Guyana has again become a trans-shipment point for cocaine since the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) was installed in August 2020. Most recently, on Saturday March 5, Akata Makeba Garnett, a 22 year old woman, of ‘C’ Field Sophia squatting area was arrested at the Eugene F. Correia International Airport, Ogle by agents of the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit (CANU). She had in her possession 5.274 kg of cocaine with an estimated value of $5.6 million. The cocaine was hidden in five mats. She was a passenger booked on a flight to Barbados. Further investigations resulted in the arrest of another woman, Malika Scott, 32, of Grove East Bank Demerara.
Last November a container of rum that originated in Guyana was discovered in the Netherlands to also contain some 1,100 lbs of cocaine. Investigations by CANU concluded that the container was indeed loaded and shipped from Guyana. Additionally, in 2021 the container scanner of the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) was tampered with, images of a container with cocaine had been erased. No one was ever charged with a crime in relation to erasing the images. The revelation of scanner-tampering came in early November, after law enforcement officials in Belgium announced that 11.5 tonnes of cocaine had been found in a container of scrap metal shipped from Guyana.
The shipment has been described as the largest overseas drug bust ever, worldwide. The cocaine had an estimated street value of 900 million Euros. This huge cocaine bust followed one in August 2020. In that bust, authorities in Germany found over 300 million Euros worth of cocaine in a cargo ship container from Guyana containing rice. The cocaine weighed 1.5 tons. Cocaine transshipment from Guyana had taken a sharp downturn while the APNU+AFC government was in office. This has changed.
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