The Cuyuní Machine-Pt.III   The Price of a Clean Origin

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 The Cuyuní Machine-Pt.III   The Price of a Clean Origin

 OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September,2026       

Washington’s Venezuelan gold rush has produced metal that no refiner will vouch for. Next door sits a gold sector that publishes little, measures less, and already leaks at the border. The Board asks what a clean Guyanese label is now worth.

The Warehouse

Seized from small operators and dressed up as enforcement

Half a year after the first Venezuelan gold was flown into the United States, a great deal of it has not been sold. The New York Times reported on September 28 that gold shipped by the trading house Trafigura, under a deal with Venezuela’s state miner Minerven, sits in storage. Any refiner that takes it must be able to certify, under international rules, that it has not financed gangs, environmental destruction or corruption. According to the NY Times, an executive of Asahi Refining mused at an industry gathering in London about whether his firm wanted to be the first refiner to announce publicly that it was receiving Venezuelan gold.

The NY Times also reported that the gold began moving before Trafigura had engaged an auditor or a risk consultant. Trafigura told the newspaper that its due diligence is ongoing and that its auditor has identified no illegal taxation, extortion or involvement of illegal actors at the sites it buys from. The Board draws no conclusion about Trafigura’s conduct. We draw one about incentives.

The NY Times report does not mention Guyana. It does not need to. It describes a market condition: a large quantity of Venezuelan gold that cannot presently be sold as Venezuelan gold.

The Ninety Percent Problem

The difficulty is not that Venezuela has no legitimate gold. It is that legitimate and illegitimate gold become indistinguishable once melted together. The Times found that at Minerven, whose two industrial mines are fenced and guarded specifically to keep criminality out, brigade miners working on company property hand a share of their output to the Tren de Guayana gang, and that another share goes to Minerven, which melts it with the gold sold to Trafigura. Payrolls seen by the NY Times indicate that Minerven declares only a fraction of the gold it sells.

If the most carefully ring-fenced supply chain in the country cannot keep its origin clean, the informal open-pit sites now being taken up by other investors will not. Julia Yansura of the FACT Coalition told the Times: “Around 90 percent of the gold produced in Venezuela is criminally produced.” In that setting, origin is less a fact about the metal than a fact about the paperwork.

Origin, in this trade, is less a fact than a document.

The Price of a Clean Origin

Gold is fungible; its paperwork is not. A bar a refiner can trace to a licensed, audited mine sells at the market price. A bar it cannot trace sells at a discount, or sits in a warehouse. Wherever that gap exists, someone will be paid to close it, and the cheapest way to close it is not to clean the metal but to change the label: blend it, re-document it, and export it under another jurisdiction’s name. That is among the oldest techniques in illicit gold.

The question for Guyana is whether the label on offer could be a Guyanese one.

Why Guyana Is the Obvious Neighbor

Part One of this series set out what is already on the record. A March 2026 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime found that Guyana has become a gold source into Venezuela, with buyers paying a premium of roughly eight percent, moved along the Lethem–Boa Vista route and settled in part in cryptocurrency. The Cuyuní corridor, meanwhile, is subject to extortion by armed groups. Routes built to carry Guyanese gold into Venezuela are, by their nature, routes that connect the two supply chains. The Board’s question is whether metal or paperwork is moving the other way.

The timing sharpens it. Washington’s Legal Gold and Mining Partnership Act remains pending, and the NY Times reports that Democratic lawmakers have questioned the legality of the Trafigura deal and promised greater oversight if they win control of Congress in November.

If scrutiny of directly imported Venezuelan gold tightens, the incentive to route it through a neighbor with a friendlier label tightens with it.

The Brazilian Warning

Brazil has been here. Its gold problem was never only illegal wildcat mining; it was lawful-looking paperwork. Investigators and researchers there documented permits and “paper” operations used to give illegally extracted gold a legal origin, and in 2023 the country’s Supreme Court suspended the legal presumption of good faith that had allowed buyers to accept a seller’s declaration of origin. The lesson for Guyana is not that Guyana is Brazil. It is that a system which accepts a declaration of origin at face value invites the declaration to be written to order.

The Gap That Makes It Plausible

As Part Two reported, the government’s own organized-crime unit has estimated that about 15,000 troy ounces of gold a week are smuggled out of Guyana across the Suriname border. That is an unrecorded flow of enormous size, and it means the distance between what Guyana mines and what Guyana can prove it mines is already wide. The January 2026 crackdown, including the suspension of 107 Brazilian miners’ licenses, was aimed at a different flow.

Additional metal would not have to be hidden in a sealed system. It would have to be added to one that already leaks.

What This Piece Does Not Say

The Board holds no document showing that Venezuelan gold has been documented as Guyanese gold. The Times reporting establishes the incentive on the Venezuelan side; Part One establishes cross-border flows in the other direction. The link between them is a hypothesis, and this series will treat it as one until records say otherwise. Nor is the question an indictment of Guyana’s licensed dealers or its artisanal miners, most of whom operate lawfully. Part Two cautioned against blunt enforcement that harms them, and that caution stands.

What the Board Demands

The hypothesis can be tested with numbers the State already holds. The Board calls on the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission and the Guyana Gold Board to:

  • Publish monthly declared production and recorded exports, by dealer, from January 2025 to date, so that any change after March 2026 is visible.
  • State whether any export declaration or certificate of origin for Guyanese gold has been queried, refused or flagged by a foreign refiner or buyer since March 2026.
  • State whether the organized-crime unit has examined any overlap between the Suriname smuggling estimate, the Cuyuní flow and gold of Venezuelan origin.
  • Disclose how many suspicious transaction reports gold dealers, as designated reporting entities, have filed since March 2026 on gold of unverified origin.

The 592 Guardian intends to file access-to-information requests on each point and to publish the responses, or the silence. Part Four will test the hypothesis against whatever the numbers show.

— The Board

 

Sources

Anatoly Kurmanaev, Tyler Pager and Rebecca R. Ruiz, The New York Times, September 28, 2026 (Venezuelan gold; Trafigura -Minerven; Heeney Capital-Mercuria; Trafigura and FACT Coalition statements).

Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, March 2026 report on Venezuela’s illicit gold markets, as cited in Part One.

Government organized-crime unit estimate of gold smuggled across the Suriname border, and January 2026 license suspensions, as cited in Part Two.

The Cuyuní Machine, Parts One and Two, The 592 Guardian.

 

 

 

MV Barima: Raise the Vessel Before the Truth Sinks

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  MV Barima: Raise the Vessel Before the Truth Sinks

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

Weeks after bids were opened for the salvage of the MV Barima, Guyanese remain in the dark about who bid, what the operation will cost, when the vessel will be raised and whether the Commission of Inquiry can reach credible conclusions without examining the wreck itself.

The MV Barima is still underwater. But the questions surrounding it are rising rapidly.

Weeks have passed since bids were reportedly opened for the salvage of the vessel, yet the country has not been given a full public account of what has happened since. There has been no adequate disclosure of the bidders, the proposed salvage methods, the cost of the operation, the criteria for evaluating bids, the anticipated date of an award, or the timetable for raising the vessel.

At the same time, the Commission of Inquiry is proceeding. 

That creates a fundamental public-interest concern: how can Guyana be assured of a complete, credible and technically sound investigation if the vessel at the centre of the incident remains submerged and unavailable for proper forensic examination?

The MV  Barima is not merely a wreck to be removed from the water. It may be the most important physical witness in the entire matter.

It may hold evidence about the impact, the point and angle of collision, structural damage, navigational decisions, mechanical condition, communications equipment, safety systems, maintenance failures, crew procedures and whether the official account of events matches what actually happened.

Witnesses can forget. Records can be incomplete. Statements can be self-serving. But physical evidence has a way of contradicting convenient narratives. That is why the recovery of the MV Barima must not be treated as an administrative afterthought while a Commission of Inquiry presses ahead.

 “The vessel is not simply the subject of the inquiry. It may be the inquiry’s most important witness.”

The Public Is Still Waiting

The public has a right to know whether the salvage exercise is being pursued with the urgency, competence and transparency demanded by the seriousness of the incident. The concern is not that a salvage operation requires time. Marine salvage can be complex. Water depth, currents, weather, the vessel’s structural stability, environmental conditions, divers’ safety, equipment availability and the risk of further damage can all affect the pace of recovery.

But complexity is not a license for secrecy.

If there are technical problems, the Government should say so. If the procurement process has encountered difficulties, explain them. If bids were non-compliant, disclose that fact. If a contract has been awarded, identify the contractor, the contract sum, its qualifications, the scope of works, the expected completion date and the safeguards governing preservation of evidence. Silence invites suspicion.

