By endorsing a corruption-tainted candidate for the OAS, Caribbean leaders chose politics over principle — and the region’s citizens will pay the price
Georgetown, Guyana — May 2026
There is a particular kind of that flourishes in the Caribbean — the kind that dresses itself in the language of democracy and sovereignty while quietly betraying both. CARICOM leaders demonstrated this hypocrisy in full view of the hemisphere when they threw their collective weight behind Albert Ramdin as Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS), a man trailing a cloud of serious corruption allegations from his own country, Suriname. They did so not because he was the best candidate for the hemisphere’s premier democratic body, but because he was not Donald Trump’s candidate.
The consequences of that choice deserve far more scrutiny than regional leaders are prepared to invite.
A Region Already Failing Its Citizens
The endorsement did not occur in a vacuum. Transparency International has documented what Caribbean citizens already know in their bones: CARICOM governments are failing them. Bribery significantly obstructs access to basic public services — health care, education, housing — with the heaviest burden falling on society’s most vulnerable. The International Corruption Perceptions Index records little meaningful progress in the region over the past decade. The private sector, too, has been indicted as a willing partner in this culture of corruption.
This is the context in which CARICOM leaders made their OAS decision: not as reformers seeking to clean up regional institutions, but as political actors calculating advantage. Their candidate of choice, Albert Ramdin, was not an antidote to the region’s corruption problem. He was, arguably, a symptom of it.
The Allegations Against Ramdin
During his five years as Suriname’s Foreign Minister, Ramdin accumulated a record that should have disqualified him from leading any institution charged with upholding democratic governance. Surinamese media and the country’s own Public Prosecution Service have documented his alleged involvement in multiple corruption scandals. The most damaging centres on his relationship with Xaviera Jessurun, who has since become an advisor in his OAS office.
Jessurun has been formally designated as a suspect by Suriname’s Attorney General in connection with fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, and forgery. She has been summoned to appear in court. Yet rather than distance himself from a figure under active criminal investigation in his own country, Ramdin brought her to Washington as a senior advisor. And when Suriname’s Foreign Minister Melvin Bouva publicly revealed that Ramdin had improperly issued Jessurun a diplomatic passport — a passport that allowed her to travel to Washington while legal proceedings against her remained active in Suriname — the Caribbean leaders who had vouched for Ramdin said nothing.
Their silence was not accidental. It was a choice.
Politics Dressed as Principle
CARICOM’s defence of its endorsement has centred on the claim that its leaders were protecting the OAS from the influence of Donald Trump, whose preferred candidate was Rubén Ramírez Lezcano. There is no question that Trump’s interventions in hemispheric affairs warrant resistance. But resistance to one problematic actor cannot justify installing another. The OAS exists to defend democracy and human rights across the Americas. Its Secretary-General must be a figure of unimpeachable integrity — or at minimum, one who has not been linked by his own country’s law enforcement to abuse of office.
CARICOM performed no meaningful investigation into the allegations against Ramdin before casting its votes. Reports from Surinamese media were available. The Public Prosecution Service’s actions were a matter of public record. The Foreign Minister’s statement about the diplomatic passport was documented. The leaders of the region’s most corrupt member states simply looked away.
The Cost Borne by Ordinary People
Perhaps the most troubling dimension of this episode is what it reveals about where Caribbean leaders place their priorities. Former Surinamese President Santokhi, a close ally of Ramdin, reportedly directed millions of US dollars toward securing Ramdin’s OAS appointment — funds that could have been directed toward poverty reduction, crime prevention, healthcare, and education in one of the hemisphere’s poorest nations. Whether those reports can be fully verified, the pattern they describe is one the Caribbean knows well: public resources quietly redirected to serve elite political interests.
This is the same pattern Transparency International has catalogued across CARICOM for a decade. The bribery that blocks a mother from accessing her child’s medical records, the corruption that diverts school funds into private pockets, the culture that allows the powerful to obtain diplomatic passports for allies facing criminal prosecution — these are not separate phenomena. They are expressions of the same institutional rot.
Guyana Must Answer for Its Role
Guyana’s government has not been transparent with its citizens about its position on the Ramdin appointment. The 592 Guardian calls on the Ali administration to state clearly: did Guyana support Ramdin’s candidacy? If so, on what basis? What due diligence, if any, was conducted into the allegations against him? The Guyanese people, who are themselves living under the burden of inadequate public services and unresolved institutional corruption, deserve a direct answer.
A government that cannot answer those questions credibly has no standing to lecture its citizens about accountability.
Integrity Cannot Be An Afterthought
The OAS under Albert Ramdin’s leadership begins its tenure under a shadow that CARICOM itself helped cast. The institution’s credibility as a guardian of democratic norms will be tested from its first day. Whether Ramdin can overcome the allegations that followed him from Suriname to Washington remains to be seen. What is already clear is that the Caribbean leaders who installed him chose political expediency over rigorous scrutiny, and dressed that choice in the language of regional sovereignty and anti-imperialism.
The citizens of this region — the ones waiting in corrupt queues for public services, the ones watching their governments’ development budgets evaporate into patronage networks, the ones who never had millions of dollars to spend securing anyone’s appointment to anything — deserved better from their leaders. They deserved due diligence. They deserved transparency. They deserved the truth.
https://i0.wp.com/592guardian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_0293.jpg?fit=500%2C549&ssl=1549500Editorhttps://592guardian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/img_9918-300x150.pngEditor2026-05-25 06:57:152026-05-25 06:57:15CARICOM’s Anti-Trump Protest Cost the Region Its Integrity
Guyana’s Parliament has not sat for more than 100 days. Let that settle. Not a scheduling hiccup. Not an administrative delay. A governance failure — sustained, deliberate, and inexcusable.
The sudden announcement of a June 5 sitting, arriving conveniently on the heels of pointed remarks from representatives of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, should not be met with relief. It should be met with fury. Because what it confirms is this: the machinery of Guyanese democracy does not move on constitutional obligation. It moves on diplomatic pressure. That is a humiliation dressed up as a concession. Minister Gail Teixeira’s response — that the diplomats should have first “engaged the Government” — is as revealing as it is tone-deaf.
Parliamentary democracy is not a private arrangement to be managed behind closed doors by the politically convenient. It is a public institution. Constitutionally mandated. Non-negotiable. Its prolonged dormancy is not an internal matter to be shielded from outside eyes. It is a public failure to be answered to — by citizens first, and by international partners second. But here is where this editorial must turn — because the Government cannot be allowed to stand alone in the dock.
The Opposition Has Questions to Answer Too. One hundred days. Where was the thunder? Where were the emergency press conferences, the legal challenges, the sustained and relentless public pressure that this constitutional crisis demanded? The Opposition — including the lone seat of the Forward Guyana Movement — sounded alarm, yes. But alarm without escalation is just noise.
One must ask, plainly and without apology: if their emoluments had been withheld — if their salaries, allowances, and benefits had been suspended for every day Parliament failed to sit — would they have waited this long? Would the outrage have been so measured, so periodic, so politely contained?
