By NAN Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now

News Americas, GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Weds. August 12, 2026: The Guyana Elections Commission has not held a single meeting since last September’s general elections, and when it does eventually reconvene, its composition still won’t reflect who Guyanese voters actually elected to Parliament.

WIN, the party led by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed, holds 16 seats in the National Assembly following the 2025 elections, the largest opposition bloc by a wide margin. It holds zero seats on GECOM. APNU, which won 12 National Assembly seats, less than WIN, holds three GECOM seats. The mismatch stems from GECOM’s structure, which allocates opposition-nominated commissioners based on party configurations that predate the 2025 vote and have never been updated to reflect it.

The Carter Center’s warning

FLASHBACK – Supporters of Guyana’s presidential candidate Azruddin Mohamed from the WIN party take part in a campaign rally in Georgetown on August 30, 2025. Guyana will hold presidential elections on September 1, 2025. (Photo by Joaquin Sarmiento / AFP) (Photo by JOAQUIN SARMIENTO/AFP via Getty Images)

The Carter Center, the U.S.-based election monitoring organization that has observed more Guyanese elections than any other country, issued a formal statement this week calling the impasse a matter of “considerable concern.” Following stakeholder meetings held in Georgetown in June, where the organization’s delegation met with President Irfaan Ali, Opposition Leader Mohamed, GECOM, and a broad range of civil society and political stakeholders, the Center warned that without a fully functioning commission, GECOM will be unable to organize local government elections by this year’s statutory deadline, and will run out of time to implement reforms before Guyana’s next general election.

“The Carter Center notes with considerable concern the current impasse surrounding the composition of the Guyana Elections Commission,” the organization said, calling on officials to amend the 2022 Constitutional Reform Act to reflect the country’s current parliamentary makeup. The Center noted it welcomed Attorney General Anil Nandlall’s earlier acknowledgment, made in May, that the Act requires updating, but the amendment still hasn’t happened.

Nandlall has previously said the government is committed to implementing most of the Carter Center’s recommendations, but cautioned the process would proceed “in stages,” particularly where constitutional amendments are required. Opposition Leader Mohamed has separately called on GECOM’s current opposition-nominated commissioners, appointed under a previous Opposition Leader before WIN’s 2025 breakthrough, to resign.

A pattern of institutions under strain

The GECOM standoff lands in the same stretch of weeks Guyana’s Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima disaster has faced protests over alleged conflicts of interest among its members, and just days after revelations that the Caribbean Court of Justice’s own president stands accused by a majority of his fellow judges of attempting to influence the ruling in Mohamed’s own extradition case. Three separate Guyanese and regional institutions, an elections body, a disaster inquiry, and the region’s highest court, are now facing public questions about whether they can be trusted to function independently, all within the same month.

For a country navigating record oil wealth, a rebuilt international profile, and a fast-approaching local government election deadline it may not be able to meet, the Carter Center’s warning is a reminder that institutional credibility, once eroded on multiple fronts at once, becomes far harder to rebuild than any single crisis alone.

NewsAmericasNow will continue tracking GECOM’s status and Guyana’s electoral reform process.

RELATED: A Sitting CCJ Judge Says The Court’s President Tried To Influence The Ruling Against Guyana’s Opposition Leader.

By Dr. Isaac Newton

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Mon. Aug. 10, 2026: At 8:17 on Monday morning, the president walked into the executive conference room. The atmosphere changed. One executive had troubling news and decided to wait. Another had a better idea but kept it to herself. There was silence. A third had learned that challenging the president brought public correction, so he nodded, took notes, and said nothing. The president left believing the meeting had gone well. It had been orderly. There had been agreement. Yet the organization had just paid another installment of the silence tax. Later, the executives spoke freely among themselves. They discussed the risks, the flawed decision, and the alternative that might have worked. The truth had not disappeared. It had simply learned to travel around power.

That is how a toxic executive culture can take root. Rarely in one dramatic moment. More often through hundreds of small adaptations. A president may believe he is demanding excellence, protecting standards, moving quickly, or staying close to important work. His people may experience arrogance, excessive control, public correction, and distrust of their judgment. Intent matters, but impact determines what people learn. If candor repeatedly produces embarrassment, dismissal, or retaliation, people adapt. They speak less. They wait longer. They take fewer risks. They protect themselves. Problems reach the top after they have grown expensive. The institution has not lost its intelligence. It has lost access to it. That is the real cost of a toxic executive culture.