And in a country where procurement controversy, opaque contracting and weak disclosure have become recurring public concerns, the Government should understand that citizens will not be reassured by general statements that “the matter is being handled.”

Handled by whom? Under what process? At what cost? Under what oversight? On what timetable? Those are the questions that matter.

“The Government cannot demand public confidence while withholding the information required to earn it.”

 An Inquiry Without the Wreck?

A Commission of Inquiry has an important role. It can compel evidence, summon witnesses, analyze documentation and make findings regarding responsibility, failures and recommendations for reform. But no inquiry should proceed as if testimony alone is enough.

The Commission must hear from crew members, port authorities, marine officials, vessel operators, technical personnel, witnesses and every agency with responsibility for safety, navigation, maintenance and emergency response. It must examine logs, communication records, maintenance documentation, certifications, crew rosters, navigational records, inspection reports and any available video or electronic data.

Yet none of that should remove the need for the vessel itself to be examined.

A proper investigation must ask whether the physical condition of the MV Barima can corroborate—or undermine—the testimony being presented before the Commission. It must determine what damage the vessel sustained, how that damage occurred, whether there were pre-existing structural issues, whether key equipment was functional and whether the wreck contains material evidence that has not yet been identified.

A Commission that reaches major conclusions before the vessel is raised risks producing an incomplete account. It may hear what people say happened without obtaining all available evidence of what actually happened.

This is not an argument against the Commission. It is an argument for a Commission that gets the full truth.

“An inquiry that cannot examine the central physical evidence risks becoming an inquiry into recollections, not reality.”

 A Procurement Matter and an Evidence Matter

The salvage of the MV Barima is both a procurement issue and an evidentiary issue.

It involves public funds. That means the public has a right to know whether the State is obtaining technical competence and value for money. Salvage contracts can be expensive, highly specialized and vulnerable to cost overruns, variations and delays. A poorly structured contract can leave taxpayers paying more while the vessel remains underwater and evidence deteriorates.

It also involves the preservation of possible evidence. That means the contractor’s competence cannot be measured by price alone.

The selected company must have demonstrated expertise in marine salvage, underwater recovery, wreck stabilisation, environmental protection, vessel handling and evidence preservation. Its work must be governed by a clear protocol that protects the integrity of the wreck and documents every stage of the recovery.

The State should not merely choose the lowest bidder. It must choose the bidder best equipped to perform a sensitive recovery without compromising the investigation

That requires transparent evaluation criteria and independent technical oversight.

If the contractor is selected solely through an opaque process, and the wreck is later damaged, altered or improperly handled during recovery, the country may lose evidence it cannot recover.

“The cheapest salvage operation is not necessarily the best one if it costs Guyana the evidence needed to establish the truth.”

Questions for the Authorities

The agencies and officials responsible should provide prompt, specific answers to the following questions.

To the Procuring Entity and Relevant Ministry

⇒ On what date were bids opened for the MV Barima salvage operation?

⇒ How many bids were received, and which companies, partnerships or consortiums submitted them?

⇒ What were the proposed prices, timelines and technical methods submitted by each bidder?

⇒ What procurement method was used, and under what statutory authority or procurement procedure?

⇒ Has a preferred bidder been identified or a contract awarded?

⇒ If a contract has been awarded, who received it, what is the contract value, what is the duration and what are the principal contractual deliverables?

⇒ If a contract has not been awarded, what specific issue is delaying the evaluation or award?

⇒ What qualifications and documented marine-salvage experience were required of bidders?

⇒ What weight was assigned to price, technical competence, equipment, safety record, environmental safeguards and evidence-preservation capacity?

⇒ Was any independent marine-salvage specialist involved in evaluating the bids?

⇒  Will the full bid-evaluation report, contract award information and eventual contract be publicly released?

⇒What is the projected total cost to taxpayers, including salvage, monitoring, security, technical inspection, transport, storage and environmental mitigation?

⇒ What measures will prevent contract variations, delay claims or unexplained cost escalations?

To the Commission of Inquiry

⇒ Has the Commission formally requested the urgent recovery of the MV Barima?

⇒ Does the Commission regard physical examination of the wreck as necessary to reaching final conclusions?

⇒ Will the Commission defer final findings until the vessel is raised and examined?

⇒ What evidence has been secured from the wreck site while the vessel remains underwater?

⇒ Has the Commission received expert advice on the risks of   deterioration, disturbance or loss of physical evidence over time?

⇒ Will the Commission appoint or retain independent marine engineers, salvage specialists, naval architects and forensic investigators?

⇒ Will the experts who inspect the wreck be independent of the vessel’s owner, operator, regulator, insurer, Government agencies and salvage contractor?

⇒ Will the Commission make the full technical inspection report available to the public?

⇒ Will the Commission revisit witness evidence if physical examination of the vessel reveals contradictions or new facts?

⇒ Will it identify and explain any limitation in its findings caused by the inability to inspect the vessel before hearings conclude?

To the Maritime and Safety Authorities

⇒ What was the certified operational condition of the MV Barima  before the incident?

⇒ When was the vessel last inspected, and by whom?

⇒ Were all required certifications valid at the time?

⇒ What maintenance records, defect reports and repair logs have been secured?

⇒ What navigational, communication and tracking data have been preserved?

⇒ Are there records of radio exchanges, distress calls, bridge communications, engine-room logs or other operational information?

⇒ What emergency-response procedures were activated after the incident?

⇒ Was the wreck site secured immediately to prevent disturbance, unauthorized access, loss of evidence or environmental harm?

⇒ What is the current condition of the vessel, and is there a risk that further deterioration will affect the recovery effort?

The Need for Independent Technical Examination

Once the vessel is raised, Guyana should insist upon an independent examination by suitably qualified professionals.

That examination should include marine engineers, naval architects, collision-reconstruction experts, surveyors, safety specialists and, where necessary, forensic investigators. The experts must not simply be persons selected because they are convenient to the Government or connected to agencies whose performance may itself be under review.

Their mandate should be public and specific. It should include examination of:

⇒ Hull damage, breach points and the direction of impact

⇒ Structural integrity before and after recovery

⇒ Engines, steering systems, propulsion and mechanical equipment

⇒ Navigation, radar, radio and communications systems

⇒ Safety equipment, emergency systems and lifesaving appliances

⇒ Maintenance records, certification history and outstanding defects

⇒ Electronic, navigational and operational data where recoverable

⇒ Any evidence relevant to the cause of the incident and the adequacy of the emergency response

The recovery process should also be documented thoroughly through photographs, video, chain-of-custody records and contemporaneous technical reports.

That is how public confidence is built: not with assurances, but with evidence that can be independently assessed.

“The country does not need another official narrative. It needs an evidence-based account that can withstand scrutiny.”

The Broader Governance Problem

The MV Barima matter is not occurring in isolation. It sits within a wider Guyanese pattern in which large expenditures, strategic projects and controversial public decisions often proceed with limited disclosure and little meaningful opportunity for citizens to test the claims being made in their name.

Guyana is no longer a country that can excuse weak governance by pleading poverty or scarcity. The country now controls unprecedented oil revenues. Public spending is expanding. Infrastructure plans are multiplying. Contracts are becoming larger, more complex and more consequential.

That makes transparency more urgent, not less.

The danger is that “development” becomes a word used to silence questions. Anyone who asks about procurement is accused of opposing progress. Anyone who seeks documentation is portrayed as obstructive. Anyone who demands independent scrutiny is told that Government must be allowed to work.

But scrutiny is not sabotage. Questions are not anti-development. Transparency does not delay progress; it protects progress from waste, corruption, incompetence and political favouritism. Guyana cannot build a durable future on a system where citizens are expected to applaud announcements but are denied the information needed to assess delivery.

“Oil wealth should have produced stronger safeguards, not a culture in which the public is asked to accept less information and more assurances.”

Raise the Vessel. Release the Facts.

The Government must act with urgency, but urgency must mean more than moving hearings forward and issuing occasional statements.

It must mean finalizing the salvage process transparently. It must mean identifying the contractor and publishing the essential terms of the contract. It must mean preserving the wreck as evidence. It must mean ensuring that independent experts examine it. It must mean giving the Commission the material it needs before it reaches final conclusions.

Most importantly, it must mean treating the Guyanese public as entitled to information rather than as spectators expected to wait quietly for official pronouncements

The MV Barima must be raised. The evidence must be secured. The procurement process must be explained.

The Commission must not be allowed to deliver a final report without confronting the question of whether it had access to the central physical evidence.

And every official, agency, operator or contractor found responsible for negligence, incompetence, misconduct or a failure of duty must face meaningful consequences.

Because if the vessel remains below the surface while the inquiry moves ahead above it, Guyanese may be left with a report—but not necessarily the whole truth. The country deserves better than a managed explanation.It deserves the facts.

