Local gun violence

Dec 19, 2012 Editorial

The latest gun-facilitated mass murder by an American – this time of 20 children and six adults in an elementary school, along with his mother – has precipitated the expected recriminations, blame, analyses and calls for increased gun controls in the United States. Because of the power of their gun lobby and the entrenched belief in their constitutionally protected ‘right to bear arms’ not much, if anything, will change.
But lest we in Guyana smirk about ‘gun violence in America” we ought to take a hard look at our own situation.
In fact, the US State Department in its advice to its citizens travelling abroad noted that in 2010 there were “140 murders, 108 shooting incidents, and 143 armed robberies”, warned that “The murder rate in Guyana is three times higher than the murder rate in the United States.” The last figures for 2011 we could find was as of December 28 — 130 persons had been murdered. For the present year the trend appears to be holding constant, as is the increasing number of murders committed with guns.
While the police do not issue figures breaking out the precise method of killings, one can eke out the latter assertion from the ‘execution’ and ‘felony’ murders reported. Murders associated with guns started to spiral upwards in 2002 following the Mash Day “Freedom Five” jailbreak of that year. Before that, there were about 90 murders annually – a rate of about 11.8 per 100,000. In 2002, the toll was 142, with a rate of 18.9 per 100,000 – compared to the US rate of 5 per 100,000. In the following year, the number of murders jumped to a mind-numbing 205 – a rate of 27.3. It would appear that Guyana had now reached a new peak, which showed every sign of escalating in the immediate future, because of the new structural dynamics.
One recent study looked at the development of gangs in Guyana, from the small ad hoc criminal gangs to larger, professional organisations that sprung up to service the trans-shipment of drugs from the Andean sources to northern markets. The latter gangs adopted the ruthless modus operandi of their Latin American counterparts, in which guns and violence are used indiscriminately to settle “business” disputes and to intimidate the authorities. While guns and other weapons are also trafficked along similar routes as drugs, the bulk of the guns are smuggled from Brazil, home to Taurus, an important regional handgun manufacturer.
According to the Guyana Police Force, 61 percent of firearms confiscated in 2008 were manufactured in Brazil. The ‘execution style’ murders attest to work of the gangs and guns.
But the foreign authors of a survey published earlier this year, point to another type of gang – represented in the present era by the “Freedom Five” of 2002, alluded to above, which had an explicitly political motive and as ‘backed by the PNC”. They were the inheritors of a tradition that went back to the sixties when the CIA sponsored local political/labour operatives to overthrow the then PPP government accused of being “communist”. Intermediately, “During President Burnham’s rule, gangs (including ‘kick-down-the-door’ bandits’) were frequently used to intimidate political opponents.”
“With the police unable to stop the killings (of the “political gangs” mayhem) vigilante death squads took it upon themselves to restore order. These ‘phantom squads’, as they became known, targeted, tortured, and executed a number of Afro-Guyanese gang members.” They were explicitly claimed by the Roger Khan criminal drug-smuggling gang, which was linked to the PPP government in sworn US court testimony.
A new stimulus to murder linked with guns has been the boom in gold mining caused by the extraordinary rise in gold prices. This year, there have already been more than two dozen murders and numerous armed robberies in the interior. Because the interior is also the route for the drug-smuggling gangs’ operations, a most combustible mix has been created. The interior has always been poorly policed because of the vast and inhospitable terrain.
The political class, which is part and parcel of this simmering volcano of violence with its nexus to ‘political’ and ‘criminal’ gangs, has to work together to save Guyana.

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