The Barima Test Case: A Nation Weighs Its Dead Against Its Discretion

SMOKE AND FIRE — PART II OF III

The Barima Test Case: A Nation Weighs Its Dead Against Its Discretion

By Hem Kumar, Editor

Georgetown — August, 2026

This is the second of a three-part series examining Guyana’s oil-era governance through the lens of Bloomberg Opinion’s July 29, 2026 feature “Oil’s Resource Curse Hangs Heavy Over Guyana” by Juan Pablo Spinetto, read against The 592 Guardian’s own investigative record. Attributed excerpts below are drawn from Spinetto’s published column; all further findings are the Guardian’s own unless otherwise sourced. Some allegations described below remain sourced but not independently verified by this newsroom, and are labeled as such.

Juan Pablo Spinetto gave the MV Barima disaster four sentences. He had a week in Georgetown and a great deal of Guyana to cover — Exxon, the port at Berbice, the census, the ranch. Even so, what he chose to notice in those four sentences is instructive: the age of the vessel, the scale of the loss, the poor emergency response, and — the detail he singled out for its own clause — that  civil activists were briefly arrested for staging a peaceful demonstration during a vigil for the victims.

In a revealing display of the authorities’ low tolerance for dissent, three civil activists were briefly arrested for staging a peaceful demonstration during a vigil in solidarity with the victims.— JP Spinetto, Bloomberg Opinion, July 29, 2026

That sentence is the one a visiting columnist can write from a week of interviews and a news wire. It correctly identifies a reflex. What this news-media has spent the past two weeks establishing is that the reflex did not stop at a vigil. It runs through the funeral arrangements, the salvage decision, the parliamentary sitting, and now the Commission of Inquiry meant to investigate all of it.

WHAT BLOOMBERG SAW FROM THE OUTSIDE

Spinetto’s column places Barima inside a broader argument about “weak state capacity” and institutions under strain — accurate, and consistent with what this publication has documented in far greater granularity since the ferry went down on July 18.

He was not in the halls of the Arthur Chung Conference Centre on July 27, when the Joint Opposition marched into the National Assembly chamber in black, wearing placards bearing photographs of the dead, to demand the resignations of Public Works Minister Juan Edghill and Minister within Public Works Deodat Indar.

He did not witness the confrontation between Hadiyyah Mohamed, sister of Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed, and Prime Minister Mark Phillips, in which this publication has verified that Phillips personally told her to “get from here” before his own security made physical contact with her — contact Phillips himself then called off. Parliament proceeded, that same sitting, to pass a $54.9 billion appropriations bill. a $40 billion funding bill for the State Development Bank, and observe one minute of silence for an estimated 100 dead.

THE MEMORIAL QUESTION NOBODY ASKED FOR

Before any of that, this newsroom obtained a document being circulated to victims’ relatives: a pre-drafted “Declaration of Agreement — MV Barima as Memorial Site,” complete with a signature table for name of deceased, relative, relationship, address, phone, and signature.

It was in circulation before the government’s own stated family-consultation process had meaningfully begun. The 592 Guardian’s editorial on this point asked a direct question, and repeats it here: what is government afraid a floated MV Barima will show?

That question sharpened further after this new-media reviewed a still-unconfirmed account — sourced from a relative interviewed amid the July 29 Amerindian Peoples Association picket outside the Office of the President — alleging that the President personally told a grieving family they would be paid $200,000 for burial, and separately told them not to record photos or video on threat of police arrest.

This publication has not yet independently confirmed either claim and is awaiting a cleaner transcript before treating them as established. They are reported here as exactly what they are: a serious, sourced allegation still under review — not yet a 592 Guardian finding.

THE COMMISSION SWORN IN THE DARK

On July 30, President Ali unilaterally swore in a five-member Commission of Inquiry at State House: Chairman Justice Godfrey Phillip Smith of Belize, sworn in virtually; Captain Hamada Fouda of Jamaica; Nyree Dawn Alfonso, a Trinidad and Tobago attorney; Dr. Andrzej Jasionowski of Poland; and Rear Admiral (Ret’d) Hayden Pritchard of Trinidad and Tobago. No Commission Secretary has yet been named. The swearing-in proceeded without press access.

This newsmedia’s review of ND Alfonso and Associates’ own published case record finds that the firm’s March 2025 entry states Alfonso represented “the Owners” in a Supreme Court of Guyana matter — alongside Asif Hosein-Shah and Keoma Griffith, who is now Guyana’s Minister of Labour in the Ali administration.

Griffith’s individual attorney bio page on the firm’s website now returns a 404 error; a cached version confirms he was listed there as admitted to practice in both Guyana and Trinidad since 2016. The firm’s team page was modified on July 25, and its contact page on July 26 — in the days immediately preceding Alfonso’s July 30 swearing-in as a Barima Commissioner.

A commission sworn in the dark cannot be trusted to bring what happened on the Barima into the light.— The 592 Guardian, editorial, July 30, 2026

A second, more serious thread runs alongside this one, and this publication is explicit that it remains an allegation, not an established fact: sourcing describes Griffith as having been engaged by the Attorney General’s Chambers to represent Mahdia fire victims’ families in compensation negotiations, where families now allege in ongoing litigation that they were coerced into accepting a package Griffith presented as government’s best and final offer.

This news-media’s published piece treated Griffith’s subsequent ministerial appointment as a timeline juxtaposition worth placing on the record — not as a proven causal claim of reward for outcome. Alfonso herself has no documented connection to the Mahdia matter; her only established link is as a professional associate of Griffith’s at the same Trinidad firm, a link the firm’s own website was edited to obscure in the run-up to her Barima appointment.

TWO WAYS OF SEEING THE SAME COUNTRY

Put Bloomberg’s four sentences next to the Guardian’s two weeks of reporting and the difference is not one of disagreement. It is one of altitude. Spinetto, writing at the level of a nation’s institutional trajectory, correctly clocked that Guyana’s authorities show “low tolerance for dissent.”

This news-media, writing from inside the specific case, can show what that intolerance costs in practice: a memorial consent form drafted before consultation, a burial-cost allegation still pending confirmation, a Prime Minister’s security making contact with a grieving woman in a public building, and a Commission of Inquiry sworn in without press access, containing a commissioner whose firm scrubbed a colleague’s public profile in the same week the President appointed that colleague’s law partner to investigate the deaths of a hundred people.

This publication has formally requested that the Office of the President disclose its commissioner vetting records, that Alfonso clarify the Griffith association on the record, and that a Commission Secretary be named without further delay. As of this writing, none of the three requests has been answered.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Bloomberg’s column ends its treatment of Guyana’s institutions with a diagnostic instrument — the Natural Resource Charter’s twelve benchmarks, several of them, in Spinetto’s own account, only partially met.

Part III of this series turns to that same diagnostic question through the instrument built to answer it domestically: Guyana’s electoral machinery, the unresolved dispute over Article 161(3)(b) and the composition of GECOM, and what the Carter Center’s own findings — cited approvingly in Spinetto’s piece — leave out.

This is Part II of a three-part series. Part I: “The Elite Capture Story” has run. Part III: “Democracy on Paper” will follow.

— The Board