The first repair must therefore begin with the person holding the greatest authority. The president must confront the distance between the leader he intends to be and the leader others experience. Reassurance will not reveal that distance. Evidence will. A confidential 360-degree assessment can expose patterns that loyalty and fear conceal. So can five questions asked privately and answered without interruption: What should I stop doing? What should I start doing? Where do I make your work harder? What do you hesitate to tell me? What would you change if you had my authority? Then comes the discipline that separates mature leadership from protected leadership: do not defend yourself while people are telling you what they experience. Every explanation offered too early teaches the listener that your need to be understood matters more than their need to be heard. A leader who can receive difficult truth without retaliation gives the institution something invaluable: permission to remain honest.

The second repair is to return judgment to the people entrusted with it. The president should define the outcome, set the standard, grant appropriate authority, clarify the limits, and identify the circumstances that require presidential intervention. Then he should let people work. Micromanagement often feels like diligence to the person doing it. To the person receiving it, repeated intervention can communicate a steady message: Your judgment is not trusted. The answer is not less accountability. It is better accountability. Ask: What are you responsible for? What authority do you need? What obstacle requires my involvement? Then resist taking the work back. An institution cannot grow leaders while teaching everyone to wait for one leader. The president’s task is not to become the most involved person in every decision. It is to know which decisions belong to him and which must belong to others.

The third repair is deeply human. Systems can clarify responsibility, but relationships determine how people experience power. The president should meet privately with each member of his immediate team and acknowledge that his leadership may have created distance, frustration, or hesitation. He should ask what needs to change and listen without explaining his intentions. In executive meetings, disagreement should be invited before it becomes necessary: What are we missing? Who sees another path? What could make this decision fail? The goal is not comfort. It is candor. Psychological safety means people can raise concerns, admit mistakes, question assumptions, and deliver unwelcome news without fear of humiliation or retaliation. Trust cannot be ordered into existence. People decide to trust after they watch what happens when they tell the truth. The president must therefore make every honest conversation a test of the culture he says he wants.

The final test is remarkably simple: What happens to the organization when the president is not in the room? If decisions stall, people wait for permission, bad news stays buried, and capable executives become cautious, the office has accumulated authority but not leadership. If people think clearly, challenge assumptions, make sound decisions, raise problems early, and accept responsibility, the president has accomplished something far more significant than being obeyed. He has strengthened the institution. That is the higher purpose of executive power. Authority can make people comply. Leadership makes people capable. The silence tax disappears when truth no longer has to travel around power to reach the person who needs it. And perhaps that is the clearest measure of a president’s legacy: not how quiet the room became when he entered it, but how much truth became possible because he was there.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Isaac Newton is a leadership strategist, governance scholar, and author specializing in institutional excellence, ethical leadership, and human development. Educated at the University of the Southern Caribbean, Oakwood University, Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard, he writes on leadership, governance, diplomacy, economics, the development of people and institutions. He is the author of Fix It Preacher, Face Life Squarely, and Intimate Intimacy; coauthor of Steps to Good Governance and Daring to Hope; and author of the forthcoming When Nations Kneel and The Belief Code.

RELATED: When The Law Stands Taller Than Power: The CCJ’s Defining Moment For Caribbean Democracy

By NAN Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Mon. August 10, 2026: Five of the CCJ – Caribbean Court of Justice’s six sitting judges have accused the court’s president, Justice Winston Anderson, of running the region’s highest court in an “authoritarian” and “dictatorial” manner, according to internal correspondence obtained by the Trinidad Express in a bombshell report. Among the specific allegations: that Anderson attempted to improperly influence the outcome of the case that dismissed Guyana Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed’s final appeal against U.S. extradition proceedings.

Justice Peter Jamadar, in a detailed email to fellow judges, wrote that he experienced “an attempt to influence the opinions of colleagues that differed from yours in an authoritative manner” specifically in “the Mohamed vs MOHA, AG, and Magistrate extradition matter.” Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji went further, alleging Anderson “tried single-handedly to override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions” in a separate case, and said Jamadar’s experience “was not unique.”

