Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo and Opposition Leader Joseph Harmon are both accusing each other of having ties to the drug underworld, days after almost 1000 pounds of cocaine was found in an aircraft at Orealla.
The Opposition, the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU+AFC) following its defeat at the March 2020 polls, and indeed before that, often accused the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) of having ties to the criminal underworld. Following two major busts this year, APNU+AFC officials are on record positing the “return of the drug trade”.
But Jagdeo, during a press conference yesterday, dismissed this as ‘propaganda’, moments before leveling accusations of his own against the APNU. He told the media that the APNU had connections with criminal elements in neighbouring Suriname, who provided arms to criminals in Guyana during the crime wave that gripped the country between 2002 and 2009. The VP has on numerous occasions accused the APNU of providing support to ‘criminals’ who had ‘sought refuge’ at Buxton on the East Coast of Demerara during that time which saw the killing of over 20 police officers and numerous civilians.
“I’ve seen APNU now with a new thing: oh, the PPP is back, so cocaine would flourish. That’s their new propaganda. But we know what has happened. The people in the law enforcement agencies are telling us now how they had to stand down on some major issues. Now, we know that from a long time ago, that APNU had connections in Suriname with many cocaine persons, who were supplying the weapons a long time ago. If you look at the police reports from that period when we had the so-called troubles in Buxton, you’d see that those were the same persons who were supplying weapons to the criminals there and that you had many visits to them from many senior people in APNU. So, they had connections,” Jagdeo said.
Harmon later released a statement saying that Jagdeo has “no moral authority to make baseless accusations about political connections to the drug underworld unless he is coming clean about the PPP’s well-documented entanglement with the drug world”.
The Opposition Leaders said that it was under Jagdeo’s government that Guyana was internationally recognized as a ‘narco-state’ and it was Jagdeo and the PPP/C who adamantly refused to permit the United States Drug Enforcement Agency to set up an office in Guyana. It was under the APNU+AFC Coalition Government that this office was established.
“In less than a year, we have witnessed not only Guyana returning to being a narco-state but the return of brazen assassinations within feet of State House. During the PPP’s tenure the Phantom Squad, operated by the drug underworld, wreaked havoc, and a sitting PPP minister, Leslie Ramsammy, used government letterhead to approve the importation of spy equipment for a known drug lord.
Mr. Jagdeo is fully aware that the PPP has a sordid history of deep association with the drug underworld and the nation has witnessed Guyana regressing to being a major transshipment point for the global cocaine trade with busts in Germany, Belgium, Jamaica, and multiple flights laden with cocaine having crashed within the country’s borders. Mr. Jagdeo’s attempts at obfuscation are weak and repugnant and he must answer for his regime’s lax approach to drug enforcement,” Harmon wrote.