 

The Patron’s Bargain

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 The Patron’s Bargain

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

What an American critique of Washington’s Venezuela policy tells Guyana about the price of being useful

A publication that sides with the Venezuelan opposition, and wishes America well, has now made the case that Washington’s Venezuela policy is failing on its own terms. The Free Press argues that nearly ten months after American forces seized Nicolás Maduro, Venezuelans remain under the authority of his former deputies, while Washington’s attention has moved to oil and gold. This Board does not adopt the Free Press’s politics. We read it because the critique comes from inside the tent, and because the structure it describes is one Guyana should study before it is asked to live inside it.

What the Free Press Says

The account, which we attribute to the Free Press and have not independently verified, runs as follows. Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, is the de facto leader. She and President Trump have spoken of elections, but neither has offered a date, a plan for a credible vote, or an answer to who will be allowed to run. 

María Corina Machado, the opposition leader, remains in exile; her spokesman says she was refused entry three times last week. Washington holds enormous leverage over Rodríguez, the piece argues, yet has chosen to work with her in pursuit of deals.

The deals are the substance. The Free Press relays reporting by the New York Times that hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Venezuelan gold, mined in areas controlled by gangs and a corrupt military, is sitting in American warehouses because refiners cannot sell gold that funds criminal organizations. It cites Elliott Abrams, Mr. Trump’s first-term point man on Venezuela, for the observation that the administration has not demanded the release of all political prisoners or the return of exiled leaders, and that recovery and democracy have been pushed into an indefinite future. And it reports Mr. Trump telling the UN General Assembly that, to the victor, belong the spoils. The verdict is that the policy is both imperial and inept: investors avoid a country without the rule of law, and contracts signed today may not outlast the President who blessed them.

A patron’s favor tracks usefulness, not legitimacy. A client who forgets this has stopped asking what the favor costs.

Four Lessons for Georgetown

Usefulness outranks legitimacy. On the Free Press’s account, Ms. Rodríguez is protected because she takes instructions, not because Venezuelans chose her. Guyana’s government was elected, and the comparison does not turn on that. It turns on how a patron decides whom to favor. Washington’s criteria are Washington’s own. A government that assumes they coincide with its citizens’ interests has stopped checking.

When the stated purpose is resources, protection is a transaction. Mr. Trump’s spoils remark was made in public. Guyana is an oil state, and Secretary Rubio, standing beside President Ali in Georgetown, pledged consequences if Venezuela attacked Guyana or ExxonMobil. This Board noted then that the sentence protected a commercial asset as well as a border.

Protection from a power that openly names resources as the prize has a price. Guyanese are entitled to know what it is.

Tainted gold needs a clean exit. The Free Press’s point is that Venezuelan gold cannot be sold because its origin is the problem. Guyana is a gold-producing country with a documented smuggling record, which this Board has traced in its Cuyuní Machine series. A stockpile with no legitimate buyer creates an incentive to launder its origin, and export documentation is where origin is written down. We allege nothing here. We say the incentive exists, and that Parts Three and Four of that series test whether the paperwork resists it.

Arrangements outlive attention only if they are law. The Free Press warns that Venezuelan contracts may not survive Mr. Trump’s departure in January 2029, and that Venezuelans will come to resent the country that kept their unelected ruler in place. Both warnings apply at once with regards to Guyana. A framework that never came before the National Assembly, as with the third-country deportee arrangement, or a security memorandum whose data terms have never been disclosed, is fragile precisely because no legislature owns it.      The public will own the consequences without ever having been asked.

What We Are Not Saying

Guyana is not Venezuela, and we do not say otherwise. Its government is elected. The threat to the Essequibo is real, and a small country beside a larger one is entitled to seek strong friends. The Free Press piece is an opinion column, its account of the gold reporting is second-hand, and its endorsement of Ms. Machado is its own position, not ours. Our quarrel is not with engagement. It is with engagement conducted by announcement, where the terms surface after the decision.

The Test

The Free Press gives us a yardstick, and we propose to apply it. For any arrangement with Washington or its agencies, the public is owed the answers to five questions. Who proposed it, and when? What are the terms, including who borrows, who bears the risk, and what must be bought from whom? Was there a competitive process, and if not, under what exemption? Has the National Assembly seen it, and if not, why not? And which named officer answers for it when it fails?

The Board will apply this test to the most recent announcements on American financing and housing as soon as their terms are on the record.

If the answers are good, they can be published in a day. The speed with which an arrangement moves is not evidence of its merit. It is evidence of who is in a hurry, and the public should ask why.

— The Board

Sourcing note: Claims about Venezuela are attributed to the Free Press and to the reporting and commentary it cites (New York Times on gold; Elliott Abrams) and have not been independently verified by this Board. References to Guyana draw on the Board’s prior documentation.

Morons have risen, madness sweeps all over

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOU NTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Morons have risen, madness sweeps all over

OPINION BY: GHK LALL –October 2026

An invitation is extended.  Look around.  Absorb the sweep of the present.  Allow that to take hold.  Turn it over in the mind.  Shiver first.  Then say what has to be said.  It is that worst of palpitating, sweating, paralyzing nightmares.  Invasion of the Morons.  To make matters cripplingly unbearable, there is that horror of horrors: the morons have taken over.  Many heads.  Vast spaces.  Platforms and narratives.  It’s a truly a dreadful time.  Pushing things still higher, it is beyond any hallucination, any old or new nightmare.  It’s the reality of morons at high trajectories.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a moron is a stupid or foolish person.  To which I add, a jackass that thinks its bray is a Mozart Symphony.  They come in different types and stripes.  When the madness takes over, they sport various costumes for color; and to match their masquerades that emphasize how unabashedly and exuberantly moronic they are.  Of all places, the United States has a moron at the senior table, one who drives priorities, their implementation.  

No one from any part of the world needs to take a refresher viewing of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to get a handle (and a chill) of how America has gone to the dogs.  Low ones.  A heavy dose of paranoia and malice provide the fuels.  What other outcome could there be when the way is cleared for a moron to rise and a Palace Guard of likeminded to be recruited, put in uniform, then let loose?  This isn’t no damn tea party.

This sort of development is normal in North Korea and Russia.  A tick could be marked in that box: expectation checked out, proven beyond doubt.  But the same in the good ole USA?  Nah!  No way, Jose.  Sorry xenophobia is an inseparable aspect of the moron’s apparel.  Loud talk.  Live presentations.  An endless stream of rich fodder for Saturday Night Live skits and Jimmy Kimmel spectaculars.  There is another moron caught in the updraft, this time in the always choppy, full-of-hostility Middle East.  It isn’t Teheran and some men whose heads are wrapped in towels.  Those didn’t prove too much of a defense when the bombs started following, and shrapnel flew.  It was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who gave the world that gem of John Bull wisdom: revenge is a dish best served cold.  And from the sky.  Expand the mind.  Imagine the Middle East the home of morons with a special distinction.  Some went to America’s Harvard U.  Perhaps, that’s the source of the sickness, only nobody wants to say it.  I did.  Go ahead!  Plaster me with the label of anti this or anti someone else.  Like Donna Summer insisted, “I will survive.”

Moron invasion and ascendancy in America, Russia, Manchuria, and even in the Holy Land, the sacred hills of Judea and Samaria.  What Jesus refused to slither into armor and seize, is now done under the auspices of peacemaking.  See what I mean about a moronic mentality and with commercials selling its fitness for office!  But the invasion of morons doesn’t stop there.  There is India.  The world’s largest democracy is now the world’s largest madhouse.  Apologies to the Indian Ambassador.  Two hundred million citizens reduced to last caste status, if any.  Others to cockroaches.  From white supremacy to religious supremacy.  Just pointing to the facts, without an iota of malicious intent.  This is frightening.  Now, it gets downright alarming, nothing less than terrorizing.  I cast mine eyes in this direction.  After circumnavigating the globe, a shortcut really, I come homeward bound.

I wish that family could be spared.  But then, frank diagnosis would have to be sacrificed.  This region, this hemisphere, has its share of morons.  Two stand out.  One is from nearby.  Exclude Venezuela.  The other, well the other is unmentionable.  More than a moron.  Think of a creature that crawled from the sewer.  Scales galore.  Sores all over. 

A super moron giving off more than sound. There’s an overpowering stench that causes retching.  I look to the heights.  There’s apprehension: what’s next?

Washington’s Echo Chamber: The Caribbean Must Not Trade Sovereignty for Access

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Washington’s Echo Chamber: The Caribbean Must Not Trade Sovereignty for Access

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

There is a political playbook now taking shape across the Caribbean and Latin America. It is presented in the language of partnership, security, prosperity, technology and collective action. It is wrapped in the vocabulary of fighting transnational crime, defending democracy, strengthening borders, protecting supply chains and resisting external coercion.