Mohamed’s office responds

Mohamed’s own office has now formally weighed in. In a statement issued Sunday, the Office of the Guyana Leader of the Opposition called the revelations “deeply disturbing” and demanded “full transparency and an appropriate independent examination” of what occurred during deliberations in his case. The statement emphasized that the concerns come from a majority, not a lone dissenting judge, and posed a direct set of questions it says “demand credible answers”: Were attempts made to influence judges who disagreed with the president? Why did a clear majority of judicial colleagues reportedly object to the timing and manner in which the decision was announced? Were established conventions departed from? And did any of this affect the integrity or perceived fairness of the process?

“This is bigger than any individual litigant, judge, government or political party,” the statement reads. “A court that demands accountability, independence and adherence to the rule of law from governments must hold itself to those same standards.”

The CCJ unanimously dismissed Mohamed’s appeal on July 29, clearing the way for U.S. extradition proceedings against him and his father, businessman Nazar Mohamed, to resume before Chief Magistrate Judy Latchman on September 3. The ruling, delivered by Justice Denys Barrow “on behalf of himself and CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson,” was presented publicly as a clean, unanimous decision.

Jamadar’s email suggests the reality inside the court’s deliberations may have been considerably less settled. Justice Eboe-Osuji, in correspondence cited directly in the opposition’s statement, described being told the court’s president intended to announce the Mohamed decision “at a time and in a manner in which a clear majority of his colleagues had very strongly communicated to him as inappropriate.” If a sitting judge is alleging the court’s president attempted to pressure colleagues who disagreed with him specifically on this case, it raises a legitimate question the ruling’s public unanimity was never meant to answer: how much genuine disagreement existed among the judges before that unanimity was reached, and did it reflect independent judicial reasoning or institutional pressure.

A crisis two decades in the making

The allegations land at a particularly difficult moment for an institution that has spent more than 20 years trying to convince the wider Caribbean it deserves full trust. The CCJ was established by agreement in February 2001 and inaugurated in April 2005, created explicitly to replace the British Privy Council as the region’s final court of appeal and complete a long-delayed step toward full judicial independence.

Yet more than two decades later, only five of CARICOM’s 14 full member states, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana, and St. Lucia, have actually made the CCJ their court of last resort. The rest, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the OECS states, continue to send their final appeals to London. Jamaica’s House of Representatives voted to adopt the CCJ back in 2015 and still hasn’t finished the process. Antigua and Barbuda held a referendum on the question in 2018; voters rejected it.

Proponents of the CCJ have long argued that lingering attachment to the Privy Council reflects colonial habit more than genuine concern, a reluctance to fully trust a court of the region’s own making. This week’s revelations, and now Mohamed’s own formal demand for an independent examination, complicate that argument considerably.

Justice Eboe-Osuji, in his email, captured the irony directly: “There is, of course, a surreal problem in all this. It is that an apex court who decides questions as the final arbiter of the rule of law and democracy according to the rule of law would labour so badly under a leader that does not believe in the ethos of democracy in his own leadership.”

Neither the CCJ nor Justice Anderson has publicly responded to the allegations.

NewsAmericasNow will continue following developments at the CCJ and their impact on the Mohamed extradition case.

RELATED: CCJ Issues Stay In High-Profile Extradition Case

By NAN Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now

News Americas, GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Fri. August 7, 2026: Guyana’s Maritime Administration Department is seeking a marine salvage contractor capable of recovering the MV Barima from 13 to 15 meters of water, some 28 nautical miles off the Essequibo coast, while preserving forensic evidence for the international Commission of Inquiry. While no company has publicly confirmed submitting a bid, several established marine salvage operators around the world have exactly the kind of regional and technical experience MARAD’s Expression of Interest is asking for.

Companies with relevant Caribbean and regional experience

Resolve Marine Group, headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, is one of the largest marine salvage operators globally, with roughly $220-260 million in annual revenue and 40 years of heavy-lift salvage and refloating experience. Its proximity to Guyana and extensive Caribbean operating history make it a natural fit for MARAD’s requirements.

