Drug barons and ruling elites in an elected dictatorship

Oct 23, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Mr. Roger Khan pleaded guilty in a US court, not to sending counterfeit money to the US; not for murdering an American citizen in Guyana; not for tax fraud in the US but for shipping cocaine as part of a drug trade to the US.
Mr. Khan, then, was a drug trafficker in Guyana (according to the man himself). In his words to the judge, Khan apologized to US citizens for sending drugs there but not a word on the pain he caused the Guyanese nation. Yet there were persons of Guyanese birth, who do not live in this land that openly told the journalists from Guyana that went to New York to cover the case that Khan should be viewed as a hero by Guyanese because he fought the gunmen of Buxton who were creating widespread violent instability.
Nowhere in their thoughts were these “hero” advocates thinking of what benefits a drug trafficker stood to gain from undertaking an anti-crime task that the security forces appeared unable do for themselves. The answer to that is so simple; it makes these “hero” advocates very unpatriotic people because they were only concerned with what Khan did in Buxton not what Khan was doing to Guyana with his trade.
To comprehend the implications of Khan’s activities, one has to understand what drug trafficking does to a small country with a tiny population.
Stage 1 – Money comes in plenty. Stage 2- Low pay and poverty makes the cocaine oligarch penetrate the state apparatus and the wider society.
Stage 3 – The manipulation of state officials allows for the trade to get bigger.
Stage 4- The drug oligarch becomes a law unto himself because security officials will not arrest him and cannot arrest him-
Stage 5 – Prodigious sums of money is invested in the economy bringing the baron into contract with politicians who need the investments.
Stage 6- An interlocking relationship sees drug money going into the election campaign. Stage seven – Competition involves uncivilized descent into horrific dimensions of violence and the barons with greater influence with ruling politicians win out.
The final stage – The lords become a parallel government immune from persecution and prosecution from any quarters in the small, personalized country.
Those who think that Roger Khan was a hero should ask themselves why Khan would use his own millions to fight deadly gunmen for the Guyana Government and allow that very government to arrest his men or even arrest him.
And why those who praise Khan would believe that Khan would not ask the government to leave alone his drug operation.
We come now to the question every school child in Guyana can answer – why has no large drug pusher been arrested in Guyana and only when they leave these shores? We don’t have to repeat the answer. Just look at the stages we have outlined above.
Before I move on to the nexus between Khan and the Guyana Government here is a detail about an incident at a Sheriff Street night club involving an American Social Sciences lecturer at UG who is a close relative of one of Georgetown’s most eminent businessmen and a once powerful drug lord.
A young lady was dancing too romantically with the lecturer.
An ill-mannered interruption occurred which the lecturer objected to and he was severely beaten by bodyguards. No charge was made though there was a police report. This is what powerful drug lords do – they do what they want. I saw a baron stop his fleet of vehicles in the middle of Church Street because there was no place to park outside Austin’s Bookstore. He wanted an item in the store. No one dared protest.
Have the “hero” advocates ever wondered what would have happened to the social fabric of this country if Khan was not arrested? But more importantly, why would a government ask a cocaine baron to help them with a security operation? Why not ask for overseas help?
The answer to that is when the foreign help came, the ruling politicians would have lost their hold on the top boys in the security forces and the foreign men would have encountered the criminal nexus between powerful rulers and state security. So the little dictators chose Khan instead and Khan joined the ranks of the little dictators.
This theory explains why the little dictators have rejected the British programme of police reform with UK officers working in Guyana. When their drug friends kill people, the elected dictators would not have been able to stop police investigation. Isn’t it time PPP supporters come out of their self-destructive cocoon?

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Drug barons and ruling elites in an elected dictatorship

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