But beneath the attractive language lies a question that citizens of Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean must ask without fear or apology:

At what point does cooperation with the United States stop being cooperation and become compliance?

That question became impossible to ignore at the United Nations General Assembly when United States President Donald Trump announced that the world should replace the term “Artificial Intelligence” with “Superintelligence,” or “SI.” The term “artificial,” he argued, made intelligence sound fake. He said the United States would use “Superintelligence” and hoped the rest of the world would follow. 

Then Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar rose and publicly declared: “I want to agree with President Trump.” She endorsed the terminology and said, “We commit to that.”

The issue was never really AI versus SI. The issue was the reflex.

Pres.Trump and PM Bissesar

A prime minister of an independent Caribbean nation had been given a choice: treat an American president’s spontaneous preference as a position to be considered, debated and evaluated—or embrace it immediately before the world. The response sent a message far beyond technology. It suggested that Washington speaks, and Port of Spain echoes. That is not what sovereignty is supposed to look like.

Sovereignty Is Not Ceremony

A country does not become sovereign merely because it possesses a flag, an anthem, a passport, a coat of arms and a seat at the United Nations.

Sovereignty is the practical ability to make independent decisions. It means a government can listen to Washington, Beijing, London, Brussels, Caracas or any other capital, but still arrive at a position because it serves the national interest—not because a powerful country has announced its preference.

A sovereign country can cooperate. It can form alliances. It can seek military assistance, trade access, investment and intelligence support. It can agree with the United States when the facts and interests warrant agreement.

But it must also retain the ability to disagree. That is the test.

The problem is not that Trinidad and Tobago may share a position with the United States. The problem is a public display of uncritical alignment, particularly on an issue where there was no evident domestic policy process, scientific consultation, parliamentary discussion or CARICOM position.

A country that cannot pause before saying “we commit” to an American president’s terminology may eventually find it difficult to pause before committing to his foreign-policy priorities, his sanctions agenda, his security architecture or his geopolitical conflicts.

The Shield and the Strategy

This concern becomes more serious when placed alongside the US-led  Shield of the Americas initiative, launched in 2026 and expanded at the UN General Assembly. Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago are among the governments that have joined this hemispheric framework.

Its language sounds unobjectionable: stronger security, joint action against organized crime, economic resilience and greater cooperation among countries of the Americas.

Who could oppose fighting drug trafficking, firearms smuggling, money laundering, human trafficking, cybercrime and transnational criminal networks? No responsible government should. But citizens must distinguish between genuine crime-fighting cooperation and an arrangement that progressively turns regional governments into instruments for carrying out Washington’s security and diplomatic agenda.

The communiqué adopted under the Shield rests on three pillars:

♦ Economic cooperation.

♦ Security cooperation.

♦ Multilateral coordination.

That third pillar deserves the closest attention.

“Multilateral coordination” sounds harmless. In practice, it can mean that governments which should be independently assessing international questions begin to coordinate positions in the United Nations, the Organization of American States and other international bodies around a US-defined agenda. The danger is not always a formal order from Washington. It is often subtler.

It is the creation of a political environment in which smaller states learn that access, security assurances, investment opportunities and favorable diplomatic attention are connected to proving that they are “reliable” partners. A reliable partner gradually becomes one that does not embarrass Washington, does not challenge Washington and does not depart too far from Washington’s preferred line.

That is how sovereignty can be weakened without a single flag being lowered.

The Security Lever

The Shield of the Americas communiqué envisages coordinated action against 24 groups identified as narco-terrorist or foreign-terrorist threats, including potential sanctions, asset freezes, immigration restrictions and legal action against persons who knowingly provide support It also contemplates using the Organization of American States’ mechanisms under the Rio Treaty, or TIAR, to examine collective action against such groups.

That may sound like a narrowly focused anti-crime initiative. But regional citizens should understand what such a structure can become.

Once governments accept a common security framework, the central question becomes: who defines the threat? Will threats be defined independently by Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, CARICOM and other regional states on the basis of evidence, law and domestic interests? Or will the definition flow primarily from US intelligence assessments, US designations and US geopolitical priorities?

Those are not academic concerns.

Security designations carry consequences. They can affect banking, trade, shipping, investment, travel, insurance, remittances, immigration, digital platforms and cross-border commercial relationships. They can expose domestic companies and individuals to serious legal and financial consequences. They can also draw countries into conflicts whose origins, objectives and ultimate costs have not been fully explained to their own citizens.

Before Guyana signs on to any sanctions-orientated or security-related framework, the public has a right to know:

 ♦ Which organizations are being targeted.

 ♦ What evidence supports the designations.

 ♦ What actions Guyana has agreed to take.

 ♦ Whether Guyanese law authorizes those actions.

 ♦ Whether Parliament has been informed.

 ♦ What obligations are being assumed by Guyana’s police, military, intelligence, financial and immigration agencies.

 ♦ What protections exist for Guyanese citizens, businesses and institutions.

 ♦ What happens if Guyana concludes that a US-backed measure is not in its national interest.

Security cooperation without transparency can easily become security dependence.

Guyana’s Special Vulnerability

Guyana’s situation is more complicated than Trinidad and Tobago’s because Guyana faces a real and continuing threat from Venezuela over the Essequibo region.

That reality cannot be minimized.

Guyana is entitled to seek security partnerships. It is entitled to welcome diplomatic support from the United States. It is entitled to strengthen maritime surveillance, intelligence sharing, border monitoring, cybersecurity, coast-guard capacity and defense readiness. It is entitled to seek support for the protection of its offshore petroleum assets and its territorial integrity.

No sensible Guyanese should demand that the country isolate itself while Venezuela maintains an unlawful claim to more than two-thirds of Guyana’s territory.

But it is precisely because Guyana is vulnerable that Guyana must be careful.

A country facing a security threat can become so anxious for protection that it begins to mistake dependency for partnership. It can become reluctant to take any position that may irritate the power it believes is protecting it. It can become more concerned with demonstrating loyalty than defending policy independence.

That is the danger Guyana must avoid.

The United States may be an important ally in the defense of Guyana’s sovereignty. But Guyana must never allow the defense of its sovereignty against Venezuela to become the justification for surrendering its diplomatic sovereignty to Washington.

That would be a cruel irony: defending Essequibo from external control while allowing Guyana’s foreign policy to become externally managed.

Ali’s Washington Problem

President Irfaan Ali has enthusiastically emphasized Guyana’s expanding relationship with the United States. His government has highlighted deeper US-Guyana security cooperation, praised Trump’s leadership and presented Guyana as a committed partner in Washington’s hemispheric security initiatives.

Again, engagement is not the offense.

Guyana needs friends. It needs allies. It needs partners capable of helping it deter Venezuelan aggression and strengthen national security. The public concern is whether the Government is defining the terms of that relationship or merely accepting terms fashioned elsewhere.

When Guyana signs a US-led communiqué that includes “multilateral coordination,” the Government must explain what that means.

♦ Does Guyana retain its absolute freedom to vote independently at the United Nations?

♦ Can Guyana support Washington on the Essequibo controversy but differ with Washington on Cuba, Palestine, sanctions, trade disputes, climate financing, migration, development policy or relations with China?

♦ Can Guyana take a CARICOM position when that position differs from the United States?

♦ Can Guyana say no to a military, security, sanctions or intelligence proposal that it considers contrary to its law or interests?

♦ Or has Georgetown accepted the idea that being a “good partner” requires keeping step with Washington on every major issue?

Those questions cannot be dismissed as anti-American. They are pro-Guyana questions.

Partnership Is Not Obedience

A mature relationship between states is not built on obedience. It is built on clarity, reciprocity and mutual respect.

Guyana can say to Washington:

♦ “We value your support for Guyana’s territorial integrity.”

♦ “We welcome intelligence and security cooperation against shared threats.”

♦ “We will work with you against narcotics trafficking, illegal arms, money laundering and organised crime.”

♦ “We will defend democracy, international law and the right of states to live free from external aggression.”

But Guyana must also be able to say:

♦ “We will make our own decisions.”

♦ “We will not adopt every US priority as Guyana’s priority.”

♦ “We will not join conflicts without a clear Guyanese interest.”

♦ “We will not treat regional consultation as a replacement for Guyana’s independent judgment.”

♦ “We will not use national security as an excuse to avoid parliamentary scrutiny.”

♦ “We will not allow security cooperation to compromise the country’s non-negotiable right to think, speak and vote for itself.”

That is what equal partnership sounds like.

CARICOM Must Not Be Reduced

The Caribbean’s strength has always rested on its ability to act collectively while maintaining an independent voice. CARICOM countries are small, but they are not insignificant. They have moral authority, diplomatic experience and a long record of defending international law, decolonization, peace, climate justice and the rights of small states.