Titan Salvage specializes specifically in North Atlantic and Caribbean shallow-water refloating and environmental protection, conditions that closely match the Barima’s location, lying on its side in soft mud in relatively shallow coastal waters.

Ardent has secured an operating license specifically for the Caribbean region, one of the few salvage companies to do so, a credential that could matter given MARAD’s emphasis on companies experienced in Guyanese and wider Caribbean waters.

Svitzer Salvage Americas, a 175-year-old company with its Americas headquarters in Miami, has responded to salvage needs across North America and the Caribbean since 2009.

InterTug, based in Cartagena, Colombia, offers Caribbean-wide towing and salvage services, giving it direct regional and South American proximity to Guyana.

T&T Salvage brings global heavy-lift and large-scale maritime disaster response experience, including work as a contractor for the U.S. Navy’s SUPSALV program, relevant given the scale and forensic sensitivity MARAD is requesting.

What MARAD is actually asking for

Interested companies must submit Expressions of Interest limited to ten pages, detailing their corporate profile, salvage experience over the past five to ten years, technical approach, environmental protection measures, personnel and equipment, project timeline, and insurance and safety arrangements. Contractors must also explain how they will protect and document forensic evidence during the salvage process, and demonstrate the ability to stow the recovered vessel upright on a barge for several weeks.

Submissions are due electronically to MARAD no later than close of business on Friday, August 14, 2026. Shortlisted firms will then be invited to submit detailed technical and financial proposals before a contractor is selected.

NewsAmericasNow will continue tracking the salvage process as the deadline approaches.

RELATED: Guyana Case Against MV Barima Captain And Crew Adjourned To September 7th

By NAN Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now

News Americas, GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Mon. Aug. 3, 2026: The murder case against the captain and two crew members of the MV Barima has been adjourned to September 7th, after a Guyanese magistrate ruled the Charity Magistrate’s Court’s limited sitting schedule left no earlier date available for the prosecution to complete disclosure to the defense.

Captain Kevin “KP” Price, 40, Chief Mate Rondell Dwayne Roberts, 42, and Goods Superintendent Delon Granderson, 33, appeared by Zoom before Magistrate Ravindra Mohabir at the Charity Magistrate’s Court. The three are jointly charged with 72 counts of murder in connection with the July 18 sinking that killed at least 72 people, with more than 30 others still missing and presumed dead.

Prosecutor Mandel Moore told the court he now holds a fiat, the formal written authorization required to prosecute the matter, and confirmed partial disclosure had already been provided to the defense. Moore requested an adjournment to August 31 to complete full disclosure, but the magistrate noted the Charity Magistrate’s Court only sits on Mondays, pushing the next available date to September 7.

Price and Granderson are represented by attorney Dexter Smartt, alongside a legal team that includes Dexter Todd. Attorney Everton Lammy-Singh represents Roberts.

A charge that continues to draw criticism

Defense lawyers, legal commentators, and the political opposition have criticized the decision to file murder charges before the search for the missing has concluded and before the international Commission of Inquiry has begun its work. Police have maintained the charges followed legal advice from Director of Public Prosecutions Shalimar Ali-Hack, who has said her recommendation was based on the evidence presented, relevant principles of law, and case law authorities drawn from the United Kingdom, Commonwealth jurisdictions, and the European Court of Human Rights, along with public policy considerations.

Protesters rally for the accused

On Sunday night, family members, friends, and residents gathered outside Roberts’ home in Grove, East Bank Demerara, in a solidarity protest arguing the murder charges were used to shield senior government officials from accountability. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Transparency and accountability,” “Free Rondell, Dellon and Kevin,” and “Justice for these three men. Families need closure.”

One protester voiced support for the government’s decision to proceed with salvaging the MV Barima rather than converting the wreck site, roughly nine miles offshore, into a memorial, arguing physical evidence from the vessel itself is needed before the case, and the broader investigation, can move forward.

The opposition WIN party has called for a protest on Tuesday, August 4, at 9:00 a.m. in front of Watooka House, Linden.

NewsAmericasNow will continue following the case as it proceeds toward its September 7 hearing.

RELATED: Could MV Barima Victims Sue The Guyana Government For Negligence? Here’s What The Law Says