-operation aimed at combating the drug trade would meet “soon.”
Now it is true we reported on January 5 this year that according to CANU most of the cocaine (perhaps 60%) exported from Guyana likely enters this country from Venezuela via the Pomeroon. Furthermore, sources told this newspaper that there was a nexus between gun-running and the narcotics trade – which should hardly come as a surprise to anyone. A portion of the drugs were then moved further east to Suriname, it was said, where the going rate for two Chinese-made AK-47s was a kilo of cocaine. On the face of it, therefore, co-operation with the Venezuelan authorities seems sensible.
Given what was said above, however, one wonders if the Venezuelans were serious, or indeed if the Guyanese were either. As stated earlier, other than for an exchange of information, no measures were identified, and thirteen items were mentioned for “follow-up” action. It all sounded like one of those bureaucratic obfuscations, meant to sound meaningful, but really having nothing substantial behind it. Perhaps the talks about the road link and the gas pipeline were fluff too, since leaving a variety of issues including the all-important sovereignty one aside, they hardly seem compatible with our new environmental approach as reflected in the President’s Low Carbon Development Strategy. But then again, having to do contradictory things at the same time has never been regarded as a challenge by this government.
All of that apart, exactly what level of trust can be generated for joint border ventures against drug-trafficking when only two years ago the Venezuelan army blew up two Guyanese dredges in the Cuyuni River (in Guyanese territory) and at the same time two helicopters trespassed into this country’s airspace. Some weeks later a fairly low-level delegation from Caracas showed its face here, and the public was informed by then Minister of Foreign Affairs Rudy Insanally that the Venezuelans had expressed regrets, and that the two sides had agreed to create bilateral mechanisms to address “the issue of mutual concern.” One wonders what bilateral mechanism was necessary in this instance, when all that was required was for Venezuela to give an absolute undertaking that it would not happen again. It was noteworthy that there was no apology (regrets do not constitute an apology) and no compensation.
And then there was that little matter of the statements by the President of the Venezuelan Frontiers Studies Institute who insisted that the destruction of the dredges had occurred in Venezuelan territory because it was their ‘Reclamation Zone.’ Consequently, he went on, he hoped his government would not apologize, because the ‘zone’ should not be compromised. Caracas did not even attempt to distance itself diplomatically from these remarks; there was nothing but a deafening silence.
And all of this came, it should be remembered, after the Venezuelan military shot dead an unarmed Guyanese citizen in cold blood on the stelling at Eteringbang, again well within Guyana territory. There has been no satisfaction on this matter either: no apology and no compensation. In fact, the then Venezuelan Minister of Defence, General Baduel, expressed public doubts that anyone had been shot at all. So the question has to be asked, does Venezuela really take this country seriously? Nearly everyone – except the government, of course – knows the answer to that. Given the obvious answer, therefore, the question which follows it inevitably is, why would our neighbour want to co-operate with Guyana in drug interdiction unless it thought it had something else to gain. If it doesn’t have anything else to gain, then the meeting was, as suggested above, nothing but a bit of empty PR.
As it is, Venezuela has no apparent vested interest in preventing narcotics from entering Guyana; she would be far more interested, one would have thought, if they were crossing the border in the other direction. Her major problem frontier in that respect, is the one with Colombia, which is of course the primary source of the cocaine that has so undermined societies in the region. And that is an extremely long frontier where FARC guerrillas, Colombian paramilitaries and plain old-fashioned criminals are active in the drug trade.
In addition, there is well-documented widespread corruption in the Venezuelan military and the various law-enforcement agencies. The most recent allegation in that regard concerns the former owner of the airline Aeropostal (it is now nationalized), and his brothers, who worked with various government officials and members of the military to smuggle an average of 10 tons of cocaine per month into the US. According to the Miami Herald, he worked with a Colombian arms-for-drugs trader associated with the FARC.
So if Venezuela is not all that interested in helping Guyana on the narcotics front (unless it’s a prelude to something else, of course), why should Georgetown be interested? As said earlier, maybe it too is only concerned with appearances. Clearly on a ‘serious’ matter like this, Messrs Persaud and Singh are the right people to send to the meeting – but Mr McDonald? Why should taxpayers foot the bill for him to go to Caracas when it was on his watch that Guyana’s most notorious drug baron came to the fore. What were his astonishing successes on the anti-narcotics front which warranted sending him as a consultant on an issue of this kind?
In any case, if the government was unprepared to work with the British on a security sector reform plan, what is it that the Venezuelans have to offer which would make a substantial difference to the drug-trafficking situation here? Nothing that would tackle corruption in the law enforcement agencies or which would make them more effective, that’s for sure.