The question answers itself. Opposition members are not volunteers. They are elected representatives, paid from the public purse, entrusted with the sacred function of holding power accountable. If they treated this constitutional crisis with anything less than maximum urgency, they too have failed the people who sent them there. Silence in the face of institutional collapse is not opposition. It is complicity in slow motion.
The Deeper Crisis: A Parliament That Can Be Paused at Will The most dangerous truth exposed by these 100 days is not that one party abused its power. It is that the system permitted it.
A Parliament that can be suspended at the political convenience of the executive is not a co-equal branch of government. It is a decorative institution — convened when useful, shuttered when inconvenient. That is not democracy. That is theatre.
And this theatre has played out against a backdrop of unprecedented national expenditure. Guyana is an oil-producing nation now, channelling revenues of a scale this country has never before managed. The Public Accounts Committee — the very body mandated to scrutinise how that money is spent — has been non-functional. Let us be direct: governance without scrutiny at this scale, with this volume of public funds in motion, is not just negligent. It is an invitation to plunder. Governance without scrutiny is not governance. It is control.
The Reform That Must Now Follow The resumption of Parliament on June 5 should not be celebrated. It should be the beginning of a reckoning. Because if history is any guide, this is not a correction — it is a recalibration. A temporary concession to external pressure, after which the status quo reasserts itself. That cannot be allowed to happen again.
Guyana urgently needs — and the Opposition must now table — a Parliamentary Sittings (Fixed Schedule) Bill. Its purpose would be singular and unambiguous: to remove, permanently, the unilateral authority of any person, party, or executive to defer, delay, or dissolve parliamentary sittings at will.
The National Assembly must sit on a constitutionally fixed, publicly published roster. Not subject to ministerial discretion. Not contingent on political appetite.
Not moveable by Cabinet decree. The people’s business must be conducted on the people’s schedule — not the Government’s. Such a Bill would do more than prevent future abuses. It would signal to every Guyanese citizen, and to every international observer, that this nation is serious about institutional governance.
That it does not require diplomatic nudges to honour its own Constitution. Let the Opposition bring this Bill. Let them table it the moment Parliament reconvenes. Let every member — Government and Opposition alike — be forced to vote on whether they believe democracy should function inevitably or merely intermittently. Let that vote be on the record, in Hansard, for the people to judge.
The Standard Must Be Inevitability, Not Convenience Guyanese must now move beyond outrage — because outrage without reform is just catharsis. What this moment demands is structural change, enforceable by law, binding on every administration that follows.
Democracy must not function when it is politically expedient. It must function because it cannot be stopped.
A Parliament that sits only when pressured is a Parliament that has already surrendered its purpose. A Parliament that sits on schedule, by law, regardless of who is in power — that is a Parliament worthy of the name.
Anything less is a betrayal. Of the Constitution. Of the electorate. Of the very idea of self-governance. The people of Guyana did not elect a Parliament to meet at someone’s pleasure. They elected it to meet — period.
It is time to make that non-negotiable. In law. Without exception. Without delay.
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Three men who between them command the world’s most formidable economies and the most lethal military arsenals met in Beijing. They talked. They posed for cameras. They issued statements. And when they left, the wars continued, the Strait of Hormuz remained contested, and the price of oil held its grip on the throats of ordinary people from Georgetown to Guangzhou.
That is the uncomfortable truth behind the diplomatic pageantry that unfolded in China’s capital this week — two separate summits, one involving the United States and China, the other China and Russia, both freighted with global expectation and both, ultimately, light on delivery. To be fair, no serious observer of international affairs expects a single summit to resolve conflicts decades in the making. Agreements between sovereign states are forged through repetition, not revelation. But the world’s patience is not unlimited, and its tolerance for diplomatic theatre grows thinner with each body counted.
Tariffs, Trade and the Theatre of Trump
On the US-China front, the most pressing item for America’s corporate class was trade — and understandably so. Trump’s tariff war has rattled supply chains and stoked inflationary pressure far beyond American shores. Small, open economies like Guyana’s are not insulated from those tremors.
President Trump returned claiming victory: 200 aircraft to be purchased by China, agricultural products to follow. Beijing, notably, confirmed none of it. Whether these are genuine commitments yet to be formalised or political theatre for domestic consumption in Washington remains to be seen. What is certain is that no new trade agreement was announced, and the tariff war shows no signs of formal resolution.
For Guyana and the Caribbean region, this matters. The broader global trading environment shapes the conditions under which we sell our oil, attract investment, and manage our import bills. Instability at the top of the international economic order cascades downward. We do not have the luxury of watching from a distance.
Taiwan: The Collision Course Neither Side Can Afford
The most consequential exchange of the US-China summit may well have been President Xi Jinping’s unambiguous warning: Taiwan is “the most important issue in China-US relations,” and if mishandled, the two nations could “collide or even come into conflict.” President Trump’s response was, by his standards, measured — urging Taiwan against seeking independence and signalling that America has little appetite for a war fought 9,500 miles from its shores. He has also reportedly withheld his signature from an US$11 billion arms sale to Taipei.
This restraint, if it holds, is not nothing. But restraint is not a policy. And the absence of clear red lines, binding commitments, or a framework for crisis management leaves a dangerous vacuum. One miscalculation — a naval incident, a provocation, an election — could ignite a confrontation that no subsequent summit could contain.
Russia, China and the Architecture of a New Order
The China-Russia summit produced more paperwork — reportedly over 20 agreements signed across energy, transport and international cooperation, with 20 more pending. More significantly, the two leaders signed a document calling for a “multi-polar world order” and “a new type of international relations,” explicitly positioning themselves against what they characterise as unilateral and hegemonic excess.
The language is pointed and deliberate. Russia, perhaps the most militarily and economically exposed of the three powers, finds in China both a market and a shield. President Xi, for his part, gains strategic depth and a counterweight to Western pressure.
But what was conspicuously absent from those 20-plus agreements was any document addressing the war in Ukraine — no ceasefire framework, no peace roadmap, no announced effort to end a conflict that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions. The multi-polar world order Xi and Putin envision apparently does not yet include a shared responsibility to stop a war that one of its architects started.
The Numbers Behind the Silence
The editorialising of summits should never lose sight of the human ledger. Across Gaza and the Russia-Ukraine theatre, an estimated 140,000 people have been killed. A further 8,000 are missing in Gaza. In the killing fields of Eastern Europe, 90,000 remain unaccounted for.
These are not statistics. They are sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers — consumed by conflicts that the three most powerful leaders on earth have, thus far, chosen to manage rather than end. Neither Beijing summit produced an announced, immediate effort to halt either war.
What Beijing Told Us
The summits were not without value. The mere fact that Washington and Beijing sat across the table signals that both powers understand uncontrolled escalation serves no one. That both agree, at least in principle, that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open for the free passage of the 20 per cent of global oil supply that flows through it is a floor, not a ceiling — but it is a floor.
What Beijing told us, however, is that the world’s most powerful men are managing crises, not resolving them. They are preserving options rather than making choices. And in the space between managed tension and resolved conflict, people die, prices rise, and smaller nations absorb shocks over which they have no control.
