THOUGH a child may not understand the deadly effects of consuming bottles of rum, a report of a 10-year-old boy dying from alcohol consumption in Baramita, points to one of several worrying situations in that community.This case was one of many highlighted in a report — ‘Impact of Mining: Survival Strategies for Interior Communities in Guyana’ — published by the Guyana Human Rights Association last November.
According to the report, substance abuse in Baramita has become somewhat of slow-motion genocide among the once proud Carib tribe there.
“It is like a slow-motion genocide. A genocide of the Carib people in slow motion, so much that we believe that by the turn of the next century, we may not have the Carib people here if it’s not arrested soon,” one resident was quoted as saying in the Human Rights report.
While it was highlighted that women in Baramita are heavier drinkers than men, the Guyana Chronicle understands that it is in this state of drunkenness that women become victims of sexual abuse and some remain unaware that they were abused.
A large number of citizens, burdened with troubles, turn to rum before counselling, and by the time they are ready to receive counselling, they are too drunk to communicate.
Counselling then becomes difficult, “because between all the uses of all these addictive substances to get a person to sit down to take counselling is a near impossibility,” one counsellor said.
The GHRA said over the past two centuries, “alcohol is the single most important cause of the disappearance of indigenous people….In Latin America alone, hundreds of tribal communities have disappeared due to alcohol,” and mining has been the major stimulus to alcohol consumption in hinterland regions.
Baramita came to popularity in 2015 for being the community with the single highest rate of suicide in Guyana, and according to the GHRA, a great number of suicides in the community are committed under the influence of alcohol.
DEEPLY TROUBLING
“… people are under the influence at all hours of the day and night. Even children 10 and 11 years old have been seen drunk. Girls of this age and younger are forced to prostitute. Young boys smoke and drink, an extreme case being that of a 10-year-old who drank himself to death.”
Cheap high wine is most commonly used, and marijuana smoking is widespread, even as mining has increased around the indigenous settlement and more strangers enter into the once private residential place.
“Mining brings money and the evils attached to it… the liquor and the alcohol in the highest concentration in which humans are capable of consuming alcohol, namely, high wine. This has been accompanied by the evil that go with it,” one resident said in the report.
That resident added that the situation of alcoholism is similar to some in coastland communities, where many individuals abuse cocaine and other harmful drugs.
“So I can say like in the coastlands we have ‘junkies’, but in Baramita the equivalent is ‘drunkies’ … especially the women when they are under the influence of alcohol, they don’t know what’s going on with them unless they are observed by someone, who actually see what is happening and then report it back to us.”
Others who observe what transpired in camps with women and girls who are victims of substance abuse, say they are given alcohol laced with narcotics, and this makes them easy victims of sexual and physical abuse by ruthless men.
Alcoholism also leads to domestic and other forms of abuse and sexual exploitation with persons chopping their spouses, and parents giving their children as sex slaves to mature persons, “just for them to get a bottle of high wine or so.”
Government stepped in in 2016 and closed down a few illegal shops in the settlements, in an effort to curb the problem of alcoholism in the settlement.
GHRA in 1992 had collaborated with the Mazaruni Christian Council to combat the widespread problems created by alcohol intolerance, which include domestic violence, men falling out of canoes and drowning and early deaths among citizens of Baramita.