Guyana as dumpsite for petroleum wastes

Janette Bulkan

By Janette Bulkan

Guyana is often mentioned for less than stellar reasons. There’s Jonestown (‘(s)he drank the Kool Aid’), rigged elections, the poorest country after Haiti in CARICOM and Latin America, the costliest failed infrastructural project in CARICOM (US$250M Skeldon sugar factory), and failed or captured regulatory agencies. Standouts among the latter was the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) in 2020 and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2021. This article considers the EPA’s (non)regulation of US multinational ExxonMobil (XOM) and companies that provide services to XOM.