Guyana has historically been part of that tradition. 

♦ It is inconsistent for Guyana to demand respect for international law in the Essequibo controversy, then become silent when the same international-law principles are inconvenient for a powerful ally.

♦ It is inconsistent to argue that small states must not be bullied by larger powers, then allow Guyana’s positions to be moulded by the expectations of the hemisphere’s dominant power.

♦ It is inconsistent to call for a stronger multilateral system while joining arrangements that may reduce multilateral consultation to coordination behind Washington’s lead.

Guyana must work with the United States. But it must also work through CARICOM, the Commonwealth, the United Nations and the wider Global South. Its foreign policy cannot be reduced to a single axis.

Parliament and the Public

The Shield of the Americas communiqué may not itself be a binding treaty. It is described as a declaration of intention, not a ratified agreement that automatically creates enforceable legal duties.

But non-binding documents often become the foundation for binding actions.

They can lead to intelligence-sharing protocols, sanctions measures, policing agreements, military cooperation, financial restrictions, technology contracts, data-sharing arrangements, diplomatic commitments and OAS resolutions. The public may only discover the full implications after political commitments have already been made.

That is why Parliament must not be treated as an afterthought.

The Government of Guyana should place before the National Assembly:

 ♦ The complete communiqué and every annex, protocol and side agreement connected to Guyana’s participation.

 ♦ A list of the 24 groups referred to in the security component.

 ♦ A legal opinion on Guyana’s obligations and discretion under the arrangement.

 ♦ The financial, operational and staffing commitments required of Guyanese agencies.

 ♦ The terms governing intelligence sharing and personal-data protections.

 ♦ A statement of whether US personnel, equipment or operational assets will be stationed or deployed in Guyana.

♦ A clear explanation of how Guyana will preserve independent voting and diplomatic positions in international forums.

♦ The procedures through which Guyana may decline, amend or withdraw from proposed joint actions.

The public cannot defend national sovereignty if it is denied the information required to understand what has been agreed in its name.

The Real Playbook

The public should understand the playbook. 

♦ First comes the language of shared values: democracy, security, freedom, prosperity and sovereignty.

♦ Then comes the language of common threats: criminal networks, drugs, arms trafficking, hostile states, cyberattacks and foreign influence.

♦ Then comes the invitation to coordinate: intelligence-sharing, sanctions, border initiatives, digital standards, investment screening and common diplomatic positions.

♦ Then comes the expectation of political alignment: support the designation, vote for the resolution, adopt the terminology, repeat the talking point, endorse the priority and demonstrate reliability.

♦ Finally, independent disagreement begins to look like disloyalty.

That is how smaller states can be absorbed into the geopolitical agenda of a larger power—not necessarily through invasion, formal colonialism or public coercion, but through institutional habits, elite relationships, security dependence and the gradual normalization of agreement.

The result is an echo chamber. Washington speaks. Regional governments repeat. Citizens are told it is partnership.

 Guyana Must Speak for Guyana

The question is not whether Guyana should have relations with the United States. Of course it should. The question is whether Guyana will have a foreign policy of its own.

A country defending itself against Venezuela must be especially vigilant not to become overly dependent on any single foreign power. It needs strong friends, but it also needs options. It needs security support, but it needs constitutional accountability. It needs diplomatic partnerships, but it needs the confidence to disagree.

President Ali must therefore make clear that Guyana’s participation in the Shield of the Americas does not mean automatic alignment with Washington on foreign policy, sanctions, military action or UN voting.

♦ Guyana must cooperate where cooperation serves Guyana.

♦ Guyana must resist where resistance serves Guyana.

♦ Guyana must consult with its CARICOM neighbors before allowing foreign powers to shape the region’s collective agenda.

♦ And Guyana must remember that sovereignty is not measured by how loudly a government praises an ally. It is measured by whether, when the moment comes, that government can say:

Washington has spoken. Now Guyana will speak for Guyana.

 

The Commissioner Answers to the Court

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 The Commissioner Answers to the Court

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

This is a consequential ruling because it does more than settle a dispute between Christopher Ram and the Commissioner of Information. It begins to restore a legal mechanism that successive administrations allowed to lie dormant for fourteen years.

For fourteen years, Guyana’s Access to Information Act 2011 sat on the statute book like an unopened letter: enacted, available, and ignored by the very institutions meant to give it life. The promise was clear enough. Citizens would have a lawful avenue to seek records held by the State; public authorities would have duties to respond; and Parliament would receive annual reports showing whether the system was working. 

In practice, however, the law became an ornament. The office established to advance access to information produced no visible culture of disclosure. Ministries remained accustomed to silence. Annual reports required by law were not laid before the National Assembly. Citizens seeking records encountered delay, deflection, or refusal.

This week, Justice Nicola Pierre opened that long-neglected statute, read its plain words, and delivered a judgment of importance to every Guyanese who has ever been told that public information is unavailable, inconvenient, confidential by habit, or simply not the business of the public.

Her findings are direct. The Commissioner of Information is a “public authority” within the meaning of section 2 of the Act. He is therefore subject to the same statutory obligations of openness and accountability that the law imposes on other bodies holding public records.

That point should never have required litigation. Yet it did.

The Commissioner had sought to send applicant Christopher Ram back to the ministries or agencies believed to hold the documents, effectively arguing that Mr. Ram first needed a refusal from the original record-holder before he could approach the Commissioner. Justice Pierre rejected that position. The Act contains no such precondition. A citizen does not have to run a bureaucratic obstacle course before invoking the law.

The ruling matters because bureaucracies often make rights inaccessible not by repealing them, but by adding hurdles that Parliament never enacted. They require the wrong form, the wrong office, the wrong sequence, or an unofficial preliminary refusal. Every such invented condition turns a legal right into a favour granted at administrative discretion.

Justice Pierre has now made clear that the Commissioner cannot manufacture a barrier that the law does not contain.

The Reporting Duty Ignored

The judgment also addresses an issue that goes to the heart of whether the Access to Information Act has been functioning at all. Section 44 requires an annual report to be prepared on the operation of the Act and laid before the National Assembly. That report is not optional. It is not a public-relations exercise. It is the accountability mechanism Parliament built into the legislation.

Through such reports, Parliament and the public should have been able to see how many information requests were made, which agencies complied, where delays occurred, what exemptions were invoked, what appeals or complaints arose, and whether the system was expanding or failing.

Instead, not one such report has reached the National Assembly.

Mr. Ram’s request for these reports was dismissed by the Commissioner as an “absurdity” and an invitation to “self-oversee.” But the court correctly recognized the request for what it was: a request for existing records relating to the administration of a statute. The Commissioner was not asked to invent a document. He was asked to account for documents the law already required.

That distinction is fundamental. A public officer cannot evade a disclosure request by disparaging the purpose of the request or by treating a statutory obligation as though it were an unreasonable personal demand.

If no reports exist, that fact itself demands explanation. If reports were prepared but not tabled, the public is entitled to know who withheld them, why they were withheld, and whether the Minister responsible took any step to ensure compliance.

A Troubling Finding on Candour

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Justice Pierre’s ruling is her finding concerning the Commissioner’s candour about whether he had received the requests.

The judge described the situation as “particularly ironic and lamentable” in proceedings concerned with access to information. That language deserves close attention. Courts do not lightly comment on the candour of a public official. When they do, it reflects a serious concern about the reliability of the explanation offered.

The irony is stark. The official entrusted with facilitating access to public records was unable, or unwilling, to give a clear and straightforward account to the court about requests made to his own office.

Access to information depends on more than legislation. It depends on public officers keeping records, acknowledging correspondence, providing reasons, meeting deadlines, and acting honestly when challenged. An information regime cannot function where silence is routine and accountability must be extracted through litigation.

The Commissioner’s office ought to set the standard for administrative transparency. Instead, it has now become the subject of a court order compelling it to do what the law required all along.

What the Court Ordered

It is important to state exactly what the ruling does and does not accomplish.

Justice Pierre did not order immediate disclosure of every record sought. The court ordered the Commissioner to process and determine Mr. Ram’s three requests within sixty days. One of those requests concerns the taxes the Government pays on behalf of ExxonMobil and its partners—a matter of substantial public interest in a country whose oil revenues, fiscal arrangements, and petroleum concessions affect every household and future generation.

The Commissioner must now make a lawful decision. If he grants access, the documents should be disclosed in accordance with the Act. If he refuses access, or says that the records cannot be located after a thorough and diligent search, section 23 requires him to provide written reasons and to notify the applicant of the right to return to the High Court.

That is the next test.

A decision cannot be a vague letter, an oral explanation, or another exercise in administrative avoidance. It must identify the legal basis for any refusal. It must explain whether records exist, where they were searched for, what exemption is being relied upon, and why that exemption applies. The public is entitled to reasons, not reflexes.

