A lesson we must pay attention to

I WANT us to reflect for a moment, in our interest, on the full issue of illegal immigrants from mainly South America in this case risking all to enter America. NO, THIS ARTICLE IS NOT ABOUT PRESIDENT TRUMP! America will overcome President Trump, their systems are stronger than he is. It is about the grim possibilities that the full human story represents, of masses fleeing their homeland motivated by visions of greener pastures elsewhere.

Oh no, this is neither about Guyanese going ‘Backtrack’ to the countries we classify from the standpoint of our 10 National Regions, as the USA- Region11, and Region 12-the UK, to make it big and show people back home that we made it surrounded by all the conspicuous consumption as possible, no Guyanese would endure what these immigrants are expected to endure.

On Sunday, June 24, I watched the 60 minutes episode revolving around the separating of the children of the illegal immigrants, but the greater horror was the revelations that the Texan vigilante group revealed, that these people were dying, in this desperate push to get into America. The trip was life or death, many have died, yet they were willing to take a dying chance, because home had become a living hell, and many more will die.

The drug cartels had supplanted Governments, for a short while we witnessed that in this country. Life was cheapened, devalued and subject to the whims of thugs, from the street, in business and politics, human creatures without empathy or character, the same can be said of their callous senior political patrons. The enriching capacity of narcotics always preys on the hopelessness of the masses in a trinity format; as salvation, enforcers and eventually as victims.

That phenomenon is metamorphic from the result of the absence of in-depth vision from political cabals and social sycophants who are swayed by ideals of their self-interest status quo, rather than the holistic mandate. The alkaloid of the Coca plant is not new to Columbia from prehistoric times, nor is the knowledge of the addictive effects of modern chemical cocaine.

This article cannot capture the history of the proliferation of cocaine, except to identify the collapse of the textile industry in Medellin-Columbia, coupled with the post-Vietnam flower power development in America as triggers to cocaine as a significant competitor on the accepting American and European markets. Cocaine was, for internal political reasons in America, channelled into Afro American communities, as well as the mood of the cold war that facilitated alternate financing of revolutionary groups using cocaine. Any use of cocaine soon spirals out of control to become a national problem across ethnic and social lines.

In Columbia, the Medellin empire of the Ochoas rose as a welcoming economic solvent, then morphed into a vicious unstoppable cult of ‘Evil’ oppressive, murderous and counter-productive to the very humanity it had intended to liberate and is the ideal case study of the malevolent nature of Mama Koca.

Guyana must learn from this desperate immigration movement, driven by a chronic fear that defies the risks of death as a real possibility. Latin America remained in the colonial mould where the nexus between authoritarian Church and State established the status quo, unlike nations that permitted diverse religious tolerance where discourse and change became inevitable. The influx of wealthy Axis refugees after WWII did not help.

Institutional and Religious racism existed in the Latin belt longer without reform against tribal Indian and African populations than in the Anglophone colonial group.

The lesson we must learn from countries whose Independence preceded ours by over a hundred years in most cases, is the value and courage of our Independence leaders to apply unorthodox change to benefit our nation- that we were able to recognise and thwart inherited repressive subliminal legacies to shape the first semblances of nationhood to the point that when the cocaine brokers rose their heads aggressively and fearlessly in Guyana during the years when we became a Highly Indebted Nation, and in real sense that another economy emerged, with State approval and a body count of murder and gun battles like no other time in our history became the norm, coupled with the criminalisation of the State.

There were still Guyanese in the joint services and across political walls willing to work against the total Narco dominance that occurred in some Latin States. But we should not deceive ourselves and fail to recognise how swiftly people we know and expected more of did volunteer their souls for the right price to serve common citizens elevated by politics and drug money. I was astonished when a source disclosed to me recently that a legal mind I respect, recently had called law enforcement to plead for Ms.Daby not to be charged.

Our lesson must be, to persuade the awareness that every economic possibility emerging from the potential of our people must be explored for its earning capacity; to avoid the atmosphere that led right here to the devil’s parallel economy of cocaine, declared by sober minds as ‘The Third Scourge of Mankind’ that extracted so many youthful untimely deaths within our borders in such a short period. The after-effect of that era is still with us and will haunt the destabilising of our collective perceptions for a long time, despite the bold efforts of this administration.

In respect to the Latin citizens, our continental neighbours risking illegal entry through the borders of America, with a death toll percentage that no Guyanese would risk, it is too complicated to even attempt a rational and balanced comment in closing, that would not demand the volume of the very space of this article to complete.