With permission from Indo Caribbean World

Kidnappings now move to Guyana

by

Ramdath Jagessar

I see the kidnappings have started in Guyana. My sincerest condolences go out to the Indian population of Guyana, and especially the wealthy ones who have previously been a little protected from the prevailing ethnic terror.

Now  the vampires who have been preying on Indians in Guyana have learned from their Trinidad brothers the new and rewarding skill of kidnapping, they will see that choke and rob and kick-down-door were only baby crimes. Kidnapping is the big time.

Wealthy people usually don’t carry much money on them. They don’t keep much cash or valuables at home either. It’s too easy to lose valuables that way. The real money is in the bank or the safety deposit box, way out of reach of the choke and rob boys, the kick-down door bandits or the armed robbers.

When a bandit comes into your house with a gun he can get only what you have in the house. A kidnapper, however, can make you take money out of the bank, sell your property and liquidate your valuables. You do his dirty work for him, or else he kills your loved one. Sometimes he kills your loved one even after you have paid the ransom, but that’s another story.

Bandits in Trinidad have learned that game well in the last nine months. Instead of dangerous holdups of gas stations that may get them $200, they have staged easy kidnappings that have netted $200,000. And they have been getting away with a frightening number of  kidnappings.

The Guyanese bandits have taken notice. Now nobody in Guyana is exempt. Those really wealthy Indians who traveled everywhere with security and retreated at nights to armed fortresses are not secure anymore. They cannot put out the same level of security for their spouses, their children, their brothers and sisters, their parents, their grandchildren. A kidnapper can snatch one of those going to school, coming back from the grocery, taking a walk to visit the neighbour.

If the incompetence of the Trinidad police is repeated in Guyana, the bandits know they have little to fear. As lawyer Anand Ramlogan has noted, the US authorities took three weeks to track down a mystery sniper who hid in a large population of several million, had no pattern, and shot people of all races, genders and age groups. In little Trinidad with one million people, the Trinidad police in nine months are nowhere near discovering who are the people carrying out kidnappings against mostly wealthy Indians.  In this tiny country where everybody minds everybody else’s business, Trinidad police are baffled.

You see, there is a terrible weakness in the kidnapping business. The kidnapping is easy enough, and so is the holding the person in secret and making ransom demands. But the kidnapper has to come and collect the money, and in other countries with an efficient police system, this is where the kidnapper is usually caught.

The money is marked secretly, and traced later. Or a microchip locator is hidden in the bag for the police to follow. Most times the police just grab the person after he has taken the ransom. In the USA the FBI has become so good at the kidnapping business that  criminals no longer attempt this crime in any serious way. It’s seen as a loser’s crime, and a sure way to find yourself behind bars doing hard prison time.

That’s not how it’s been in Trinidad. The police have not racked up a good record of tracing telephone calls or ransom notes. They have not come up with informers who can identify the kidnappers. They have not freed many kidnap victims, and have not caught many kidnappers. I believe they have not nabbed a single bandit in the act of collecting the ransom. They have not traced much of the haul of several million dollars paid out in ransom this year. People don’t trust the police to do anything and they quietly pay the ransom, hoping to get their loved ones back alive. Then some of them sell their businesses and migrate.

Could the fact that many of the kidnap victims were Indians have anything to do with the ‘baffled’ condition of the Trinidad police?  You tell me. And is there any possibility the same thing will happen in Guyana. You tell me again.