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It seems that the more we know about Cotton Tree, the less we know

Apr 12, 2021 Letters

Dear Editor,
So, where are we with Cotton Tree? Wherever we are, I believe it’s a bad place, one that reinforces the darkness in this land. As I sense things, it is more than one of those routine unsolved mysteries that the police categorizes as cold cases. It is confirmation of the awful brutalities of first two murders in Cotton Tree, then a third farther afield, and now of a pensioner. Other than for a drink-induced confession, there is only the chilling silence that thickens and lengthens.
It seems that the more we know about Cotton Tree, the less we know. In the sum of our knowing, we know nothing. Everybody has their favorite suspects, yet all we really have are dead and mutilated bodies; and raging passions that spiral from the recollections of gruesome deeds that only grow with the passage of time.
That pensioner felled is the latest exhibition of the fallout that started in Cotton Tree; while time is against us in what I once believed was a race to bring the perpetrators to justice. At the rate that the murders are occurring, we could have a veritable mini murder industry on our hands in Cotton Tree and its wider peripheries.
The president himself made a belated pilgrimage and promises. Still, we are at the same place as before a half year later, which is nowhere. The thinking in some quarters is that the Guyana Police is working with the hand it has. I subscribe to that, and I do not limit myself to merely the abundance, or paucity, of supporting evidence from the traumas. In the context of the Cotton Tree murders, it is my position that the police is in the same place as that of the local EPA.
The police could be of a mind to move more powerfully with what it has, and to get more help from the outside, and to bring matters to a head. But like the EPA, it is a creature of circumstances, and possibly of leadership convenience, group loyalty, and carefully calibrated protection. For emphasis, and so as not to be mistaken, I boldly assert that politics has intervened and influenced.
Editor, when political figures go silent, when leaders seek the shelter of protective distance, when those same leaders maneuver around something as sensitive and stormy as Cotton Tree, then there is no need for subtitles, or Argentinian interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations.
In the broader firmament of grand political intrigues and designs, four murders serve as mere casualties of our ongoing undeclared political wars, the simple arithmetic of leadership neglect, fragile continuity. Murderous violence is now so commonplace, and political deceptions so normalized, that we have become jaded and listless. I detect a nexus between the two on Cotton Tree; it now borders in the wastelands of inconvenient reminders and nuisances. I started out hopeful last year that the nation will get somewhere fairly quickly and conclusively on Cotton Tree. That was then, this is now.
Yours truly,
GHK Lall

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