THE STATE THAT CANNOT SAY NO-Part V — The Land Was Never For Sale 

THE STATE THAT CANNOT SAY NO

Part V — The Land Was Never For Sale 

Copy of grant recorded in Sept 1991 – specifically states ( from time immemorial been in occupation) by the community of Chinese Landing

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

All of these are consent questions. None of them asks the prior question — whether Tassawini was ever, in law, available to be sold in the first place. It was not.

Buried in the Mining Act’s current Section 111 is a doctrine with a name almost nobody uses anymore: quiet enjoyment. Its lineage runs back to 1903, when the colonial Mining Ordinance declared that “all land occupied or used by the Aboriginal Indians, and all land necessary for the quiet enjoyment by the Aboriginal Indians of any Indian Settlement, shall be deemed to be lawfully occupied by them.”

The wording survived, nearly untouched, through the 1905 Mining Regulations and into the Mining Act that governs Guyana today. Land necessary for an Indigenous community’s quiet enjoyment is not land the State owns and may dispose of at auction. It is land the law already treats as theirs.

In 1995, when the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission auctioned Prospecting Permit 14—95 to Wayne Vieira, it did so on the understanding that Tassawini was State Land. It was not. Chinese Landing had held legal title to that ground since 1976 — nineteen years before the auction GGMC conducted. The permit forms GGMC itself issued carried a saving clause excepting “all lands lawfully located or held under title.”

Tassawini was such land. The auction excepted the very ground it purported to sell.

This is not a new argument invented for this newsroom. It is the argument made, with full documentary support, in a peer-reviewed study published this year by researchers at the University of British Columbia, drawing on thirty years of Chinese Landing’s own paper archive — correspondence the Council kept without an office, without a filing cabinet, without the infrastructure most institutions take for granted, because an institution that held it would not need the villagers to.

A SECOND SPINE, INDEPENDENT OF THE FIRST

Article 36 commits the State to “improve the environment… in the interest of the present and future generations.” Article 149J goes further, making that commitment a right rather than an aspiration: every citizen has an entitlement to an environment “not harmful to his or her health or well-being,” and a duty on the State to take reasonable measures to secure it.

Read together with Article 154A — the provision, already central to this series, that makes Guyana’s ratified international human rights treaties domestically enforceable — these articles do not merely describe an aspiration. They describe a standard the State has bound itself to meet, and against which Tassawini can be measured directly.

The measurement is not favorable. This publication  has already reported the government’s own 2023 mercury testing: of forty-six households approached, twenty-three people were actually sampled. Five came back safe. One measured ten times the safe threshold. Read plainly, that is seventy-eight percent of those tested carrying unsafe mercury levels in their blood — in a government report whose own author concluded there was “no alarming trend toward mercury toxicity,” reasoning only that no single sample reached the acute poisoning threshold.

AN AGENCY THAT WAITS TO BE TOLD

Guyana’s Environmental Protection Act has required an environmental impact assessment for mining operations like Vieira’s since 1996 — thirty years, under Section 11 and the Act’s own Schedule 4. It is not optional, and it is not contingent on a complaint. It is a precondition the law attaches to the activity itself.

There is no public record of one ever having been conducted at Tassawini.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s posture across this entire thirty-year dispute follows a pattern this newsroom has already documented in GGMC: an agency that acts only when instructed, and only in direct response to outside pressure, never on the strength of its own statutory mandate. The EPA’s name appears in this record exactly once with any independent weight; as one participant among several government bodies on the August 2023 fact-finding mission that followed the IACHR’s precautionary measures.

It did not arrive at Tassawini because the law required an assessment. It arrived because an international human rights body had already forced the government’s hand, and someone needed to be seen doing something. No comprehensive environmental or social impact assessment of the kind the Council itself requested from the IACHR — and the kind Section 11 has required all along; appears to have followed.

This is not an agency enforcing an environmental law. It is an agency attending a damage-control exercise organized by other people, for other reasons, and then going quiet again.

WHAT THIS DOES TO THE REST OF THE RECORD

None of this erases the consent failures already documented in this series — the 1998 Georgetown signing, the 2001 permits issued without a word to the Council, the 2026 individual-signature arrangement that bypassed the Village meeting Section 48 requires. Those remain what they were: proof that even after Tassawini was wrongly classified as available, nobody could manage to ask its owners honestly.

But two independent legal theories now converge on the same conclusion from different directions. One says the land was never the State’s to sell. The other says that whatever has happened on it since has violated a constitutional environmental duty the State owes to everyone, Indigenous or not.

Guyana has a comparator worth naming. In March 2024, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled against Peru for its decades-long failure to regulate the La Oroya smelter, finding that the State’s inaction itself violated residents’ right to a healthy environment.

Guyana is a signatory to the same regional human rights architecture. Article 154A does not let it treat that architecture as someone else’s problem.

— The Board