The sixty-day period is therefore not a courtesy. It is a judicially reinforced deadline. The Commissioner must now demonstrate whether his office can perform the basic functions for which it has been publicly funded.

Government Must Explain Its Silence

The failure of the Access to Information Act is not the Commissioner’s failure alone. It is a Government failure.

Year after year, public funds have been allocated to an office connected to the administration of access-to-information law. Yet year after year, the mandatory annual reports were not laid before Parliament. This year’s budget again voted funds, but the public has heard no adequate explanation for why the central reporting requirement in section 44 went unmet for more than a decade.

That silence cannot continue.

A Minister answerable to the National Assembly for this statutory scheme must explain why Parliament was denied the reports the law required. Was the Commissioner instructed to prepare them? Were they prepared? Were they submitted to the responsible Minister? Were they rejected, delayed, misplaced, or ignored? What money was allocated, how was it spent, what staff and systems were in place, and what measurable work did the office perform?

These are not partisan questions. They are elementary questions of public administration.

Guyana cannot claim to embrace transparency while allowing a transparency law to remain dormant for fourteen years. Nor can it celebrate oil wealth and national development while citizens are forced into court merely to establish that the official responsible for information is himself subject to the Act.

A Precedent for Every Citizen

Christopher Ram deserves credit for taking the matter beyond protest and into the courtroom. Where public complaint had failed to awaken the system, litigation has now produced a binding judicial clarification.

He has secured more than a personal victory. He has established a working precedent for every Guyanese journalist, researcher, community group, taxpayer, trade unionist, student, civil-society organization, and ordinary citizen seeking to know how public power is exercised and how public money is spent.

The Commissioner is reachable. He is bound by the Act. He is answerable to the court.

That principle may seem obvious, but in Guyana it has had to be fought for. It is a first step toward converting access to information from a slogan into an enforceable civic right.

The importance of this moment lies not only in the records Mr. Ram seeks. It lies in what can follow: questions about contracts, tax concessions, environmental approvals, procurement awards, state lands, public spending, policy decisions, audits, regulatory enforcement, and the management of the country’s natural wealth.

A functioning access-to-information system changes the balance of power. It reduces the ability of officials to govern through secrecy. It equips citizens and journalists to test official claims against records. It gives Parliament, the courts, and the public a stronger basis on which to demand accountability.

The Demands Are the Law

The demands now before the Commissioner and the Government are neither radical nor unreasonable. They are obligations already written into Guyana’s law:

⇒ Determinations on all three of Mr. Ram’s requests within sixty days, with written reasons for every refusal or claim that records cannot be found.

⇒ The preparation and laying before the National Assembly of the overdue section 44 annual reports.

⇒ A full public account from the responsible Minister explaining why those reports were never tabled.

⇒ Clear disclosure of the resources allocated to the Commissioner’s office, the work performed, and the measures now being taken to ensure compliance with the Act.

⇒ A public, accessible process through which citizens can make requests, receive acknowledgements, track deadlines, and challenge refusals.

The court has opened the door. The Commissioner must now walk through it, and the Government must stop pretending that an enacted law can be ignored without consequence.

This judgment will mean little if it is read once, applauded briefly, and shelved beside the Act itself. The real measure of its significance will be found in the next sixty days: in the quality of the Commissioner’s decisions, in the candour of the Government’s explanations, and in whether Parliament finally receives the reports it was legally entitled to receive years ago.

For the first time in a long time, Guyanese have gained real ground in the struggle to obtain information from those who govern in their name. That ground must now be defended, widened, and used. The clock is running. We will publish the count.

— The Board

 

When Deportation Comes Home

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 When Deportation Comes Home

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

Paul LePage built much of his political identity on a hard-line view of immigration. As Maine’s governor, he helped normalize the language of suspicion—casting migrants as burdens, outsiders, and threats to public resources. He now tells voters that he supports “legal, but not illegal, immigration.”

Then the machinery he applauded came close to his own family.

LePage says his son’s father-in-law has a work permit, is in the United States legally, and is nonetheless facing deportation. He says the man is being removed because he comes from a country disliked by people in Washington. “That’s not right,” LePage declared. No, it is not 

But that is precisely the point many immigrant families have been making for years—often without a microphone, a campaign platform, or the political influence of a former governor running for Congress.

For too long, immigration has been discussed as an abstraction: “illegals,” “criminal aliens,” “the border,” “the invasion.” Such language is useful to politicians because it erases people. It turns parents, workers, students, spouses, caregivers, and longtime neighbors into a faceless problem to be solved by raids, detention centers, deportation flights, and armed agents.

LePage’s family connection has momentarily exposed the lie beneath the slogan.

A work permit does not guarantee safety. A person can be authorized to work, pay taxes, raise a family, obey the law, and contribute to a community—and still be rendered deportable by a change in policy, the withdrawal of a humanitarian protection, or the cold discretion of an immigration bureaucracy. In today’s America, “legal” status can be fragile, temporary, and politically contingent.

That should trouble everyone.

The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration has long been deployed as a moral shortcut. It allows politicians to claim compassion while backing policies that cause fear and instability in immigrant communities. But immigration law is not a clean moral ledger. It is a maze of expiring permissions, pending applications, work authorizations, asylum claims, humanitarian protections, and bureaucratic delays. A person’s life can be upended not because he committed a violent crime, but because Washington changed the rules.

LePage now says enforcement should focus on gang members and serious criminals. That is a more defensible position than indiscriminate deportation. Yet it raises an unavoidable question: where was this concern when his own politics helped cultivate an atmosphere in which immigrant communities were broadly treated as suspect?

The painful truth is that mass enforcement does not remain neatly confined to the villains politicians invoke at rallies. It does not stop at the gang member or the violent offender. It reaches the father with a work permit. The grandmother who has lived in America for decades. The asylum seeker awaiting a hearing. The worker driving to a job. The young man who becomes a name in a news report after an encounter with armed immigration agents ends in death.

In Maine, the killing of Colombian immigrant Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero by an ICE agent has shaken the public conscience. A 25-year-old man is dead. Questions persist about the circumstances of the operation, whether he was even the intended target, whether deadly force was necessary, and whether the public will ever receive a full and credible accounting.

That is the danger of an enforcement culture that treats immigration control as a license for escalation.

The rule of law does not mean that government may do whatever it wishes in the name of law enforcement. The rule of law means that government itself is bound by law—by due process, judicial orders, constitutional rights, limits on force, and the principle that no agency is beyond scrutiny.

When judges warn that immigration authorities are disregarding court orders, the danger is larger than immigration policy. It is a warning about executive power. A government agency that can ignore a judge, deport a person despite credible claims of danger, punish dissent, or operate without meaningful transparency is not protecting the rule of law. It is eroding it.

And the moral issue cannot be avoided.

No country is strengthened by humiliating vulnerable people. No democracy is made safer by treating human beings as cargo for third-country detention schemes, as statistics for political speeches, or as expendable targets in an enforcement campaign.

A nation that prides itself on liberty cannot selectively apply dignity only to those who possess the right passport, the right accent, the right political connection, or the right family tie.

LePage’s appeal for his relative should be heard. But it should not be heard only because it comes from Paul LePage.

It should be heard because every immigrant family deserves the same consideration: an individualized hearing, respect for due process, protection from arbitrary state power, and recognition that a person’s worth is not erased by an immigration file.

The real test is not whether political leaders can find compassion when deportation knocks on their own door. The real test is whether they can show that compassion before it does.

Global Moral Voices, Local Silence?: The Diaspora Intellectual’s Dilemma.

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Global Moral Voices, Local Silence?: The Diaspora Intellectual’s Dilemma.

 OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan, the Guyanese scholar and former United Nations human-rights leader, has rightly raised alarm over the danger of Guyana being seen internationally as tolerant of Holocaust denial. But where is that same urgency when his own people are subjected to continuing -unhinged dehumanization at home—through official indifference, unequal treatment, avoidable hardship, and a political culture that too often treats ordinary Guyanese lives as expendable?  Is this a principled defense of human dignity everywhere, or a selective morality reserved for international stages and distant atrocities while the suffering of his own kin receives far less sustained attention? A human-rights conscience cannot be activated only when Guyana’s global image is at stake. It must be equally present when Guyanese dignity, safety, justice and humanity are being eroded in Guyana itself.

Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan is right to condemn Holocaust denial in a state-owned newspaper. There can be no moral ambiguity on that question: the Holocaust is historically documented, its victims deserve dignity, and a government-owned publication should not normalize antisemitic distortions behind the shield of a disclaimer.

