Gold Before Guns

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦EDITORIAL♦ June  2026

Gold Before Guns: The Real Story Behind Guyana’s Arms Crisis

Thirty-three smuggled AK-47s have reignited fears of a Venezuelan invasion plot. The more uncomfortable explanation is already embedded in Guyana’s own gold economy — and in the officials who keep it running.

Former Assistant Commissioner of Police Paul Slowe was right this week to call the discovery of 33 smuggled AK-47s — ten on the Corentyne in May, twenty-three at Schoonard three weeks later, all but one stripped of their serial numbers — a national security emergency rather than an ordinary policing matter. He was right, too, that the answer runs through Interpol, the United States’ Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and an honest accounting of who inside the state may have let the shipments through. Where the public conversation has gone wrong is in the theory it has chosen to chase.

An anonymous defense and security source told Demerara Waves this week that the rifles are most plausibly the leading edge of a Venezuelan hybrid-warfare campaign: sleepers embedded among an estimated five thousand Venezuelan men already working across Guyana, positioned to “sow chaos and disorder” ahead of the International Court of Justice’s year-end ruling on the 1899 Arbitral Award. It is a dramatic theory, and not an impossible one, given that Guyana Defence Force patrols have already taken fire along the Cuyuni River and a string of unexplained bombings — the GPL substation, the Ruimveldt police station, a Regent Street gas station blast that killed a child — remain unsolved. But it asks Guyanese to believe that interim President Delcy Rodríguez, mid-negotiation with Washington over reopening Venezuela’s mining sector to foreign capital, would gamble that relationship on a covert smuggling run through Georgetown’s own wharves.

R.Evan Ellis, the U.S. Army War College’s Latin America research professor who has tracked the Essequibo dispute since well before last year’s referendum scare, offers a more disciplined read of the same facts. The guns, he argues, are more plausibly being moved by criminal networks — Venezuelan, Brazilian, Colombian — fleeing enforcement pressure now bearing down on them across the region, not by a state plotting an invasion it cannot win. Neither Rodríguez nor her brother Jorge, who chairs Venezuela’s National Assembly, has any incentive to torch a fragile opening to Washington over Essequibo right now. That distinction matters, because it points to where Guyana’s actual vulnerability lives: not in Caracas’s intentions, but in its own gold economy.

Guyana has watched this mechanism before, only from a different direction. When Brazil’s government moved against the garimpeiros occupying Yanomami land, the miners did not go home; they scattered across the Guiana Shield, into Venezuela, Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana’s own interior. Venezuela’s troops are now running the identical operation in reverse, clearing armed groups out of the Las Claritas gold fields in Bolívar state — the same district that borders both Guyana and Brazil — as part of Caracas’s own push to reopen its mining sector to foreign investors. There is no reason to expect the men displaced from those fields will behave any differently than the garimpeiros did. The only real question is whether Guyana is a harder landing zone than it was last time, or an easier one.

The evidence says easier. Long before these rifles surfaced, Venezuelan-linked traders were already operating inside the illicit gold economy running through Guyana’s southern border regions, including Region 9, with a level of comfort that should embarrass any functioning regulator.

That is not a hypothetical for this news platform  It is the same institutional posture this media-source has spent months documenting around Mazoa Hill and Marudi. An arms pipeline riding on top of an already-tolerated gold pipeline is not a second national security failure. It is the same failure, with a body count attached.

This is what makes Slowe’s diagnosis half right and too generous by half. Guyana’s security apparatus is not simply under-resourced against a sophisticated foreign adversary. It has spent years declining to police a smuggling economy that was already running through its own ports, mining districts, and licensing offices, and is now expressing alarm that the same corridors are moving rifles as well as ore. Tracing serial numbers with Interpol’s help, as Slowe recommends, is necessary. It will not explain why the corridor existed in the first place, or who benefited from keeping it open.

The official response so far offers little reassurance that anyone intends to find out. The Home Affairs Minister’s response to the busts amounted to “still assessing,” and her predecessor offered nothing beyond a refusal to comment. President Ali has promised only that regional and international partners will be brought into the investigation, with no timeline given and no lead agency named, and no answer yet to the opposition’s basic question of how the weapons cleared a port that, by the government’s own admission, still lacks the scanners to catch them. Parliament, for its part, has not asked a single public question about how a cross-border gold-and-arms network operates inside Guyana with this much room to move.

Until it does, Guyana’s national security emergency will remain exactly what successive administrations have allowed it to become: a crisis imported through channels the state itself left open, and shows no apparent urgency to close.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board