THE STATE THAT CANNOT SAY NO

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

THE STATE

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar —September 2026

Part IV — The Regulator Walks Away

On September 7, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission wrote to Toshao Nikita Miller to say it was stepping back. GGMC Commissioner Newell Dennison’s letter — copied to Minister of Natural Resources Vickram Bharrat ; offered no finding, no accounting, and no acknowledgment of who had done what to whom. “The initiative for a mediated solution between the parties appears to have been overtaken by developments and circumstances affecting both sides,” Dennison wrote. The Council, he added, “remain[s] at liberty to pursue whatever legal avenues” it deems appropriate.

Copy of GGMC Letter to Village Council -Chinese Landing

It is worth sitting with that sentence. “Circumstances affecting both sides” is the language of a coin toss, not a mediation. It assigns no responsibility to a process that, on GGMC’s own record, broke down for a specific and undisputed reason: the Council had told GGMC it would not sit down while Vieira’s machinery remained on Tassawini Landing. That machinery did not leave. It moved — first blocked at Tassawini, then barged to Kariako in an attempt to enter by another route, then stopped there too. The Council’s precondition was never met. GGMC did not say so. It said only that things had changed for everyone.

This newsroom has already documented what preceded the collapse: a Guyana Geology and Mines Commission officer stationed on-site at Tassawini on August 21 who was, in the Council’s account, either unable or unwilling to stop Vieira’s equipment from entering. Under Section 53 of the Amerindian Act, GGMC is require; before it issues or permits activity on Village lands — to satisfy itself the mining will not cause harm. An officer who stands and watches equipment cross into titled land without intervening is not neutral. He is the Commission failing its own statutory duty in real time, and then, three weeks later, walking away from the table before that failure could be examined by anyone with the standing to ask about it.

That is what “unconscionable” looks like in a regulatory letter: not an absence of language, but the presence of exactly enough language to close a file.

A STANDARD SET BEFORE THE TEST BEGAN

Before any of this — before the machinery, before the barges, before Dennison’s letter; the South Rupununi District Council had already said what a fair process would require. Its statement, issued as the mediation was being organized, was not a verdict on what followed; it was a specification, offered in good faith, of what would need to be true for a mediated resolution to mean anything. Equal footing between the parties. Recognition of the Village Council as the community’s legitimate representative. Independent technical and legal advice, and adequate time to weigh it. A process addressing the underlying land, legal, and environmental questions — not merely the immediate confrontation.

And, at the center of it, free, prior and informed consent treated as the basis of any agreement, not as a signature collected after the fact to ratify a decision already made.

Neither SRDC nor the Amerindian Peoples Association has yet spoken to the collapse itself. That silence should not be read as agreement with how it ended. It is more likely the ordinary lag between an institutional statement and an institutional response — and this news-media will be watching for it. But the standard SRDC set down does not require their commentary to be applied. It can be measured against what is now a matter of public record.

Equal footing: a Village Council was asked to sit down with a mining operation still holding the machinery that had triggered the standoff in the first place — the precise imbalance the Council’s own precondition was designed to correct. Consent as a starting point, not a formality: the same operation had, weeks earlier, sought individual signatures from residents for a labour arrangement; nine residents and two non-residents, by the Council’s count outside the Village-Council-level process Section 48 of the Amerindian Act requires. A process addressing the underlying legal questions: the process ended before any of them were addressed, with the Council’s substantive land claim still sitting, unheard, before the Court of Appeal, more than three years after the 2021 High Court ruled against it on the merits.

By its own standard — set out before anyone knew how this would end — the process that just collapsed does not appear to have met the test.

WHAT “AT LIBERTY TO PURSUE LEGAL AVENUES” ACTUALLY MEANS

Dennison’s letter points the Council back toward the courts, as if that were a neutral off-ramp rather than the same road that has already failed it. The Council’s 2021 claim against GGMC and Vieira was dismissed on the merits — the High Court held that minerals vest in the state and that Vieira did not require the Council’s consent to access his permitted claims. That ruling has sat on appeal, without a hearing, since 2021. GGMC inviting the Council to pursue “legal avenues” is not an alternative to the mediation that just ended.

It is a redirection to a courtroom that has already ruled once and has not been heard from since — with no timeline for when, or whether, it will be again.

A regulator does not get to offer the courts as its exit strategy while the same courts sit on the very appeal that would resolve the underlying dispute. If GGMC believes the judiciary is the proper venue, it might ask, on the Council’s behalf, why the Court of Appeal has taken three years to not hold a hearing. It has not asked. It has simply stepped back and pointed.

— The Board