But Ramcharan’s intervention also invites an uncomfortable question: where has this same urgency been when Guyanese people have faced their own modern-day catalogue of official indifference?

This is not to diminish his scholarship or deny the value of his warning. It is to insist that moral authority carries obligations close to home. Dr. Ramcharan is not an ordinary commentator. He is a Guyanese of international standing, a former acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a former Chancellor of the University of Guyana, and a scholar whose career has been built around human dignity, international law and the protection of rights.

That is precisely why the public is entitled to expect more than occasional interventions on Guyana’s domestic condition.

Selective moral urgency

Too often, Ramcharan’s writings appear more animated by global historical debates, international personalities and grand geopolitical questions than by the sustained, grinding realities facing ordinary Guyanese: grieving families, poverty amid oil wealth, institutional impunity, unequal access to state resources, abuse of public power, and the persistent feeling that the citizen exists only at election time.

Guyana does not lack “live” human-rights issues. They are all around us:

◊Families seeking justice after deaths connected to state failures or public negligence.

◊Citizens humiliated by weak public services while politically connected interests appear to prosper.

◊Communities struggling with the consequences of mining, environmental degradation, land insecurity and unequal development.

◊Public funds being spent amid recurring questions about transparency, procurement, priorities and accountability.

◊Victims of crime, domestic violence, police excesses, discrimination and bureaucratic cruelty who rarely receive the sustained advocacy that influential voices can provide.

The issue is not that Ramcharan must write only about Guyana. No serious person should demand that an international human-rights scholar ignore international questions. The problem is proportion and consistency.

A scholar who finds the voice to warn of Guyana’s reputational damage abroad should also be equally relentless about the damage being done to Guyanese lives at home.

The lived reality

What does it say when six Guyanese lives can be met with a proposed or offered compensation package of $5 million, as though loss, grief and human worth can be reduced to an administrative calculation?

What does it say when people see oil wealth rising, new announcements multiplying, and foreign investors being courted, while many citizens still confront inadequate roads, weak health care, poor drainage, job insecurity, low wages and a public sector that can feel inaccessible unless one has political connections?

These are not abstract governance concerns. They are the lived reality of Ramcharan’s own people—his kin in the broadest national sense.

A human-rights voice must not become most forceful only when the victims are distant, historical, international or diplomatically convenient.

The measure of human-rights commitment is not merely whether one can eloquently defend victims of Nazi atrocity eight decades later. It is whether one is prepared to challenge the powerful when present-day Guyanese are being neglected, dismissed, impoverished, intimidated or treated as expendable.

A challenge to Ramcharan

Dr. Ramcharan should not be asked to retreat from the Holocaust-denial issue. He should press it harder. The Guyana Chronicle must answer for how such material was published, why it was repeated, who approved it, and whether its editorial standards apply equally to all contributors.

But he should also widen his gaze. Guyana needs his voice on:

◊The adequacy and dignity of compensation for families who lose loved ones through institutional failure.

◊The accountability of public officials and state agencies.

◊Whether oil wealth is being translated into measurable improvements in ordinary people’s lives.

◊The protection of vulnerable communities against environmental harm and unequal development.

◊The culture of impunity, political favoritism and public contempt that citizens say has taken root.

◊The duty of a government to treat every Guyanese life as possessing equal worth.

Ramcharan himself has recently raised domestic governance questions, including concerns relating to legal and institutional arrangements in Guyana.  But the scale of Guyana’s current social and governance crisis demands something more sustained, more specific and more personally rooted than intermittent commentary.

The real warning

The danger to Guyana’s international image is not confined to an offensive column in the Chronicle. The deeper danger is a government culture that seems unable to understand the pain of ordinary people, and a national intellectual class that too often responds selectively, cautiously or after the damage has already been done.

Holocaust denial must be condemned without qualification. But so too must the quieter denial taking place in Guyana: the denial of citizens’ suffering, the denial of their right to accountable government, and the denial that national wealth must first serve the people whose resources created it.

Diaspora intellectuals have a legitimate and potentially vital role in Guyanese public life—but legitimacy must be earned through humility, consistency, evidence and solidarity with people living the consequences of political decisions every day. They must be more than overseas commentators summoned for prestige, remittances, investment and public relations.

The Ramcharan question

In Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan’s case, his international human-rights background gives special weight to his public interventions. His criticism of Holocaust denial in a government-owned newspaper is justified; such material can damage Guyana’s moral standing and must be repudiated.

But that same standing raises the public expectation that his concern for human dignity will be equally visible when Guyanese confront injustice at home. A diaspora intellectual cannot be satisfied merely with identifying a scandal that could embarrass Guyana internationally. He must also confront the domestic conditions—official indifference, impunity, weak accountability and unequal treatment;that injure Guyanese long before foreign observers take notice.

Guyana needs diaspora intellectuals who are neither cheerleaders nor detached moralists. It needs engaged citizens: people prepared to place expertise in the service of truth, insist that oil wealth serves the population, and stand with ordinary Guyanese even when doing so brings discomfort to governments, parties, friends and influential institutions.

Dr. Ramcharan has spoken powerfully about the dignity of victims abroad. Guyanese now need him to speak with the same persistence, clarity and moral impatience about the dignity of victims at home.

A Portal Before a Protector

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

A Portal Before a Protector

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026

Guyana’s all-online passport appointment system, which becomes the only way to apply from October 1, has been welcomed in a recent editorial as “a big and welcome step forward.” The editorial is right about the queues. It is silent about the law.

It lists the legal groundwork for the digital state: the Digital Identity Card Act, in full force since March 2026, and “legislation on data protection.” It does not say that the Data Protection Act, passed in August 2023 alongside the e-ID law, has never been shown to have been commenced. That omission carries the weight of the whole argument.

What the record shows

The Digital Identity Card Act was brought into operation by a commencement order from Prime Minister Mark Phillips, published in the Official Gazette on March 26 and effective March 31. Demerara Waves reported the same day that the Data Protection Act had not been so commenced. Attorney-at-law Brenden Glasford, writing in Sidebar Guyana, argued that the two laws are “intrinsically linked” and that failing to commence the Data Protection Act affects the legality of the Digital Identity Card Act.

The government has not disputed the linkage. It has conceded the gap. The Prime Minister said the state is working to establish the mechanisms to bring the Data Protection Act into full effect, and promised that private and personal data would be requested only once it is. Data Protection Commissioner Aneal Giddings, in a May 15 piece published by the Guyana Chronicle and Kaieteur News, wrote that the government “is working to establish the necessary mechanisms to bring the Data Protection Act into full effect.” In the same piece he wrote that Guyana has a Data Protection Act that is “the law of the land,” and that his office is still “in the process of formally establishing the Data Protection Office.”

Both statements cannot describe the same fully operating regime. An Act that is the law of the land yet not in full effect is an Act on paper.

A Commissioner without an office

To be fair, a Commissioner exists. The Prime Minister told the National Assembly he was appointed on January 2. But the Commissioner is also the administrator of the Digital Identity Registry and the exclusive issuer of the cards, by his own account.

The office that runs the system is the office offered as its independent overseer. Independence does not describe an official who is both operator and regulator.

Mr Giddings lists purpose limitation, data minimization, restrictions on automated decision-making and independent oversight as protections “built into the architecture of the act.” Every one is a provision of a statute he says is still being brought into effect. A citizen cannot enforce a right that exists only in un-commenced text.

Why this matters on October 1

The Attorney General’s assurance for the e-ID was that only basic data already held by the state would be collected until the Data Protection Act operates. That was the government’s own admission that collecting more, without the Act, would be unsafe. The passport system, and the integrated portal the editorial praises, is the point at which that standard must be shown to hold. The editorial itself imagines a single framework through which citizens reach passports, driver’s licences, registry documents and tax services.

Integration multiplies the harm when safeguards are missing. A single breach or misuse would expose everything at once.

The editorial warns citizens about fake websites and urges the government to keep security measures in step. It names no enforcement body, no audit, no penalty and no complaint route. The warning places the burden on the citizen, while the state’s duties go unmentioned.

Questions the state must answer

We put these to the Prime Minister’s office and to the Data Protection Commissioner, and we will publish the answers, or the silence.

  1. Has a commencement order for the Data Protection Act been issued? If so, on what date, and where was it gazetted? If not, when will it be?
  2. If the Act has not been commenced, under what statutory authority is the Commissioner acting?
  3. Is the Data Protection Office established? Where is it, and how can a citizen contact it? Is there a phone number, a website and a complaint mechanism?
  4. Who is the data controller for the passport appointment platform, and what data does it collect? How long is it retained, who can access it, and is any of it shared across agencies or with foreign governments?
  5. Who audits access to this data, and what is a citizen’s remedy if it is misused or breached? Is there a duty to notify affected persons?
  6. Where is the platform hosted, and under what contract with which vendor?
  7. If the Act is not in force on October 1, what legal recourse does a citizen have?
  8. How does the Commissioner reconcile administering the Registry with the independent oversight the Act promises?