For Guyana — a nation now firmly positioned in the global energy conversation — the instability of the Hormuz corridor, the volatility of global oil markets, and the uncertainty of great-power trade relations are not abstract concerns. They are budget lines, development timelines, and the cost of goods on the shelves of our people.
The Course Must Be Reset
The 592 Guardian is under no illusion that summits alone move mountains. But we insist on this: acknowledgement without action is not diplomacy — it is delay with better lighting.
The three leaders who gathered in Beijing this week carry between them the capacity to end both wars, stabilise energy markets, and chart a trading order that does not immiserate the Global South. Whether they possess the will to exercise that capacity is the defining question of this moment in history.
The 21st century is not yet lost. But it is being squandered, one carefully worded joint statement at a time.
https://i0.wp.com/592guardian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_0022-1-8.png?fit=1374%2C768&ssl=17681374Editorhttps://592guardian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/img_9918-300x150.pngEditor2026-05-24 08:31:032026-05-24 08:31:03The Beijing Summits: Words Without Weight
There is a particular kind of deception that does not lie outright. It does not fabricate facts or invent events. It operates instead through selective emphasis — parading the gleaming face of progress while quietly shielding its contradictions from scrutiny. Guyana’s rollout of artificial intelligence in traffic enforcement has become a masterclass in exactly this kind of deception. We are told that the system is sophisticated. We are told it is modern, efficient, and — most importantly — fair. And yet, 1,600 drivers identified by that very system as suspected violators waited six months to receive so much as a notification letter. Six months. In a world where artificial intelligence can scan a vehicle travelling at highway speed, cross-reference its plate against a national database, and generate an enforcement flag in fractions of a second, it apparently cannot send a letter in less than half a year. That contradiction is not a minor administrative footnote. It is the story.
The Promise That Built the Narrative
To understand how deeply troubling this delay is, one must first appreciate the scale of what was promised — and what was sold to the Guyanese public. AI-powered enforcement was not presented as a modest upgrade to existing traffic systems. It was framed as a transformational leap — a decisive break from the era of arbitrary roadside stops, inconsistent policing, and enforcement that depended too heavily on the discretion, and sometimes the appetite, of individual officers. The technology would be neutral. It would be tireless. It would see everything and treat everyone the same.
The language used in official communications about the system was careful but unmistakable in its ambition. Real-time detection. Automated flagging. Instant database integration. These were not the words of a department piloting a modest tool — they were the vocabulary of a government staking its modernization credentials on a technological promise.
That promise had real political currency. In a society where the belief that enforcement is selective — that who you know determines whether the law applies to you — remains deeply entrenched, the idea of a machine-driven system carried genuine appeal. A camera does not accept a handshake. An algorithm does not respond to a phone call. If the technology is what it claims to be, then the rules truly do apply to everyone. That was the bargain offered to the public. The six-month silence is proof that the bargain was not honoured.
What Artificial Intelligence Actually Does — and Doesn’t — Explain
It is worth being precise here, because the government’s defenders will reach for a familiar rebuttal: that even with AI detection, downstream enforcement processes involve human steps that take time. Letters must be drafted, addresses verified, decisions reviewed. Technology, they will argue, does not eliminate the need for administrative procedure.
This argument is not entirely without merit. It is, however, entirely insufficient. Artificial intelligence, at its core, is a tool for compressing time. It eliminates the bottlenecks that arise when human judgment must be applied to each individual case. A system that can flag 1,600 violators does not require 1,600 separate human decisions to generate 1,600 notification letters. That is, in fact, the entire point. A functioning AI enforcement system would have the capacity to automate the notification pipeline with the same efficiency it applies to detection. If such automation was not built in — if the detection engine was wired to a manual, paper-shuffling bureaucracy on the back end — then the system as deployed is not what it was described to be. It is a camera with a filing cabinet.
More pointedly: if the technology is capable of triggering enforcement responses on the spot — if, as has been suggested, it can interface in real time with officers in the field — then the claim that notifications to flagged drivers required six months of processing collapses under the weight of its own implausibility. You cannot tell the public that your system can alert a patrol officer to a flagged vehicle in motion, and then explain that generating a mailed notification to the same vehicle’s registered owner requires half a year. One of these claims must give way. And the public is entitled to know which one.
The Silence That Speaks
Six months is not a delay. It is a decision. In public administration, especially in matters of law enforcement, timelines are never purely accidental. Resources are allocated. Priorities are set. When an action that should be routine — notifying individuals that they have been flagged for a potential offence — takes six months to execute, it is because something, or someone, chose not to expedite it. The question that follows from that observation is the one the government has been conspicuously reluctant to answer: what happened during those six months?
Who held the list of 1,600 flagged drivers? Who had access to it? Was it reviewed by anyone outside the technical enforcement team? Were any names removed before notifications were issued? Were any names added? Were the 1,600 who eventually received letters the same 1,600 originally flagged by the system — or had the list been quietly adjusted along the way?
These are not hypothetical concerns born of cynicism. They are the natural and reasonable questions that arise any time sensitive enforcement data is held in bureaucratic limbo without accountability or transparency. The longer the silence, the more weight those questions carry. And they are carrying considerable weight.
The Whispers That Grow into Walls
Across Guyanese civil society, in the conversations that happen between citizens rather than in official briefings, a particular suspicion has taken root. It is not yet a verified allegation. It has not been confirmed by any whistleblower or official source. But it has spread with the stubborn persistence of ideas that feel intuitively true to the people who hold them. The whisper is this: the delay was not administrative. The list required “scrubbing.” Certain names — names attached to individuals with the right connections, the right relationships, the right proximity to power — were quietly removed before the letters went out.
Again: this has not been proven. It may not be true. But the extraordinary danger of this moment is that, true or false, the suspicion is entirely plausible given what the public has been shown of how enforcement works in Guyana. And a government that has spent years promising a new, transparent, technology-driven era of equal treatment has done nothing — nothing — to proactively foreclose that suspicion.
No audit of the flagged list has been published. No independent verification of the notification process has been announced. No explanation for the delay that goes beyond vague administrative reference has been offered. In the vacuum of credible official explanation, the whisper does not merely survive — it thrives. This is the corrosive power of perceived selective enforcement. It does not require proof to do its damage. It only requires the absence of transparency. And on that front, the government has been remarkably, perhaps recklessly, generous.
There is a term that deserves wider circulation in this debate: artificial fairness.
Artificial fairness is what you get when you deploy a genuinely neutral technology — a system that, left to its own outputs, would apply the same standard to every vehicle that passes before its sensors — and then introduce human discretion back into the process after the fact. The detection may be real. The flagging may be real. But if what comes out the other end of the pipeline has been filtered through human judgment that is susceptible to influence, then the neutrality of the machine is merely cosmetic.
This is not a hypothetical risk. It is the specific vulnerability that the six-month delay has exposed. AI systems produce outputs. Those outputs then enter a human-administered pipeline. If that pipeline operates without transparency, without independent oversight, and without verifiable timelines, then the AI’s integrity guarantees nothing. You have simply moved the point of potential manipulation further downstream, where it is harder to see and easier to deny.
