Guyana’s government Monday said that the country’s exclusion from a global list of nations classified as narco states by the U.S. means that its fight against the scourge is being recognized — at least so it thinks.
National Security Minister Clement Rohee said in a statement that the recent naming of Belize and El Salvador on the list of major producers or transit routes for cocaine and marijuana shipments to the U.S. does show that critics who deride efforts to deal with the issue as lukewarm are way off mark.
Washington last week added the two Central American nations to the blacklist, stating that Mexican and other cartels were using them to ship large volumes of drugs to the U.S. mainland.
Reacting to the Guyana’s exclusion from the list, after former U.S. Ambassador Roland Bullen had classified the South American nation as a narco state back in 2006, Rohee said the local fight-back against the trade “clearly surpasses many countries in the Latin American and Caribbean regions and gives the lie to those who are in the habit of describing Guyana as a narco-state.”
Cables from the U.S. Embassy to the State Department that have been released by the whistleblower WikiLeaks website showed that successive ambassadors had expressed concern about inertia on the part of officials to fight the trade and the close and open friendship between known traffickers and officials in the Guyana cabinet and government.
