Let’s trace the manifestations of infamy in Guyana, before we continue with the manifestations of mob rule as described in Part 1 yesterday. The ubiquity of infamy characterised the APNU+AFC regime. It sacked 7,000 sugar workers that negatively impacted upon the lives of 42, 000 family members and relatives. At the time of this decision, the Stabroek News had (and has) a weekly column, edited by WPA aficionado, and Red Thread official, Dr. Alissa Trotz, named “In The Diaspora ” (ITD) which the strapline states is a column that informs readers in the diaspora about things that happens in Guyana that interest the diaspora.

Judging from the complete absence of comments on the sugar estate tragedy in ITD, you would think that the diaspora folks of more than one million Guyanese world-wide were no longer interested in their homeland. At the time of the retrenchment, Moray House (MH) was doing a weekly symposium.
Let’s tell you who or what MH is. It is the residence that David DeCaires lived in. After his death, it was converted to an intellectual forum where there would be a monthly symposium on topics that are important to the nation. MH is administered by Stabroek News majority shareholder and daughter of Mr. DeCaires, Isabelle. MH has weekly tea parties of the Mulatto/Creole Class (MCC) and is the popular site for birthday celebrations of members of the MCC.

MH and ITD never featured a discussion on the no-confidence motion and avoided any mention of the five months of election rigging. If that is not infamy, then please define infamy for me, someone who thinks that he is educated enough to understand when an infamy occurs in society. But if you think infamy was the best description of the attitude of MH and ITD then the conduct of the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) and Transparency Institute Guyana Inc. (TIGI) was incredibly infamous.

GHRA and TIGI in March to July 2020 became some of the most infamous organisations in the history of civil society operations in this country. If you think infamy died after August 2020 when a new president was sworn in, then your head was in another time zone. In Cotton Tree in Region Five, as part of the traditional violence that accompanies the election defeat of the PNC, in September 2020, GHRA, other infamous civil society masqueraders, the usual suspects, and the private media turned the homicides of two African youths in a drug dispute into a racial inferno.
Here is a quote from the Stabroek News (SN) editorial of a few days ago (Sunday, July 2, 2023) looking back at that infamy of 2020; “Although originating in the murder of two African teenage cousins, the residents of the area imparted a racist interpretation.” That is an appalling fiction. That is a sickening denial of collaboration. The columnists of the SN (with the exception of Ralph Ramkarran who is not an SN columnist), the SN itself and certain civil society misfits painted the Cotton Tree homicides as Africans killed by supporters of the PPP, overzealous at their July election victory.

The SN gave daily coverage to the GHRA that urged with a vehement consistency that the government bring in Argentine forensic experts to scoop the area in search of blood remnants that will prove the cousins were killed by East Indians. The usual suspects wrote their usual long epistles in the newspapers putting a racial interpretation to the killings.
It lacerates every decent bone in one’s body to read last Sunday that SN says the race interpretation was the work of the villagers. No! That’s not the whole story. The villagers came to the racial verdict because they were fed the cool-aid of race-baiting by the very names cited above. The infamy of September 2020 took a tragic slide when African Guyanese brutalized a 16-year-old Indian girl and her grandmother as they were going through Cotton Tree to get to the airport.

This story of the child and her grandmother that the world has come to know about was because “Kit” Nascimento brought it to the attention of the Guyanese people. You want to see infamy created by civil society, the private press, and others, then read the letter the child wrote about her ordeal and her grandmother’s in a letter she published in the Guyana Chronicle after she made it to New York.
You want to see the existence of infamy in Guyana, then, research the silence of the women groups in Guyana over what the child wrote. Part 3 will conclude with a look at the role of the press and civil society in creating further infamy over the Mahdia inferno and the plight of Dr. Randolph Persaud.