The administration has built its modernization narrative on the premise that AI enforcement represents a structural departure from the culture of discretion. But discretion does not disappear when a camera is installed. It migrates — to the person who controls the database, to the official who reviews the flagged list, to the bureaucrat who decides which letters go out and when. If those human nodes in the enforcement chain are not bound by the same transparency and accountability standards applied to the technology itself, then the system as a whole is no more trustworthy than its weakest human link.
Right now, that link is invisible, and it has been invisible for six months.
The Standard That Must Be Applied
What would credible AI-powered enforcement actually look like? It would look like this: Detection events would be logged in a tamper-evident, time-stamped system that is subject to independent audit. The interval between a flag being raised and a notification being issued would be defined in advance, published publicly, and enforced consistently. Any deviation from that interval would require a documented justification, accessible to oversight bodies. The composition of any flagged list — who is on it, when they were added, and whether any names were ever removed — would be auditable by a body that is genuinely independent of the enforcement apparatus.
None of this is technically complicated. All of it is politically demanding. It requires a government willing to be held accountable not just to its own stated standards, but to external verification of whether those standards are being met. The question before the Guyanese public is not whether AI enforcement is, in theory, a good idea. It may well be. The question is whether the specific deployment currently underway can be trusted — and whether the administration responsible for it is willing to do what trust requires.
At present, the evidence suggests the answer is no.
Modernization Is Not a Marketing Exercise
Guyana is at a genuine inflection point. The country’s economic transformation over the last several years has created real capacity for institutional modernization. Resources exist that did not exist before. The appetite for a more functional, more equitable state apparatus — particularly among younger Guyanese — is real and should not be squandered.
But modernization is not achieved by acquiring technology. It is achieved by building institutions capable of deploying technology in ways that genuinely serve the public interest. An AI camera on a highway is hardware. The culture that governs what happens to its outputs is the institution. And it is the institution — not the hardware — that determines whether the system produces justice or merely produces the appearance of it.
A country that installs cutting-edge detection technology and then subjects its outputs to an opaque, unaccountable, six-month human filtering process has not modernized. It has digitized its old habits. It has made them faster, more scalable, and — if the technology’s reputation for neutrality is successfully leveraged — considerably harder to challenge.
That is not progress. That is the old order in new clothes.
The Questions That Cannot Be Deferred
The administration owes the public answers. Not reassurances — answers. Specific, verifiable, documented answers to questions that are neither unreasonable nor hostile. They are the questions that any functioning democracy asks of its enforcement apparatus:
Why were the 1,600 flagged drivers not notified within days of being identified? What is the documented justification for the six-month interval?
Who had access to the flagged list between the time it was generated and the time notifications were issued? Was that access logged?
Were any names removed from the original flagged list before notifications were sent? If so, on what authority, under what criteria, and with what documentation?
What independent oversight body has visibility into the enforcement pipeline, and what are its powers to audit, challenge, or publicise its findings?
Until those questions are answered — publicly, specifically, and with supporting documentation — the rollout of AI-powered traffic enforcement cannot be accepted as the transparent, technology-driven modernization it has been presented as.
It remains, for now, a performance. An expensive, technically impressive, and politically convenient performance — but a performance nonetheless.
What Guyana Deserves
The people of Guyana deserve enforcement that is credible. Not enforcement that is claimed to be credible. Not enforcement that is credible in its technology while opaque in its administration. Credible in the full and demanding sense: where the rules apply equally, timelines are consistent and published, the data is protected from interference, and the institutions responsible for it are genuinely accountable to the public they serve.
That is not a utopian standard. It is the baseline expectation of a functioning rule of law. Other countries meet it. Guyana can meet it too.
But it will not be met by installing cameras. It will be met by the hard, unglamorous, politically costly work of building institutions that cannot be quietly negotiated with — where the algorithm’s output is as binding on the well-connected as it is on everyone else, and where the word “enforcement” does not carry an asterisk.
Anything less is not modernization. It is not efficiency. It is not justice. It is digitized inequality — and it insults the intelligence of every Guyanese citizen who was told the machine would be different.
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When the historical record is consulted honestly, only one country in this relationship has consistently acted as an aggressor — and it is not the one being blockaded.
When a senior U.S. government official stands before Congress, posts on official platforms, or declares to the world that Cuba represents a threat to American national security, they are not speaking truth. They are performing a function. That function — the deliberate inversion of historical reality — is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of documented, declassified record.
The evidence has always been there for those willing to read it.
A Century of Intervention Before the Revolution
The United States never recognised Cuba’s Republic in Arms during its war of liberation against Spain. It actively intercepted patriotic expeditions carrying weapons and supplies essential to that struggle. When Spain was finally defeated, Washington intervened militarily, occupied the island by force, and stole the victory from the Cuban people who had bled for it.
The Platt Amendment of 1898 formalised what the guns had already established: Cuba as a protectorate, its sovereignty conditional on American approval. Repeated military interventions through the early twentieth century reinforced the point. Gunboat diplomacy was not a metaphor — it was policy.
When strongmen were needed to protect American commercial interests, Washington provided them. Gerardo Machado and Fulgencio Batista both enjoyed U.S. support while presiding over regimes responsible for thousands of deaths. The CIA actively advised Batista’s security apparatus and helped create the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities — the BRAC — in the 1950s.
The monster was assembled in Washington’s workshops.
From Playa Girón to Operation Northwoods
The revolutionary triumph of 1959 triggered a response that can only be described as institutional panic. By 1960, President Eisenhower had approved a covert CIA plan to overthrow the new government. In 1961, CIA-trained mercenaries invaded at Playa Girón — the Bay of Pigs — and were defeated by people’s militias within 72 hours.
The defeat did not produce reflection. It produced escalation.
Operation Mongoose followed: a programme of economic sabotage, terrorist attacks, and more than 600 documented assassination attempts against Fidel Castro — nearly one every two weeks across three decades. Rebel gangs were organised, financed, and armed in the Escambray Mountains, sowing terror across the Cuban countryside.
The most chilling episode came in 1962 with Operation Northwoods, when the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff formally proposed carrying out attacks on American civilians and blaming Cuba — manufacturing a pretext for invasion. The document exists. It is declassified. It bears the signatures of the men who conceived it.
Terrorism With Impunity
In 1976, a Cubana de Aviación passenger aircraft was bombed over Barbados. All 73 people aboard were killed. Among them were 11 Guyanese victims. The mastermind, Luis Posada Carriles, lived out the remainder of his life free and protected in Miami. In 1997, simultaneous bombings struck Havana hotels, murdering Italian tourist Fabio Di Celmo. In total, more than 3,000 Cuban victims are still awaiting justice for acts of terrorism traced to networks operating from U.S. territory with the knowledge — and often the active support — of American intelligence services.
On October 6, 1976, Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 took off from Barbados en route to Jamaica. It soon disappeared from the radar screens.
Biological warfare was also deployed. African swine fever was introduced in 1971, wiping out 40% of Cuba’s pig population. In 1981, a hemorrhagic dengue epidemic affected 350,000 people and killed 158, including 101 children.
These are not allegations. They are documented facts, available in the archives of the Church Committee, in declassified CIA files, and in the historical record that the United States government would prefer the world forget.
