WE HEAR THE NOISE” IS NOT AN ANSWER.

WE HEAR THE NOISE” IS NOT AN ANSWER: TIGI  DEMANDS AN INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATION AND RECUSAL OF EDGHILL, INDAR, AND MARAD LEADERSHIP.

IMMEDIATE PRESS RELEASE 

 Transparency International Guyana Inc. The Amerindian Peoples Association Rescue Guyana and 592 Gurdian demand an IMO-led international investigation and the recusal of the ministers and agency heads whose oversight failed.

 THE SCALE OF THE FAILURE

The MV Barima capsized off the Pomeroon coast late Saturday, July 18, carrying far more people than the government first acknowledged. Initial reports placed 116 passengers and 17 crew aboard; that figure was later revised upward to 179 after officials reviewed boarding footage. As of this week, 27 bodies have been recovered, 69 people rescued, and 83 remain unaccounted for. The vessel was 89 years old.

The gap between the manifest and the true passenger count sits at the center of this tragedy, not its margins. Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill has himself called the discrepancy “criminal.” The captain and first engineer are in police custody after both reportedly tested positive for narcotics.

A TRAGEDY FORETOLD

The Amerindian Peoples Association said plainly what North-West residents have said for years: this was a tragedy waiting to happen. The route is used disproportionately by Indigenous Guyanese, for whom river travel is not a convenience but the only affordable way to reach medical care, school, and commerce in Georgetown. An 89-year-old vessel was allowed to keep carrying that population, undetected overloading and all.

CONTRADICTIONS AT THE TOP

Minister of Public Utilities and Aviation Deodat Indar — who, until September 2025, served as Minister within the Ministry of Public Works with shared responsibility for the Transport and Harbours Department — first stated categorically that the MV Barima was not overloaded, then reversed himself days later, alleging criminal conduct. A sitting minister cannot publicly prejudge the very facts an independent investigation exists to determine and then oversee that same investigation. The same conflict applies to Minister Edghill and to MARAD’s own leadership, who cannot credibly investigate their own regulatory failures.

Prime Minister Mark Phillips’s response, when asked directly whether Edghill should go, was that he “hears the noise” — while pointing to President Ali, who was out of the country in Canada when the disaster struck. That is not leadership. It is the delegation of accountability to an absent principal.

Safe transportation is not a privilege; it is a fundamental right that every person in Guyana deserves, regardless of whether they travel by road, air or river.

— Amerindian Peoples Association

TIGI JOINS THE CALL

Transparency International Guyana Inc., through Executive Member Fred Collins, has now added its voice to Rescue Guyana’s and the APA’s. Collins was direct: Guyanese have no appetite for another domestic inquiry that collapses into what he called a “circus maximus.”

The reference is not abstract. In May 2023, 20 children — most of them Indigenous girls — burned to death in the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory fire. A Presidential Commission of Inquiry followed. Three years later, families remain in the High Court, alleging the State pressured them into grossly inadequate settlements without independent legal advice, then fought to have their claims struck out entirely. That is the precedent Collins is naming: a domestic process that ended not in justice, but in the state litigating against grieving families for years. No one is prepared to watch that repeat.

WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW

TIGI, joined by civil society groups The Amerindian Peoples Association and Rescue Guyana — with the full backing of The 592 Guardian — demand:

1. An independent, impartial and objective international investigation led by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), staffed by global maritime experts with no institutional stake in the outcome — not a domestic Commission of Inquiry under government control.
2. The inclusion of international civil society organisations with an established presence in Guyana as full members of that Commission, not observers.
3. The immediate recusal of Minister Juan Edghill, Minister Deodat Indar, and MARAD’s senior leadership from any role in the investigation. If President Ali is sincere about the transparency and accountability, he has personally promised the families of the deceased, this is the minimum test of that sincerity — not a discretionary courtesy to ministers he appointed.
4. No repeat of the Mahdia model. The public will not accept another inquiry that produces a report while the state simultaneously fights its own citizens in court for years afterward.
5. Full public accounting of the manifest fraud — how dozens of additional souls went uncounted, who is responsible, and what enforcement follows.

A SEPARATE, UNVERIFIED CONCERN

Separately, reports circulating today allege that Opposition Member of Parliament Sherod Duncan was arrested at Charity, Essequibo, while operating a drone near the area where families are gathered awaiting news of loved ones. Duncan has reportedly said he was filming recovery vessels offshore, as he had done on prior days, when a police officer instructed him to stop; two senior officers then told him they were acting on instructions. The 592 Guardian has not independently verified this account and will update as it is confirmed. If accurate, it raises a legitimate question the government owes the public an answer to: why restrict press and public documentation at a site the state says it is handling with full transparency?

THE STAKES

Guyana’s institutions have exhausted the public’s trust. This is no longer a domestic accountability question alone — it is a call for the international community’s attention and assistance, so that the families of the MV Barima can get what the Mahdia families are still fighting for years later: the truth, and justice, without having to sue the state to get it.