HGP Nightly News – Local fishermen and volunteers, not state rescue assets, were at the forefront of efforts to locate victims of the MV Barima disaster on Tuesday, APNU Parliamentary Leader Dr. Terrence Campbell has claimed.
Campbell travelled into the Atlantic search area with Opposition MP Dr. Riaz Roopnarine, APNU member Delon Carter and an experienced maritime captain, expecting to find a large, coordinated rescue effort underway.
What they encountered, he said, was something different.
“There was not any rescuing taking place. It was more of a recovery operation,” Campbell said.
During the visit, his team encountered several bodies in the water. Campbell said local fishermen and other private citizens were identifying the locations of victims and alerting the Coast Guard, whose ranks would then recover them.
He questioned why there were not more state vessels in the area and why greater international assistance was not visibly supporting the operation, given the scale of the disaster and the number of people still unaccounted for.
Campbell singled out fisherman Raymond DaCosta, whom he said spent hours alone in a small boat searching the sea. Other volunteers, along with Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed, were also commended for contributing boats, fuel or other assistance.
The APNU parliamentarian further alleged that some fishermen were forced to purchase fuel with their own money after supplies they were reportedly told would be available did not materialise.
That claim has not been independently confirmed. The government has said multiple state and private assets were deployed and that the operation was being coordinated through the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre.
For Campbell, however, the sight of fishermen searching from small boats stood in sharp contrast to the scale of the emergency.
He described encountering victims of different ages, including a young child he estimated to be about three, a teenage girl and a middle-aged man. One body, he said, had already begun to decompose.
The experience was “heartbreaking,” Campbell said.
He warned that time was rapidly narrowing the possibility of recovering and visually identifying every victim. Prolonged exposure at sea could leave some bodies badly decomposed, he said, forcing families to rely on DNA testing for identification. Others might never be found.
Campbell called for an immediate increase in vessels, personnel and specialised recovery equipment. Guyana, he argued, should also accept or request additional international help if local resources are insufficient.
He described the capsizing as the greatest tragedy involving Guyanese citizens in his lifetime. While acknowledging that the 1978 Jonestown deaths involved a far larger loss of life, Campbell said most of those victims were not Guyanese.
His comparison is likely to attract debate, but the central demand was clear: the government must expand the operation before weather, currents and time place more victims beyond reach.
Authorities have maintained that all available resources are being used and that regional and international partners have offered assistance. Whether those resources were sufficient, and whether they reached the search area quickly enough, will be among the difficult questions facing the promised Commission of Inquiry.
For families awaiting news, however, the argument over which agency led the operation matters less than the outcome. They want every possible search asset deployed, every victim found and their relatives brought home.
