“How to beat a red notice: Power, silence and the Vitesh Guptar extradition”

Jan 24, 2026 Letters

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Dear Editor,

When Interpol flags you for “aggravated criminal conspiracy aimed to commit international drug trafficking,” the script is supposed to be simple. The rule‑of‑law state mobilises its best prosecutors, leans on its extradition treaty partners, and makes a public example of its new trophy suspect.

In the case of Vitesh Jamnapersad Guptar, the opposite happened: the man on the red notice walked quietly out of an extradition battle in the Georgetown Magistrates’ Court, while the State barely seemed to break a sweat. The public record is not in dispute. Guptar, a Netherlands national of Guyanese origin, was arrested in 2024 at a Main Street nightclub during what police described as an intelligence‑led operation and was later charged in Georgetown with conspiracy to traffic drugs internationally.

At the same time, Italian authorities – via Interpol – were seeking him on an allegation of mafia‑linked, cross‑border cocaine trafficking, framed in European documents as an aggravated criminal conspiracy connected to ‘Ndrangheta‑style operations. For a brief moment, Guyana appeared at the centre of a textbook transnational organised‑crime saga.

Then the noise stopped. While other extradition matters triggered high‑octane politics, foreign King’s Counsel, and loud ministerial commentary, Guptar’s case slid down the news agenda and, eventually, out of it. Legal commentary and subsequent public debate now acknowledge that he “successfully defeated his extradition proceedings while he was on bail,” a line that has instantly become useful to defence lawyers arguing about bail and due process in newer extradition fights. The State, for its part, has not been associated with any visible, sustained appeal campaign to test the Italian evidence higher up the judicial ladder. This is where the anomalies begin to matter. If the allegations were weak, one would expect the government to say so, loudly, and to celebrate a principled refusal to extradite on the basis of thin foreign material.

Instead, what the public received was silence – no detailed published ruling setting out why the Italian case failed, no robust explanation of how an Interpol red‑notice target could be charged locally, then emerge with both extradition and narrative largely neutralised. In a country where minor offences routinely attract maximum publicity, the absence of explanation in such a serious matter is itself a kind of explanation.

Contrast is instructive. In other matters, particularly those with perceived political or business implications, the State has demonstrated that it knows how to fight. It has flown in foreign counsel, advanced sweeping theories about denying bail in extradition matters, and used public platforms to frame suspects as emblematic of a wider criminal threat. Against that backdrop, the softly lit handling of Guptar looks less like institutional incapacity and more like selective intensity – a justice system that can be ferocious when it wishes, and abstractly procedural when it does not. Overlay this with the question of proximity to power.

Sources have long whispered that Guptar did not move on the margins of Georgetown society but within its inner rings – present at high‑end events, captured in photographs alongside senior political figures, including the president, and resident at elite addresses rather than in the shadows. Publicly available reports place his address at Duke Street, Kingston, a location associated with premium hospitality properties owned by a businessman who also serves as a national security adviser, situating him in the same physical and social ecosystem as some of the most influential actors in the state.

None of this proves interference in his case; what it does is make the State’s passivity more politically consequential. The real issue, then, is not whether one man “got away with it,” but what his case reveals about the architecture of accountability in a petro‑state on the rise. When a suspect linked abroad to mafia‑scale cocaine trafficking can live well, socialise freely, face an extradition request, and then quietly defeat it with minimal public reasoning, ordinary citizens are entitled to ask whether there are, in practice, parallel systems of justice. One is loud, punitive and exemplary; the other is discreet, technical and forgiving, reserved for those who dine and deal within the right circles.

Extradition cases sit at the intersection of sovereignty, diplomacy and crime control, and for that reason alone they should not be decided in near‑secrecy. If the Italian file was flawed, the State should be able to publish, at least in summary, why; if it was not, it should explain why no vigorous appeal was pursued to vindicate Guyana’s stated commitment to fighting transnational narcotics. Until such transparency is offered, the reasonable inference will persist that in Guyana’s justice system it is not simply the law that decides who must face foreign courts – it is the invisible calculus of power, proximity and convenience.

Yours truly,

Hemdutt Kumar

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• criminal conspiracy, drug trafficking, extradition, Hemdutt Kumar, Letters, Vitesh Guptar

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