Raise the MV Barima

The Families of the Missing Must Get a Vote.

And Their Silence Is Not Consent.

The government of Guyana is preparing a declaration. According to documentation seen by Kaieteur News, the draft asks relatives to concur that the MV Barima remain undisturbed in its present resting place as a sacred memorial for those trapped inside. The government is asking people to sign away the vessel. To agree that the seabed is good enough. To accept that the thirty people still missing inside that hull will stay there forever. And according to reports, the voices being sought to make that decision include survivors, the people who escaped the vessel, rather than the families of those who did not.

Guyana1News needs to say something plainly, something that perhaps nobody in a position of authority has said yet. The survivors of the MV Barima are not the people with the most at stake in the decision about whether to raise that vessel. They are already safe. Their trauma is real. Their grief is real. Their voice matters. But the people with the most at stake in whether that vessel comes up from the seabed are the families of the thirty who are still inside it. And those families are not being asked to vote. They are being asked to sign.

There is a profound difference between a vote and a declaration. A vote produces a choice between two legitimate options. A declaration asks you to endorse a decision that has already been made. The government of Guyana is not asking the families of the missing whether to raise the vessel. It is asking them to agree that it will not be raised. That is not consultation. That is consent management.

What the Government Is Actually Doing

Let us be precise about what has happened, because the language used by the government has been careful in ways that deserve scrutiny.

Prime Minister Mark Phillips signalled, after a sitting of the National Assembly, that bringing in additional foreign divers will not change the situation and that the vessel is likely to remain there as is on the seabed. He said this publicly. He said it after weeks of families demanding a full salvage operation and insisting that Guyana has the financial resources to contract international salvage firms. He said it while at least thirty people remain unaccounted for inside the wreck.

President Ali had earlier told families that full salvage was an option he was trying to avoid as much as possible. The language he used, we are trying to avoid it, is the language of a decision already leaning in one direction. It is not the language of a government genuinely weighing two equal options. It is the language of a government that has made up its mind and is now managing the process of making that position publicly acceptable.

And now, according to documentation seen by Kaieteur News, there is a draft declaration being circulated to relatives, asking them to concur that the MV Barima remain undisturbed in its present resting place as a sacred memorial for those trapped inside. The word memorial is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. A memorial is something you build for the dead. But at least thirty people inside that vessel have not been confirmed dead. Their families do not have death certificates. They do not have bodies. They do not have the closure that burial provides. They have a vessel on the seabed and a government asking them to call it a monument.

You cannot declare a memorial before you have recovered the dead. A memorial requires confirmed loss. What the government is calling a sacred resting place, the families of the missing call an unfinished recovery operation. Those two descriptions cannot both be correct.

The Difference Between Survivors and Families of the Missing

The government is reportedly seeking the views of survivors in this process. Survivors are the 76 people who were rescued from the water. They are alive. They were on the vessel when it capsized and they made it out. Their experience of the disaster is direct, physical, and traumatic in ways that most of us cannot comprehend.

But survivors are not the group with the most direct interest in whether the vessel is raised. Their loved ones, in many cases, are either already recovered or are among the missing. The question of whether to raise the vessel affects them, but their lives are not contingent on the answer in the same way as the families of the thirty still missing.

The families of the missing are in a categorically different situation. They have been at the Operations Centre in Charity for days. They have been briefed by the President and the Prime Minister. They have watched dive team after dive team descend and come back up without their mother, their father, their child, their sibling. They are waiting. And they are being asked to sign a declaration that would end the waiting not by recovering their loved ones but by formally agreeing that recovery is no longer the goal.

“I know my baby is in that boat,” said Samantha Ramin, who lost two of her three children. The body of her young daughter was found. Her baby boy is still missing. He is inside the MV Barima. The government is preparing a declaration that would ask her to agree the vessel remain undisturbed.

How do you ask a mother to sign that? How do you present that declaration to a woman who knows her child is in that boat and ask her to endorse its undisturbed rest on the seabed? Guyana1News does not believe that process can be described as consultation. We believe it must be described for what it is: the government seeking the emotional signature of grieving families on a decision it has already made, to protect itself from the accusation that it abandoned the missing without permission.

