Selective Concern: A Year of Silence on Region 10 — From WIN, and Now From the Carter Center

Selective Concern: A Year of Silence on Region 10 — From WIN, and Now From the Carter Center

By Editor, The 592 Guardian

The Carter Center’s statement last  week reads, on its face, like the institution doing exactly what it has done in Guyana since 1992: watching, warning, and reminding officials of unfinished business. It expressed “considerable concern” over the impasse at the Guyana Elections Commission. It called for implementation of its own 2025 election report. It welcomed the Attorney General’s acknowledgment that the Constitutional Reform Act needs amending. All of it defensible. None of it wrong.

What the statement does not contain is the more urgent story.

A COUNCIL THAT HAS NEVER GOVERNED

Region 10 held its regional elections on September 1, 2025, alongside the national vote. We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) won the region outright — nine of eighteen seats, a plurality no other single party matched. The eighteen councillors were sworn in. Under the law, that council was then required to elect a Regional Chairman and Vice Chairman.

It has never happened.

The October 10, 2025 vote for Chairman produced a 9-9 tie between WIN’s Mark Goring and APNU’s Dominique Blair. The law is not silent on what happens next: the Regional Executive Officer is required to allow further rounds of voting until the tie is broken. Region 10’s REO did not do this. Nearly a year later, he still has not.

The consequences are not abstract. With no Chairman, no Vice Chairman, and no functioning council, the Regional Executive Officer proceeded to submit the 2026 regional budget without input or approval from the elected councillors — a budget covering a region of roughly 40,000 people, prepared and passed around the very representatives the people of Linden elected to prepare and pass it. WIN’s councillors have said plainly that no consultation occurred. Protests were held. Placards read “Swear in Goring.” “Respect my vote, respect my choice, REO.” None of it moved the administration.

This is not a procedural quarrel between parties who cannot agree on a date. It is a Regional Executive Officer — an appointed administrator — overriding the arithmetic of an election and the plain requirement of law, indefinitely, while the machinery of governance proceeds without the people residents chose.

Dr. Ryan Richards, WIN’s Member of Parliament, has documented this accurately and repeatedly: administrative overreach, elected representatives bypassed, a council paralyzed while budgets move forward regardless. He is not wrong. He has never been wrong. But as this newsroom  argued in response to his most recent statement, accuracy without action is impotence. Repetition, at some point, stops being advocacy and becomes complicity — not on Dr. Richards’ part alone, but on the part of every actor with standing to act and the means to do so.

RESIGNATION DRESSED UP AS LEADERSHIP

Before the Carter Center’s silence is examined, WIN’s own silence must be. For nearly a year, the party that won Region 10 has watched a Regional Executive Officer refuse to hold a lawfully required second round of voting, has watched its own councillors excluded from a regional budget process, and has responded almost entirely with statements — issued in the hope, it seems, that someone else would eventually step in and fix it. Freedom House. The Carter Center. Anyone but WIN itself.

That is not leadership. It is resignation dressed up as leadership.

When voters in Region 10 placed their mark against WIN’s name, that mark carried an unspoken contract: that the party would step up, in every conceivable way available to it, to lead. Constitutional remedies exist precisely for moments like this — judicial review, injunctive relief, a constitutional challenge to an REO acting outside his lawful authority. None of them require anyone’s permission. None of them require the Carter Center’s blessing. And yet, one year on, none of them have been utilized.

The comparison that makes this hardest to excuse is WIN’s own record elsewhere. On the issue of Indian immigrants caught up in trafficking allegations, WIN’s advocacy was immediate, sustained, and pointed — the kind of pressure campaign that moves an issue into the national conversation and keeps it there. That capacity clearly exists within the party. It was simply never applied to the eighteen thousand-plus voters of Region 10 who delivered WIN its only outright regional win in the country.

That contrast raises an uncomfortable but fair question: if this is how WIN responds when it holds a single region, what would its posture have been had it acceded to national leadership? A party’s conduct in the territory it actually controls is the most honest preview available of how it would govern more broadly. One year, no legal remedy sought, no litigation filed, no explanation offered — that is not a record that inspires confidence, and it demands a clear, direct explanation from WIN as to what conceivable reason has kept the courts off the table this long.

TOLD DIRECTLY, AND SILENT ANYWAY

Which brings us to the Carter Center.

The Center’s delegation, led by Board Chairperson Jason Carter — grandson of the institution’s founder — was in Guyana this week as a follow-up to its final report on the 2025 elections, meeting with a wide range of stakeholders to assess implementation of its own recommendations. According to Charles Sugrim, WIN’s campaign coordinator, WIN raised the Region 10 impasse directly with Jason Carter during that visit. Not with a junior staffer. Not through a written submission routed to a desk officer. With the Chairman of the Board himself.

The statement that followed addressed GECOM. It did not mention Region 10 at all.

“The omission is not an oversight. It is a choice.”

This is worth sitting with. The Carter Center is not a passive observer of Guyanese democracy; it has, by its own account, conducted more than a dozen missions here since 1992 and considers itself instrumental in the country’s democratic development.            Its statements carry institutional weight precisely because the organization has spent three decades building a reputation for saying difficult things plainly. When such an institution is told, in a direct meeting during a working visit, that an elected council has gone almost a year without its lawfully elected leadership — and responds days later with a statement that finds room to discuss constitutional reform, campaign finance, and the composition of a commission, but not that — the omission is not an oversight. It is a choice.

We are not speculating about whether the issue reached the delegation. It did. The question this newsroom  is now putting to Mr. Carter directly is simple: why did a concern raised with you personally not merit a single sentence in the statement your Center issued last week? Guyanese officials, and the tens of thousands of people governed without their chosen representatives in Region 10, deserve an answer that is not “outside the scope of this particular release.”

An institution that has stood for decades on the premise that its voice matters cannot then choose, selectively, when that voice will be used.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE CONCLUSION

None of this diminishes the legitimacy of the Carter Center’s GECOM concerns, which are real and which this news media  has covered extensively. But it does confirm something this publication has argued before: external validation was never going to be the mechanism that resolves Region 10. If a body with the Carter Center’s history and standing will not spend its institutional weight on a documented, year-long breach of electoral law it was told about directly, then the wait for outside pressure to fix this is over. It was arguably never going to work.—and WIN’s own year of waiting for it to work is the more damning story here.

It is worth noting, plainly, that no other media house in Guyana has addressed this intransigence — not WIN’s silence, not the Carter Center’s selective statement. That silence, too, is a choice, and this publication does not intend to make it.

That leaves the courts — the only lever still available to WIN that does not depend on someone else’s press release.

Judicial review of the REO’s refusal to conduct further rounds of voting. Injunctive relief compelling the council to convene. A constitutional challenge, if the administrative record supports one. These are not extreme measures. They are the ordinary instruments democracies provide for precisely this situation — when an administrator substitutes his own indefinite delay for the outcome an election produced, and every institutional actor with the standing to intervene, from Freedom House to the Carter Center, declines to.

In two weeks, Guyana will mark one year since the elections that were supposed to settle who governs Region 10. The people of Linden have waited that long already. Statements — from Dr. Richards, from this media room , from the Carter Center or anyone else — will not seat a Chairman. Only enforcement will. WIN said, after its January protests, that it would not stop until the election was concluded. Nearly seven months later, it must now finish what it started — not on a picket line, but in a courtroom.

Democracy in Guyana is not sustained by the frequency of statements condemning its erosion. It is sustained by what happens after those statements are ignored.

The 592 Guardian sought comment from the Carter Center on the omission of Region 10 from its August statement. This piece will be updated with any response.

— The Board