On Saturday, the Guyana Police Force destroyed narcotics worth over $1.7 billion. Cannabis valued at $738.1 million. Cocaine totalling $974.3 million. Gone in smoke, supervised, documented and declared a success.

And yet, the most important question went unanswered, as it so often does: where are the people who owned those drugs?

Drug destruction exercises have become something of a ritual in Guyana. They are announced with fanfare, presided over by senior officers, photographed for the press and presented as evidence that law enforcement is doing its job. Quality control tests are conducted. Chain of custody is maintained. The paperwork is immaculate. But the traffickers, the financiers, the networks that moved those narcotics through communities and across borders, remain largely untouched.

This is the uncomfortable truth that no press release addresses. Seizing drugs is the beginning of a criminal investigation, not the conclusion. When billions of dollars in narcotics are destroyed because they were “previously tendered as evidence in concluded court matters,” the public deserves to know what those conclusions were. Were individuals convicted? Were sentences proportionate to the scale of the operation? Or did the drugs simply outlast the prosecutions?

Guyana sits at a critical junction in the global drug trade. Its coastline, its rivers, its interior, and its ports have made it an attractive corridor for traffickers moving product from South America toward North America, Europe and beyond. The quantities being destroyed in exercises like Saturday’s are not the work of small-time dealers. Billion-dollar drug hauls point to organised networks with resources, connections and, apparently, a remarkable degree of protection from serious legal consequence.

The focus on destruction, while procedurally necessary, can serve as a convenient distraction. It allows institutions to demonstrate activity without accountability. It fills headlines without answering hard questions about who funded the shipments, who facilitated them, and whether any person of consequence has ever faced justice as a result.

Guyana’s citizens deserve more than burning drugs. They deserve prosecutions. They deserve convictions. They deserve transparency about why, year after year, the narcotics keep appearing while the architects of the trade remain in the shadows.

Until that changes, these exercises are little more than theatre.

SOURCE: Radio Eve Leary, “Police destroy narcotics worth over $1.7B,” April 11, 2026