2026: The Energy Stranglehold
Against this backdrop, what is unfolding in 2026 is not a departure from pattern. It is its logical continuation — only now prosecuted with the tools of energy warfare.
Since January 2026, the Trump administration has imposed more than 240 sanctions against Cuba, including the interception of at least seven oil tankers bound for the island. An executive order signed on May 1st expanded restrictions across the energy, defence, mining, and financial services sectors. The effect has been devastating: Cuban energy imports have been slashed by 80 to 90 percent. Power outages now last up to 24 hours a day across more than half the island’s territory.
The blockade is total enough that Cuba’s aviation authorities have been forced to warn international airlines that jet fuel is no longer reliably available at nine airports across the island, including Havana’s José Martí International. Cuba’s Health Minister has warned of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, stating that hospitals have been rendered helpless and that thousands of lives are at risk.
Public transport has stalled. Banks have reduced their hours. Rubbish collection has collapsed in Havana, leaving streets piled with waste. The cigar fair — a cultural institution — has been postponed indefinitely. The infrastructure of daily life is being systematically dismantled, not by the Cuban government’s failures alone, but by the deliberate application of external pressure designed to make life unliveable.
And still, the narrative being broadcast from Washington is that Cuba is the threat.
The Carrier at the Door
On May 20th, 2026 — Cuba’s Independence Day — the United States Southern Command announced the arrival of the USS Nimitz carrier strike group in the Caribbean, alongside destroyers and replenishment vessels. This followed a May 5th threat from President Trump to deploy the USS Abraham Lincoln to Cuban shores. SOUTHCOM’s announcement boasted of the carrier’s record of operations “from the Taiwan Strait to the Arabian Gulf.”
The same day, the Department of Justice unveiled an indictment of 94-year-old former Cuban President Raúl Castro on charges related to the 1996 shootdown of civilian aircraft. A Cuban-born U.S. congressman openly stated the indictment provides “the legal basis to go and remove” Castro from Cuba. Secretary of State Marco Rubio — whose family history with Cuba is well known — addressed the Cuban people directly in Spanish, backing the fuel blockade while blaming the resulting blackouts on Havana.
The choreography is deliberate. The legal instrument, the military presence, the media message — all deployed simultaneously, on Independence Day, for maximum psychological effect.
Who Benefits From the Narrative?
The construction of Cuba as a “threat” has never been a misperception. It has always been a function. When we ask who benefits, the answer is instructive.
The narrative justifies the blockade to a domestic audience that might otherwise question its legality and its humanity. It prepares psychological ground for military escalation, wearing down international opposition incrementally. It distracts from the acknowledged failure of more than six decades of regime-change policy that has produced neither the collapse of the Cuban government nor the liberation of its people — only their suffering. And it remains an extraordinarily effective mechanism for harvesting votes in South Florida, where a politically organised exile community has long exercised influence over U.S. foreign policy disproportionate to its size.
International law scholars have now begun to weigh in. Legal analysts at Just Security have noted that a campaign designed to force a change of government by cutting off an island nation’s essential fuel supply threatens — and in important respects already crosses — the boundaries of what international law permits, even in pursuit of ostensibly legitimate objectives.
The Record Does Not Lie
The 592 Guardian does not editorialize on behalf of any government. We editorialize on behalf of truth, of documented fact, and of the principle that the people of the Caribbean and the Global South deserve analysis that does not simply reproduce the framing of the powerful.
The historical record of U.S. actions against Cuba is not a matter of ideology. It is available in declassified files, in the Church Committee’s own reports to the U.S. Senate, in the archives of GlobalSecurity, in the records of trial proceedings, and in the testimonies of survivors. It describes, with the precision of a scalpel, which party in this relationship has consistently organised invasions, funded terrorist networks, poisoned livestock, bombed civilian aircraft, and now, in 2026, cut off the fuel supply of eleven million people while positioning an aircraft carrier off their coast.
The aggressor is not hidden. The aggressor is reflected clearly in the mirror of its own declassified record.
The question for the rest of the world — and particularly for Caribbean nations who understand what it means to have powerful neighbours — is whether we will have the clarity, and the courage, to say so plainly.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Context & Background for Our Readers
To fully appreciate the gravity of what is unfolding between the United States and Cuba in 2026, readers deserve more than headlines. They deserve history. Because this crisis did not begin with Donald Trump, and it did not begin with any single act of defiance from Havana. It is the product of a relationship that has been defined, almost without interruption, by American dominance and Cuban resistance for well over a century.
The Root of the Antagonism: 1959
For most of the twentieth century, Cuba existed within the American sphere of influence as a virtual client state. American corporations owned vast tracts of Cuban land, its sugar industry, its utilities, and its hotels. The Batista dictatorship — brutal, corrupt, and sustained by Washington — kept that arrangement intact. When Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement overthrew Batista on January 1st, 1959, it did not merely change a government. It broke an economic and geopolitical arrangement that Washington had treated as permanent.
The Eisenhower administration began planning a covert response almost immediately. What followed — the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mongoose, the decades of assassination attempts, the economic embargo formalised in 1962 — was not a reaction to a military threat. Cuba has never invaded the United States, never bombed American cities, never funded insurgencies on American soil. The hostility was always, at its core, a reaction to economic and political independence.
The Cold War Framework and Its Convenient Legacy
Washington packaged its aggression in the language of the Cold War. Cuba’s alignment with the Soviet Union, formalised after the revolution, gave the United States the ideological framing it needed to justify extraordinary measures. The 1962 Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war — genuinely so — and that moment has been used ever since to retroactively legitimise every act of economic warfare and covert destabilisation that preceded and followed it.
What is rarely noted in mainstream Western discourse is the sequence: it was the relentless pressure of American-backed sabotage, embargo, and invasion attempts that pushed Cuba deeper into Soviet alignment. The threat Cuba sought protection from was not hypothetical. It had already landed at Playa Girón.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba entered what it called the “Special Period” — a catastrophic economic contraction that saw the Cuban economy shrink by more than 35 percent. Many in Washington anticipated that the revolutionary government would collapse within months. It did not. That survival, against all prediction, hardened both sides. For Cuba, it became a point of national pride. For Washington, it became an enduring humiliation that successive administrations have never fully processed.
The Clinton-to-Obama Arc:
Hardening, Then Thawing The 1990s brought the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, which codified and entrenched the embargo in statute, making it nearly impossible for any president to lift unilaterally without Congressional approval. The legislation was partly triggered by Cuba’s shootdown of two aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue — the same incident now being used to justify the 2026 indictment of Raúl Castro. Washington framed it as an outrage. Havana maintained the aircraft had repeatedly violated Cuban airspace on provocative missions. The truth of that specific incident remains contested. The legislative consequences were not.
For the next two decades, the basic architecture of U.S.-Cuba relations remained frozen. Then, in December 2014, Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro jointly announced a historic diplomatic opening. Embassies were reopened. Travel and trade restrictions were partially eased. For a brief moment, it appeared the century-long antagonism might finally find a different expression.
That opening lasted less than three years.
