Don’t be fooled by the PPPC’s bogus war on drugs

Nov 18, 2012 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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Ricardo ‘Fatman’ Rodrigues, known to have been an associate of Shaheed ‘Roger’ Khan, the jailed narco-trafficker, was executed by a five-man squad in broad daylight on a quiet Monday afternoon on 15th October in Georgetown. He had been released on bail following his arrest over the discovery of an arms cache in the Rupununi that contained ten automatic and assault rifles, hand grenades, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and other items.
Jean Le Blanc, a Canadian who was shot at the same time as Rodrigues, died mysteriously in hospital on 26th October. Marlon ‘Trini” Osbourne, Rodrigues’s personal bodyguard, was executed on 31st October in broad daylight in the quiet ward of Queenstown, Georgetown by a squad of gunmen.
The link between narco-trafficking and gun-running is clear. It is evident also, that drugs and guns have been contributing to murders during the People’s Progressive Party Civic’s 20-year administration. The Guyana Police Force recorded 114 murders so far in 2012. Nine of these were ‘executions’ which might have been related to the narcotics trade. Armed robberies, which increased by 15 per cent to 854 – a rate of nearly three per day – are partly the result of gun-running which accompanies drug-running.
The PPPC administration is fully aware of the threats that drugs and guns pose to human safety. President Donald Ramotar faced with almost weekly drug busts at the international and municipal airports and elsewhere, told the United Nations General Assembly last September that the scourge of narco-trafficking has”…engendered a growth in criminal activity in our region.  The availability of guns in many societies, most of which is a by-product of the narco-trade, has contributed to the growth of gun crimes and murders in the region and beyond.”
Rohee, also, is on record as having said that the profits of the drug trade are being used to support money laundering and terrorism. He said that the proliferation of drugs in a society affects public health, promotes money-laundering though its profit margin, threatens political stability by exacerbating corruption and affects a country’s national security by financing crimes.
The PPPC administration, for most of its 20-year regime, has been the subject of a series of unfavourable comments by the US Department of State which publishes an annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. Rohee previously attacked the report describing it as “downright deceptive and misleading.”
Rohee, however, in less belligerent moods, changes his tone when he speaks to foreigners. Addressing an Inter-American Development Bank-sponsored National Crime Prevention Conference, he freely admitted that the country had been faced with “threats from the international and local drug trade, violence that accompanies the drug trade, escalation of violent crimes including murders and robberies, international terrorism and its negative consequences, involvement and exploitation of youth in crime and domestic violence.”
The US Department of State’s annual Report iterates every year, “Guyana is a transshipment point for South American cocaine on its way to North America and Europe.” This country, clearly, has become a warehouse from which Guyanese drug-traffickers export their merchandise to foreign markets. It is clear, also, that the PPPC administration has never been able to bring “the bigger drug lords” to justice in this jurisdiction.
The PPPC, despite Ramotar and Rohee’s admissions, actually has no comprehensive counter-narcotics strategy. The two previous National Drug Strategy Master Plans – one under Jairam Ronald Gajraj and the other under Clement Rohee–were both allowed to lapse without ever having been fully implemented.
The essential elements of the Master Plans were to call for the establishment of ten Regional Anti-Drugs Units to provide information which could be passed to the Joint Intelligence Co-ordination Centre and Joint Anti-Narcotics Committee. These, however, were never established. The National Anti-Narcotics Co-ordinating Secretariat, also, was never established. The National Anti-Narcotics Commission chaired by the President also, was never established.
It is therefore not difficult to imagine why local intelligence and counter-narcotics agencies have been unable to unravel the local network which supports narco-trafficking. The PPPC administration’s energies seem bent on arresting small-scale couriers attempting to take the small amounts of cocaine out of the country, especially through the international airport.
It has never shown the resolve or provided the resources to stop cocaine being brought into the country by the plane load in the first place.
How serious can Ramotar and Rohee be about their war on drugs despite their utterances? They, more than anyone else, ought to explain to the nation why the PPPC administration’s main counter-narcotics strategy “ the National Drug Strategy Master Plan for 2005-2009 –was allowed to expire three years ago without achieving its objectives.
They ought to explain why the Guyana Government has been “engaged in discussion” with the US administration about the establishment of a United States Drug Enforcement Agency Office in Guyana for over 12 years without reaching agreement while Barbados, Suriname and Trinidad opened DEA offices!
The country’s two existing counter-narcotics agencies “ Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit and Police Narcotics Branch – have never been provided with the surveillance aircraft, river and coastal patrol boats, all-terrain vehicles and trained personnel needed to secure the country’s main international transit points, coasts and borders. They seem incapable of identifying, much less investigating, the major drug cartels that have the ability to keep the trade going.
While Rohee talks, the cartels continue landing foreign aircraft and even constructing illegal airstrips that can accommodate foreign cocaine cargo planes.
The Guyanese public has had to learn, quite by chance, every now and then over the past 20 years, of illegal flights of strange foreign aircraft; of low-flying aircraft which dropped 20 cartons of cocaine at Loo Lands, on the Demerara River, in June 1993; of the burnt-out aircraft ‘discovered’ on the airstrip at Bartica in December 1998; of another burnt-out aircraft ‘discovered’ at Mabura Hill in July 2000; of the abandoned aircraft at Kwapau airstrip in March 2005 and of the discovery of a burn-out aeroplane on an illegal airstrip at Wanatoba, 130 km upriver from Orealla on the Corentyne River, in December 2007.
The aircraft were suspected of having brought cocaine into the country in all of these cases. The administration has never done anything to provide the civil aviation and law-enforcement agencies with the resources to detect these illegal flights or to conduct continuous surveillance of Guyana’s airspace. It is usually only when accidental damage occurs and the traffickers attempt to destroy the aircraft that the security forces eventually might become aware of the event.
And so the deception continues. Rohee announced twenty-one months ago, in January 2011, that “arrangements have commenced” for the formulation of a new five-year Drug Strategy Master Plan, to build on the work that commenced under the Drug Strategy Master Plan 2005-2009. He brazenly repeated the same empty promise, only two months ago in September 2012 that a new drug strategy master plan is being crafted by the government.
This time he told uninformed foreigners that “our country is currently working assiduously to draft a new Drug Strategy Master Plan that would be used to guide our current and future Anti-Narcotics activities.”
The public is fed up with the PPPC’s false promises, failed plans, the rising rate of ‘execution’ murders and the whole bogus war on narcotics-trafficking. This is the reason why the National Assembly expressed its complete lack of confidence in Rohee’s ability to discharge his responsibility for public security. This is the reason why the majority has called on President Donald Ramotar to revoke Rohee’s appointment as the Minister of Home Affairs.

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