Samantha Ramin did not ask for a memorial. She asked for her son. Those are not the same request. And a government that cannot tell the difference between the two has not understood the first thing about what those families need.

The Moral Hierarchy of This Decision

There are multiple groups of people whose voices matter in the decision about whether to raise the MV Barima. Guyana1News believes they should be heard in the following order, from most to least primary.

• The families of the thirty people still unaccounted for, whose loved ones remain inside the vessel and who have not received bodies or death certificates. These families have the most direct, most immediate, and most irreplaceable stake in whether the vessel is raised. Their voice must come first. Their position must be the starting point of any legitimate consultation process. If these families want the vessel raised, the government must raise it.
• The families of the confirmed dead whose bodies have been recovered and identified. They have closure that the first group does not have. Their voice matters, particularly regarding what becomes of the vessel and whether a memorial is appropriate, but their interest is secondary to the families who are still waiting.
• The survivors. They were on the vessel. Their experience is direct. Their trauma is real. Their voices deserve respect and weight. But they are safe. Their primary interest in this decision is moral and emotional rather than the immediate physical interest of the families still waiting for bodies.
• The Guyanese public and the nation at large, who have a legitimate interest in how this disaster is resolved, what accountability looks like, and what precedent is set for how Guyana treats its missing citizens.

The government appears to be consulting primarily with survivors while using the language of family consultation to give the process legitimacy. That is the wrong order. It is not a minor procedural error. It is a fundamental misreading of who carries the moral weight in this decision. And it matters, because the outcome of this process, whether the vessel is raised or left on the seabed, will be shaped by whose voice is treated as primary.

What a Memorial Means and What It Does Not Mean

The government’s suggestion that the seabed location could become a sacred memorial site deserves careful examination, not because the concept of a memorial is wrong but because of the timing and the conditions under which it is being proposed.

Memorials are built after recovery. After closure. After the dead have been returned to their families and buried with dignity. The Titanic is a memorial on the ocean floor, but every recoverable body from the Titanic was recovered before the site was designated as such. The Costa Concordia was raised before the final victims were confirmed and Italy had accounted for every person aboard. The designation of a disaster site as a permanent memorial is the last act, not the interim solution.

What the government of Guyana is proposing is different. It is proposing to designate the MV Barima as a memorial while people are still missing inside it. While families are still waiting. While the death count has not been closed. While the question of who was aboard the vessel cannot be definitively answered because there was never a proper manifest. The government is asking the nation to accept a memorial in place of a recovery, not after one.

There is also a harder question that the word memorial papers over. If the vessel remains on the seabed undisturbed, the Commission of Inquiry cannot physically examine the primary evidence of what happened on July 18. The cargo distribution that the MARAD Director General admitted he did not know about cannot be assessed. The structural condition of the hull at the time of sinking cannot be evaluated. The physical evidence of overloading, of cargo shift, of whatever happened in the final minutes before the capsizing, cannot be recovered. The memorial, in this reading, is not only a burial site. It is also a crime scene left unexamined.

A memorial built over unrecovered evidence is not a tribute to the dead. It is a convenience for those who would prefer the evidence stayed buried. Guyana1News does not say this to be cruel. We say it because the families of the missing deserve to hear it, and because they are the ones who should decide whether it applies here.

Trauma, Consent, and the Ethics of Asking Grieving People to Sign

There is a body of evidence in grief psychology and disaster ethics that addresses what happens when governments or institutions ask traumatised people to make irreversible decisions in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe. The conclusions are consistent and sobering.

People in acute grief are not in a position to give fully informed, uncoerced consent to decisions that are permanent and consequential. This is not a judgment on their intelligence or their strength. It is a recognition that acute grief impairs the cognitive functions associated with complex decision-making, that the power imbalance between a grieving family and a head of state is enormous, and that a person who is desperate for any form of resolution is vulnerable to accepting a framing that offers closure in place of truth.