The Trump First Term and the Rollback
When Donald Trump came to office in 2017, he began systematically reversing the Obama-era normalisation. By the end of his first term, Cuba had been redesignated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism — a designation the Biden administration controversially maintained, before partially reversing it in the final days of its tenure in January 2025.
The Biden years were marked by ambivalence. Meaningful reform of Cuba policy was perpetually postponed, caught between the administration’s stated values and the political calculus of Florida’s electoral importance. The terrorism designation remained in place for most of Biden’s term. Remittance restrictions continued. The fundamental structure of the embargo was untouched.
The Second Trump Administration and the Escalation to 2026
When Trump returned to office in January 2025, Cuba policy moved with unusual speed and ferocity. Cuba was immediately redesignated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. Within days of taking office, Trump posted on Truth Social: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA — ZERO!” It was not rhetoric. It became operational policy almost immediately.
The mechanism chosen was energy strangulation. By threatening tariffs and secondary sanctions against any country or company that sold or transported oil to Cuba, Washington effectively weaponised Cuba’s dependence on imported petroleum. Venezuela — long Cuba’s primary oil supplier — had already been targeted through the kidnapping and removal of President Nicolás Maduro in early January 2026. Mexico, under pressure, ceased oil shipments. Tankers were intercepted at sea. By early February, Cuban airports were running out of jet fuel. Hospitals were losing power. Rubbish was piling in the streets of Havana.
Hurricane Melissa, which struck Cuba in late 2025 and caused widespread destruction, compounded a humanitarian situation that was already deteriorating rapidly. The United States offered a modest $6 million in humanitarian supplies — even as its own policies were the primary driver of the crisis those supplies were meant to address.
Where We Stand Today
By May 2026, the USS Nimitz carrier strike group is in the Caribbean. Raúl Castro has been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice. A sitting American congressman has publicly stated that the indictment provides legal grounds for a military removal. The Secretary of State is broadcasting messages in Spanish to the Cuban people, framing a man-made energy catastrophe as the natural consequence of their government’s choices.
This is where more than sixty years of policy has arrived. Not at resolution. Not at the collapse of the Cuban government Washington has long sought. But at the edge of something more dangerous — a militarised confrontation that Caribbean nations, and all people of the Global South, have the clearest interest in preventing.
Understanding how we got here is not an academic exercise. It is the necessary foundation for any honest conversation about what comes next.
https://i0.wp.com/592guardian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_9962.jpg?fit=1170%2C699&ssl=16991170Editorhttps://592guardian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/img_9918-300x150.pngEditor2026-05-24 07:35:042026-05-24 10:54:40THE AGGRESSOR IN THE MIRROR: How Washington Manufactures the “Cuba Threat” While Strangling a Nation
Ekaa Hrim Quarry’s response to the allegations against it has the unmistakable odor of a cover-up in motion, not a company determined to confront wrongdoing. What began as serious complaints from 38 Indian workers about long hours, poor living conditions, low pay, and the handling of their passports is now being dressed up in the language of reassurance, bureaucratic process, and selective explanation. But the central question remains unanswered: if the passports were handed over voluntarily for safekeeping, why did it take intervention from outside the company to get them back? That is not how ordinary employer-employee “safekeeping” works; that is how pressure gets applied until the optics become too dangerous to ignore.
Even more troubling is the eagerness with which the company appears to be preempting the most sensitive parts of the inquiry. A worker has died. The company says it was a heart attack. Perhaps it was. But in a matter this serious, nobody with any sense of public responsibility should be rushing to wrap a final ribbon around a death that ought to be properly examined by the competent authorities. When a company is under scrutiny for possible exploitation, any attempt to present a cause of death as settled before the investigation is complete raises immediate suspicion. It is not transparency. It is narrative management.
And then there is the political choreography. In cases like this, power rarely announces itself bluntly. It shows up as delay, dilution, soft language, and official faces standing between the public and the truth. The Minister of Labour, in this instance, has been forced into the role of front-facing shield, the public buffer through which the matter is being processed and softened. That in itself should concern the country. If intervention was needed to return passports, then the problem was never administrative housekeeping. It was control. If workers had to complain before action was taken, then the system did not detect the abuse; it responded to pressure after the fact.
This is how these matters are so often buried: not by outright denial alone, but by procedural fog, managed statements, and the quiet hope that public attention will move on before accountability takes root. That cannot be allowed here. The allegations are too grave, the power imbalance too obvious, and the explanations too convenient. A company does not get to invoke “safekeeping” after documents are withheld. It does not get to pronounce on a cause of death as though it were the final medical authority. And it does not get to treat the ministry’s intervention as proof that the matter has been handled. If anything, the intervention proves the opposite: that without outside pressure, the workers’ complaints might have remained exactly where the powerful prefer such complaints to be—buried, diluted, and forgotten.
What is required now is not more performative calm. It is a transparent, independent, and uncompromising inquiry into every allegation raised by these workers. Anything less would confirm what many already suspect: that when the accused have access to power, the system bends first, and explains later.
https://i0.wp.com/592guardian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_0169-1.jpg?fit=400%2C450&ssl=1450400Editorhttps://592guardian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/img_9918-300x150.pngEditor2026-05-23 11:35:042026-05-23 11:43:26Safekeeping or Silence? Ekaa Hrim, the Passport Question, and the Smell of a Cover-Up
Georgetown finds itself at the fulcrum of a geopolitical contest it did not invite — and must now navigate with extraordinary skill
The timing was impossible to ignore. While President Ali’s administration was exchanging pleasantries and promises with U.S. Undersecretary Helberg in Georgetown last week, Chinese Ambassador Yang Yang was quietly commandeering an entire column in Guyana’s State-owned newspaper — methodically dismantling U.S. Congressman Gabe Evans recent criticisms of Chinese influence in this country. Two superpowers. One small nation. And a government that appears to be smiling at both while hoping neither notices.
Make no mistake — what Ambassador Yang’s op-ed represents is not merely diplomatic boilerplate. It is a carefully calibrated assertion of China’s irreplaceable footprint in Guyana: thirteen billion dollars in cumulative investment, six regional hospitals, the Demerara River Bridge, 300 medical professionals treating over 1.3 million patients, and 54 years of unbroken diplomatic relationship. That accounting was not published for Guyanese readers. It was published for Washington — a message delivered through Georgetown’s own State media that China is not merely present in Guyana, but embedded, entrenched, and unapologetic about it.
That the Ali government granted that platform is itself the story. A government fully comfortable in Washington’s embrace does not extend its State media to a Chinese Ambassador directly rebutting a sitting U.S. Congressman. That editorial decision reveals a quiet unease in Castellan Court — an anxiety about being seen to choose sides in a contest rapidly escalating across the entire Global South. Georgetown is not projecting confidence. It is hedging. And Washington, a city that reads diplomatic signals for sport, will have noted it.
Guyana has been catapulted, almost overnight, from a small upper-coast nation most of the world could not locate on a map, to one of the most strategically consequential countries in the Western Hemisphere. Oil changed the economics. But geography — and the great-power scramble it triggered — changed everything else. This is Pandora’s Box. And it was opened not by Georgetown, but by the barrel beneath the Stabroek Block.
