Nightmare at Timehri

Apr 11, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Cocaine in awara; cocaine in fish; cocaine in pumpkin; cocaine in false bottom suitcase; cocaine in lumber; cocaine in coconut milk; cocaine in liquor; cocaine in shoes; cocaine in glue; cocaine in achar; cocaine in pineapple; cocaine in genip; cocaine in scrap iron.
Now we learn about cocaine in cheese rolls and pine tarts. What next? You name it and the cocaine smugglers have tried it. It seems as if any and everything can be used to conceal illegal narcotics.
This is why it is so frightening to even travel. And why travellers have to take extraordinary precautions when going overseas because you never know when someone can slip something… plant something or ask you to carry something and unknown to you those things contain illicit substances.
Many Guyanese have therefore adopted a “no-carry” policy. It does not matter how long or how well they know somebody; it does not matter if that person is a friend or relative, they are not taking anything for anyone in their luggage.
If asked, the answer is a firm “Sorry and No! I am not taking anything for you to give to your friends or relatives overseas. I am not doing that at all.”
This is an understandable policy. The sheer number of drug busts that have occurred through our national airport makes the very thought of passing through that facility a nightmare. You never know what is being moved on the same flight as you. You never know who is sitting next to you and what they can slip into your baggage.
One guy told me that he has stopped taking washroom breaks while in the air. He cannot take the chance unless he is travelling with a member of his household who can keep an eye out for him while he goes to the toilet.
Other persons are cagey about carrying on conversations with strangers, something that many travellers do to help pass the boredom of a long cross-Atlantic journey.
There is one individual who does not travel with any luggage when leaving Guyana. He is so scared of someone planting something in his luggage that he has long decided that whenever he has to travel overseas he does so without any luggage.
This always perplexes the immigration authorities where he disembarks because when he is asked how many pieces of checked luggage he has and answers none, they presume that he is already living in their country and thus he is subject to a great deal of questioning.
He however prefers this grilling as to the purposes of his travel rather than having to go through the anxiety of wondering if someone is going to plant something in his luggage.  He of course has the advantage of getting through the immigration and customs quickly.
Legitimate passengers are scared of travelling out of Guyana. This is bad for tourism. No one has any hassle about travelling into Guyana. No one smuggles cocaine into Guyana on commercial aircraft. However if you visit Guyana you have to leave, and this is where your anxieties begin. Most persons are nervous at the thought of leaving Guyana to return overseas, more so if you are travelling through the Cheddi Jagan International Airport at Timehri.
Guyana will lose out when it comes to tourists, because no one wants to be anxious at the end of their vacation. As such, people are not going to take the hassle of spending their holidays in Guyana. They will go somewhere else because just a few trips a year through our airport, having to look constantly over your shoulder is enough to give anyone a nervous breakdown.
Guyana is also going to have a bad international image if this trend continues. It is not as if drugs are not smuggled through other airports. Definitely drugs leave other Caribbean airports as they do here. The drug trade has wide wings. But I do not believe that anywhere else is there so much ingenuity in the ways in which drugs are trafficked as through our international airport.
Already, the country is paying a huge price for drug trafficking. When western countries learn that a flight is from Guyana, red flags are raised. The immigration authorities are more rigorous in their questioning and the luggage of passengers is subjected to more detailed checks.
This is the price everyone that leaves Guyana pays for the country’s reputation as a major transshipment point for drugs.
With a continued bad image and with a high incidence of drug busts, the airlines are going to demand and implement intensified security checks. This is going to be the straw that will break the camel’s back, because if this happens, persons are going to be body-searched in the most invasive of ways. And this will force commercial air traffic to dry up in Guyana.
This will not be good for the country, and so action needs to be taken to ensure that it is safer and more relaxing for legitimate travellers to pass through the Cheddi Jagan International Airport.

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