When a President meets with grieving families in a regional operations centre and presents a declaration for their consideration, the power dynamic in that room is not neutral. The President of the Republic sits across from people whose children are on the seabed and asks them to consider whether the vessel might remain undisturbed. The families in that room are exhausted, devastated, and looking to an authority figure for guidance. That is not a context in which genuine informed consent can be obtained for an irreversible decision.

Guyana1News is not suggesting the government is acting with malicious intent in those meetings. We are suggesting that the process of seeking family consent for leaving the vessel on the seabed is ethically fraught in ways that the government may not have fully considered. And we are suggesting that the families of the missing, specifically, should not be asked to sign anything of this nature without independent legal representation, without time to consider alternatives, and without a clear explanation of what forensic and investigative evidence would be permanently lost if the vessel is not raised.

What the Families of the Missing Are Saying

The families have not been silent. Their position has been consistent and clear throughout. Kaieteur News reported that grieving relatives continue to demand a full salvage operation, insisting their loved ones deserve every possible effort to recover the vessel and any remains still trapped inside. Families maintain that Guyana possesses the financial resources to hire specialized international salvage firms to bring the vessel to the surface, ensuring both full recovery of the victims and a thorough investigation into what caused the vessel to capsize.

These families are not asking for the impossible. They are not making emotional demands that have no technical basis. They are asking for what international maritime salvage companies confirm is achievable: a professional operation using technology designed precisely for these conditions. They are asking for what the government of a nation with 60 billion dollars in committed oil investment can clearly afford. They are asking for what every other nation that has faced a comparable maritime disaster has provided to its grieving citizens.

And they are being met with a declaration.

When the families of the missing say raise the vessel and the government responds with a document asking them to agree it should remain on the seabed, that is not a conversation. It is a conclusion dressed up as a consultation.

What Guyana1News Is Calling For

We are calling for the following, immediately and without equivocation.

• The draft declaration asking families to concur that the vessel remain undisturbed must be withdrawn. No family should be asked to sign an irreversible document about the fate of their missing loved ones while they are still in acute grief and while the recovery operation is still formally ongoing.
• The families of the thirty people still missing must be formally designated as the primary voice in any decision about the vessel. Their position must be sought independently, with legal representation available to them, with full information about what salvage options exist, what they cost, and what evidence would be lost if the vessel is not raised.
• The government must separate the survivor consultation from the families of the missing consultation. These are two different groups with two different interests. Treating them as a single constituency in a shared process obscures the fact that the people with the most direct stake in salvage are those whose loved ones are still inside the vessel.
• The Commission of Inquiry must formally advise on whether physical examination of the raised vessel is necessary for a complete investigation before any decision to leave the vessel on the seabed is finalised. That advice must be made public.
• The Prime Minister’s statement that the vessel is likely to remain there as is must be retracted or formally clarified. A public statement of that nature, made before any formal consultation process has concluded, prejudges the outcome and undermines the legitimacy of any consultation that follows it.

The Obligation That Cannot Be Transferred

Guyana1News understands that raising the MV Barima is difficult. We understand that the conditions at the wreck site are challenging. We understand that the technical complexities of a full salvage operation are real and that the government is under enormous pressure from multiple directions.

But there is an obligation here that cannot be transferred to the families of the missing through a declaration. The obligation to make every reasonable effort to recover every person who died on a government vessel on a government route under government oversight belongs to the government. It is not dischargeable by asking exhausted, grieving families to sign a document calling the seabed a memorial.

Samantha Ramin knows her son is in that boat. She did not choose for him to be there. She did not choose the vessel, the route, the ticketing system, the regulatory failures, the captain who tested positive for narcotics, the load line that sat too deep in the water, the manifest that was really a receipt. None of those things were her choices. They were the government’s failures. And the obligation to answer for them, including by doing everything technologically and financially possible to bring her son home, belongs to the government.

You cannot ask her to sign that obligation away. Not now. Not like this. Not in a room where the President of the Republic sits across from a mother whose baby is on the seabed and asks her to consider whether undisturbed rest might be acceptable.

It is not acceptable. Not to her. Not to the other families of the missing. And not, Guyana1News submits, to any reading of what a government owes the people it failed.

Ask the right people.

Ask the families of the missing.

And listen to what they say.

Source: Guyana1news