Congressman Evans remarks, whatever their specific intent, were an early signal that Washington is paying close attention to the depth of Chinese penetration in Guyana’s infrastructure, healthcare, and public life. Ambassador Yang’s swift, detailed rebuttal — framed in the warm language of South-South solidarity and mutual benefit — was Beijing’s equally deliberate signal that it has no intention of retreating quietly. Both messages landed in the same week. In the same small country. That is not coincidence. That is competition. The question now is not whether Guyana must choose between Washington and Beijing. The question is whether Guyana is sophisticated enough to avoid choosing at all — and to extract maximum benefit from both relationships simultaneously.
History offers instructive precedents. Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew masterfully cultivated American security guarantees while deepening Chinese economic engagement, surrendering its sovereignty to neither orbit.
Rwanda has leveraged competing international partnerships to finance internal development largely on its own terms. The small nation need not be the pawn — if its leadership is disciplined, unsentimental, and refuses to be captured by either flag.
Guyana’s extraordinary advantage in this moment is its indispensability to both sides. Washington wants Guyana as a democratic, English-speaking, oil-rich anchor of American influence in a region where China has made alarming inroads. Beijing wants Guyana as living proof that Belt and Road delivers, that South-South cooperation is not neo-colonialism, and that Global South nations choose China freely. Both need Georgetown’s cooperation. Both need Georgetown’s validation. That is leverage — real leverage, of the kind small nations rarely possess and frequently squander. But leverage is only valuable when the hand holding it is steady and the mind directing it is clear. Guyana must be prepared to say plainly to Washington: we are a sovereign nation, not a satellite, and our Chinese infrastructure partnerships serve our people’s development — not Beijing’s military ambitions. And to Beijing: your investments are welcome, your medical brigades are appreciated, but Guyana’s democratic institutions, its laws, and its sovereign trajectory are not negotiable concessions in any relationship.
That is not hostility to either power. That is the language of a nation that knows its worth. Soft diplomacy — the kind that builds genuine relationships across multiple capitals, makes a nation useful to many rather than owned by one, and keeps all doors open without walking through any of them blindly — is not naivety. For a nation of Guyana’s size and surging wealth, it may be the only strategy that truly works.
What Guyana cannot afford is the absence of a doctrine altogether. Waving warmly at American delegations by day while publishing Beijing’s talking points by night, and calling that a foreign policy, is not balance. It is drift. And drift, in the currents now moving through this hemisphere, is how small nations lose their footing entirely.
Ambassador Yang’s column was eloquent. Undersecretary Helberg’s visit was cordial. But between those two events lies a question that will define Guyana’s next generation: In whose world does Guyana intend to live — and on whose terms?
If the answer is our own — and it must be — then the work of building and publicly articulating that posture cannot be deferred another day. Guyana needs a coherent, published foreign policy doctrine. It needs diplomats who speak that doctrine fluently in Beijing, Washington, Brussels, and Brasília alike. And it needs a citizenry informed enough to hold its government accountable to it. Guyana did not ask to become a theatre of great power competition. But here we are — centre stage, oil-rich, and watched. The nation that navigates this moment with discipline and vision will emerge stronger, wealthier, and genuinely sovereign. The nation that simply reacts — smiling at whoever last knocked on the door — risks becoming exactly what both sides, in their different ways, would prefer it to be.
Beneath the rhetoric lies a familiar reality—public losses, private gains, and political survival
There is a dangerous and intellectually dishonest narrative taking root in Guyana—one that seeks to chain the survival of a failing, state-subsidised sugar industry to the success of a highly profitable private rum company.
Prime Minister Mark Phillips’ claim that Guyana “cannot produce world-class rum without sustaining sugar production” is not only misleading—it is a calculated deflection from the real issue: decades of unchecked public spending on an industry that has consistently failed to justify its cost. Let us deal in facts, not sentiment.
GuySuCo has absorbed tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies over the past three decades. Year after year, it has failed to produce sugar at a cost competitive with global prices. It remains structurally inefficient, operationally challenged, and financially dependent on the Treasury for survival.
In stark contrast stands Demerara Distillers Limited (DDL)—a private, profit-making corporation that has successfully repositioned itself in the global premium rum market. It has done what efficient enterprises do: adapt, innovate, and grow. But here is the contradiction the Prime Minister refuses to confront. If DDL’s success truly depends on sugar, then why is the Guyanese taxpayer being asked to subsidize that dependency? Why is a private company’s supply chain risk being transferred onto the public balance sheet?
Serious businesses do not operate this way. They secure their inputs. They invest in their supply chains. They acquire or partner where necessary to ensure stability and control. If molasses is as indispensable as the government claims, then DDL should be at the forefront of acquiring, restructuring, or directly investing in sugar production. That is what vertical integration looks like. That is what responsibility looks like. Anything less is a quiet but deliberate socialization of cost and privatization of profit.
And the question that exposes the fragility of the Prime Minister’s argument is this: what happens when the subsidies stop? If a future administration—faced with mounting fiscal pressures or shifting priorities—decides it can no longer justify injecting billions into GuySuCo, does DDL cease operations? Or does it simply source molasses from the international market, as any rational business would? The answer is obvious—and it dismantles the entire premise.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth at the heart of this policy posture: this is not economics. This is politics. The continued subsidization of sugar has long functioned as an electoral instrument—preserving jobs in key constituencies, sustaining rural economic dependencies, and maintaining a support base that is politically valuable. In that context, the invocation of rum is not an economic argument; it is a convenient narrative, designed to make an unsustainable policy appear strategically necessary.
A political necessity is being dressed up as an economic imperative.
Yes, sugar is part of Guyana’s history. Yes, rum is part of its identity. But history cannot be financed indefinitely by taxpayers, and identity cannot be used to obscure fiscal irresponsibility.
If the government believes sugar has a future, it must present a transparent, time-bound plan for viability, with measurable outcomes and accountability. If it does not, then it must stop constructing artificial linkages to justify its continued existence. Guyanese are not blind to this contradiction. They are being asked, year after year, to fund losses they do not control, for benefits that are politically distributed but economically unsound.
Guyana cannot build a modern economy on this foundation. It is not strategy. It is subsidy without end, sustained by political convenience and disguised as national pride—and it is time that fiction is called out for what it is.
The question is no longer whether rum depends on sugar. The question is why the Guyanese taxpayer is being asked to carry a burden that private enterprise itself is unwilling to assume.
When an unelected REO does the work of elected Regional officials, it is not governance — it is the PPP’s velvet-gloved coup against democracy in Region 10.
The photographs tell a story that no government press release will ever dare to tell. A newly appointed Regional Executive Officer — an unelected civil servant, a political appointee who has never once placed his name before the people of Region 10 — is pictured tramping through communities, consulting with residents, inspecting drains, and conducting field visits. On the surface, it looks like diligence. Look closer, and it is something far more sinister.
That is the work of the Regional Chairman and Vice-Chairman. It is constitutionally mandated, democratically earned work — belonging to the elected representatives of the We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) party, who won the Regional Democratic Council of Region 10 fair and square at the 2025 local government elections. The people of Linden and its surrounding communities spoke. They chose their representatives. And the PPP-led government, apparently allergic to the democratic verdict wherever it does not favour them, has decided those representatives simply will not function.