The standard

We do not oppose digital services. We oppose the sequence. A protector should come before a portal. The editorial that celebrates the removal of a queue should have asked what stands behind the screen when a citizen surrenders identity data to the state.

Efficiency without recourse is not reform. Until the Act is shown to be in force and the Office is open, every applicant is trusting the state’s word alone.

Digital government must not become a system in which citizens are compelled to give up control over their personal data simply because essential public services have been placed online. A passport is not optional. If an online procedure becomes mandatory, the State bears an even higher duty to ensure that every applicant has legal protection, clear information and meaningful recourse.

The test of Guyana’s digital transformation is not whether government can compel citizens to use a website. The test is whether the State has built the institutions, laws, safeguards and accountability mechanisms that make digital services safe and trustworthy.

Until those safeguards are visibly and legally in place, the rush toward compulsory online public services risks becoming not modernization, but digitized vulnerability.

 

 

 

Grief Is Not a Government Bargain

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Grief Is Not a Government Bargain: The MV Barima Families Must Not Be Pressured Into Silence

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026

As reported in Kiskadee Watch in Sept 29 ,Leon Murray of Mabaruma was asked to accept $5 million for the loss of six relatives in the MV Barima catastrophe.

Six human beings. Six members of one family. Six lives abruptly taken in a maritime disaster that should trigger the highest level of national urgency, compassion, transparency and accountability.

Yet what Mr. Murray describes is an offer that works out to roughly $833,333 per life.

That is not a serious expression of national remorse. It is not justice. It is not an adequate response from a government presiding over an oil-rich country that repeatedly boasts of unprecedented revenues, transformational development and a brighter future for all Guyanese.

It is an insult to grief. 

Mr. Murray’s reported refusal deserves to be understood for what it is: a declaration that the relatives of the dead and missing are not seeking a quick payment in exchange for their silence, their legal rights, or their demand to know why their loved ones were placed in harm’s way.

“I am looking for justice,” he reportedly said.

That is the central issue. Not whether a government can put a figure beside a tragedy. Not whether lawyers can produce documents for traumatized families to sign. Not whether an official can characterize a settlement as assistance, relief or compassion. The issue is justice.

A Release Cannot Replace Accountability

Every bereaved family has the right to receive independent legal advice before signing any document that may compromise future claims or release the State, its agencies, operators, insurers or any other potentially liable party from legal responsibility. This is elementary fairness.

A family that has lost a breadwinner, a child, a parent, a sibling or several relatives at once must not be confronted with settlement papers while it is still grieving, while bodies remain unrecovered, while the vessel remains on the seabed, and while fundamental questions about safety, licensing, capacity, oversight, emergency readiness and regulatory failure remain unanswered.

The reported concern expressed by Paul  Seepersad’s- “the MV Barima chief engineer”-family is therefore entirely legitimate. They have said they do not want to sign away their rights. No reasonable person should fault them for that.

Indeed, relatives should be cautious of any agreement that requires them to accept a sum as “full and final settlement,” waive future legal action, or surrender their ability to seek further compensation if evidence later establishes negligence, misconduct or regulatory failure.

A compassionate government would ensure that every family is provided access to independent counsel of its own choosing, with the legal costs covered separately and without any condition requiring a family to accept a settlement.

Instead, the public is hearing reports that evoke the same anxiety and distrust that followed the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory fire: grieving families being asked to sign documents while serious questions of accountability remain unresolved. The circumstances may differ, but the concern is painfully familiar. Families fear that the State’s priority is not truth, justice and responsibility, but closure on terms designed by the State.

Oil Wealth, Yet Pennies for the Dead

Guyana is no longer a poor country pleading incapacity. This nation has entered an era of massive oil revenues. Government ministers speak constantly about prosperity, modern infrastructure, new highways, hospitals, hotels, stadiums and grand development schemes.

But when ordinary citizens die in a preventable or potentially preventable national disaster, their relatives are reportedly offered  $5  million to bring an end to the matter.

What, exactly, does the Government believe a Guyanese life is worth?

More importantly, what message does this send to citizens in the hinterland and riverine communities who depend on boats and ferries because there are no practical alternatives? Does it say that their lives matter equally? Or does it say that, once tragedy strikes, their families can be processed through a bureaucratic settlement exercise and expected to be grateful?

The loss of a relative cannot be reduced to a calculation. But compensation must at least reflect the gravity of the loss, the dependency created, the long-term impact on children and elderly parents, lost income, funeral costs, counselling, education, housing, medical needs and the possibility that negligence contributed to the tragedy.

In Mr. Murray’s case, the loss of six relatives may have devastated an entire family network. It may have removed income earners, caregivers, parents, children and the emotional foundation of a household.

To propose one $5  million payment for all six, if that account is accurate, reflects an astonishing absence of empathy and an even more disturbing casualness about human life.

Do Not Discourage Independent Counsel

The Government must also answer concerns about public comments attributed to the Attorney General discouraging surviving relatives from entertaining independent legal representation.

Why should families be warned away from independent lawyers?

Independent counsel is not an enemy of justice. It is one of the protections available to citizens confronting the unequal power of the State. The Government has the Attorney General’s Chambers, ministries, agencies, technical officers, insurers, legal advisers and access to public resources.

Bereaved families have grief, uncertainty and a document placed before them. The imbalance could not be more obvious.

No government that is confident in its conduct should fear families receiving competent, independent legal advice. If officials genuinely believe their offers are fair and their agreements transparent, then they should welcome scrutiny rather than create the impression that relatives ought to avoid counsel who may advise them not to sign.

The families must be allowed to make informed decisions—free from pressure, haste, intimidation, dependency or the fear that refusing to sign will result in the withdrawal of support.

The Wreck Still Lies Below

The deepest disrespect is that the wreck of the MV Barima remains submerged while relatives of the missing continue to wait.

For those whose loved ones have not been found, there can be no genuine closure while the vessel remains underwater and the Government’s salvage process appears mired in delay. Every passing day compounds the anguish of families who do not know whether the remains of their relatives are trapped inside, whether evidence is deteriorating, and whether the truth is being allowed to disappear beneath the sea.

Salvaging the vessel is not a public-relations exercise. It is a moral obligation, an evidentiary necessity and a fundamental duty owed to the dead, the missing, survivors and the country.

The vessel may contain answers about the disaster. It may reveal whether basic safety requirements were ignored, whether the craft was overloaded, whether lifesaving equipment was sufficient and functional, whether crew and passengers received proper safety instructions, whether inspections failed, and whether regulators looked away.     

The longer the wreck remains untouched, the stronger the public suspicion becomes that urgency is being reserved for settlement documents rather than for the recovery of evidence and human remains. 

The Commission Must Not Become Another Delay

 The Commission of Inquiry must also move with urgency, independence and transparency. It cannot become another state exercise that produces delay, legalistic obstruction and carefully worded findings that avoid identifying individual or institutional responsibility. 

The public deserves answers to clear questions: 

⇒ Who approved, certified, inspected and monitored the MV Barima? 

⇒ Was the vessel seaworthy, properly equipped and operating within its lawful passenger capacity?

⇒ Were all required safety protocols followed before and during the voyage? 

⇒ Did the relevant maritime authorities fail in their oversight responsibilities? style

⇒ Were warnings ignored, concealed or inadequately acted upon? style

⇒  What emergency response systems were in place, and why were they insufficient? 

⇒ When will the wreck be salvaged, and who will independently preserve and examine the evidence?

⇒ What support—financial, medical, psychological, educational and legal—has actually reached every affected family?

No amount of compensation can substitute for these answers. And no settlement should be used to close the door on accountability.

Justice Before Closure   

 The families of the MV Barima victims are not asking for charity. They are demanding recognition of their rights and respect for the value of the lives that were lost.

They deserve separate, fair and transparent assessments of compensation. They deserve long-term support that does not vanish after the cameras leave. They deserve independent legal advice. They deserve access to all relevant information. They deserve the recovery of the vessel. And they deserve an inquiry that names failures, identifies those responsible and recommends consequences that prevent another disaster. 

Most of all, they deserve a government that understands the difference between offering assistance and attempting to purchase closure 

A nation’s moral character is revealed in how it treats its people at their most vulnerable. The handling of the MV Barima tragedy is becoming a grave test of Guyana’s conscience.The Government must stop behaving as though grief can be managed with a standard figure, a signature and a press statement.

There were names behind those numbers. Families behind those names. Futures destroyed behind every family. 

And no oil-rich government has the right to treat the dead, the missing and the bereaved as though $5  million is the price of their silence.