The REO Is Not a Chairman. The Constitution Says So. Let us be unambiguous about what a Regional Executive Officer is, and what he is not. The REO is the Accounting Officer of the Regional Democratic Council. He is an administrator — appointed, not elected — tasked with managing the financial and administrative machinery of the RDC. His role is to serve the Regional Chairman and the democratically constituted Regional Administration. He is a functionary. He is not a policymaker. He is certainly not a substitute Chairman.
The Regional Democratic Council is a creature of the Constitution of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana. Chapter 7, Article 72 of that Constitution establishes Local Democratic Organs as part of the architecture of participatory governance in this country. The elected Chairman and Vice-Chairman derive their authority directly from the people. No President, no Minister of Local Government, and no hand-picked REO can lawfully strip them of that authority — not without tearing pages from the very Constitution the PPP government swore to uphold. What is happening in Region 10 is precisely that — a tearing of pages.
Victimization Dressed in a High-Visibility Vest The PPP’s strategy is not new. It has been deployed before, against other regions, against other opposition-controlled councils. Where they cannot win at the ballot box, they strangle through administration. Resources are withheld. Statutory allocations are delayed. And when all else fails, they empower the REO — their man, their appointee — to simply do the job of the elected officials, rendering the Chairman and Vice-Chairman ceremonial figureheads with titles but no territory.
This is victimization. Not the kind that is loud and obvious — no one is being arrested, no office has been padlocked.
This is the creeping, bureaucratic, suffocating kind of victimization that is designed to frustrate, to humiliate, and ultimately to delegitimize a duly elected Regional Administration in the eyes of its own constituents. If residents see the REO in the field addressing their concerns while their Chairman is nowhere to be found — not because he refuses to serve, but because he is being systematically locked out of the tools and authority needed to serve — what conclusion are they meant to draw? That is the calculation. That is the intention.
The Government Cannot Have It Both Ways This administration speaks endlessly of constitutional governance. President Ali invokes the rule of law at every press conference and international forum. Ministers lecture the opposition about respecting state institutions. Yet here, in Region 10, a constitutional body — the Regional Democratic Council — is being functionally neutered by the very government that claims to be democracy’s guardian.
You cannot celebrate the Constitution on Independence Day and desecrate it on every other day of the year. You cannot demand that opposition parties respect electoral outcomes nationally while engineering the collapse of those same outcomes at the regional level. The hypocrisy is not merely breathtaking — it is dangerous. It tells every Guyanese citizen who does not carry a PPP membership card that their vote has a ceiling, that democracy in this country is conditional, and that the Constitution is a document of convenience rather than a covenant of governance.
Region 10 Deserves Better. Guyana Deserves Better. The 592 Guardian calls on the Minister of Local Government and Regional Development to immediately cease and desist from any directive — formal or informal — that empowers the REO of Region 10 to usurp the functions constitutionally belonging to the elected Regional Chairman and Vice-Chairman.
We call on the Integrity Commission and the relevant oversight bodies to investigate whether the conduct of the REO, and those who have directed him, constitutes a breach of the constitutional order.
We call on civil society, the Bar Association of Guyana, and all defenders of democratic governance to speak with one voice: what is happening in Region 10 is not administration. It is occupation.
And we say to the people of Region 10 — your vote was not wasted. Your mandate was real. The attempt to erase it is the clearest possible evidence that those in power fear what you represent: an independent, determined electorate that will not be bought, bullied, or bypassed.
That is a power no REO, however willing, can ever take from you.
https://592guardian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/img_9918-300x150.png00Editorhttps://592guardian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/img_9918-300x150.pngEditor2026-05-22 08:47:292026-05-22 08:47:29A Servant of the State Has Become an Instrument of Suppression
President Irfaan Ali says he is “not playing politics with potholes.” It is a neat line—clean, memorable, and designed to reassure.
But governance is not theatre. And the reality unfolding in Georgetown tells a more complicated story.
The decision to unilaterally assume control of more than 50 city roads is not just about fixing infrastructure. It is about power—how it is exercised, how it is expanded, and how easily it can blur the line between public service and political strategy.
Let us not pretend otherwise.
No one disputes that Georgetown’s roads need urgent attention. Citizens have endured years of neglect, and any effort to improve infrastructure should, in principle, be welcomed. But good governance is not defined by outcomes alone—it is defined by process, legitimacy, and respect for institutions.
And this is where the administration falters.
Political authority is not earned by wresting control of municipal assets under the banner of efficiency. That is not leadership. That is the use of central power to override local
governance—because it is convenient, because it is expedient, and perhaps, because it is politically advantageous.
Because every time central government sidesteps or diminishes a locally elected body, it sends a message: that the voice of the people at that level can be bypassed when it becomes inconvenient.
That is a dangerous precedent.
If the administration believes the City Council is incapable of managing Georgetown, then there is a democratic remedy readily available—return to the people.
Anything less risks being seen not as governance, but as encroachment.
And while the President speaks of long-term planning and integrated transport systems, the immediate reality is far more visible: freshly paved roads that will, inevitably, be credited to central government. Optics matter in politics, and infrastructure is among the most powerful political tools any administration can wield.
Which is precisely why this moment demands scrutiny.
True transformation lies in confronting the structural inequities that continue to define everyday life for many Guyanese—stagnant wages, gaps in healthcare, uneven access to quality education, and the unresolved question of whether the country’s oil wealth is being maximized for its people.
These are not as visible as asphalt. They do not deliver immediate political dividends. But they are the measures by which leadership is ultimately judged.
The risk here is not that Georgetown’s roads are being repaired. The risk is that the method chosen undermines the very democratic principles that give governance its legitimacy.
Power, if it is to be respected, must also be restrained.
President Ali insists this is not politics.
But when control is expanded without consent, when institutions are bypassed rather than strengthened, and when visibility aligns so neatly with political advantage, the public is entitled—indeed obligated—to question that claim.
Yours truly will continue to defend not just development, but the democratic framework within which it must occur.
No amount of administrative maneuvering can substitute for democratic legitimacy. The People’s Progressive Party/Civic may assume control of streets, expand its administrative reach, and reshape the operational map of Georgetown—but it cannot rewrite the political reality that has defined the city for decades.
Because political power, in any democracy worthy of the name, is not secured through the gradual absorption of authority. It is earned—openly, competitively, and decisively—at the ballot box.
What is unfolding now risks creating a distinction the public will not ignore: control without consent.
Yes, roads may be paved. Yes, projects may be completed. Yes, visibility may increase. But none of these amount to validation. None of these confer the moral or political authority that only the electorate can grant.
If anything, they sharpen the contrast.
Because when a government exercises power in spaces it has historically failed to win, without first returning to the people for a mandate, the question is unavoidable: is this governance—or is this substitution?
The answer will not be found in infrastructure.
It will be found in whether the administration is willing to subject its ambitions in Georgetown to the only test that truly matters—free, fair, and fully contested elections.
Editor’s Note: This article was first published in March 2026. These streets were unilaterally taken from the City under the guise of development. Two months later, the true motives behind these actions have become evident.
