Thick smoke billowed into the sky, forming deep black clouds while heat from the flames of two burning boats added to an intense afternoon sun.
Locals of the port village of Parika in north Guyana stood and watched, many capturing events on their phones, as the fire service battled to contain the blaze.
It wasn’t the only part of Guyana in flames.
Widespread rioting and unrest had broken out across the country in response to the results of a postmortem carried out on the body of 11-year-old Adriana Younge, who had been discovered dead under suspicious circumstances in a hotel swimming pool days earlier.
Initial mishandling of the case by police, accusations of a cover-up, a hotel that had allegedly been the scene of other suspect deaths in the past, and now a postmortem result that showed the girl had died by drowning sparked anger across the country and highlighted a deep mistrust people have towards the political and policing systems.
I was in Guyana to explore how the country has been navigating its newfound oil and gas riches 10 years after Exxon Mobil’s major offshore discovery and whether everyday people were benefiting.
On this day, when I was due to link in with a local newspaper to speak with people about the cost of living, the Adriana Younge story was all anyone was talking about.
Sooner than I could say “covering crime is not really my thing”, I was in the back of a saloon car being briefed by a young reporter named Khadidja on our day’s assignment: Go to the hotel (since burned down and looted) where Adriana’s body was found, get some photographs and go to her hometown of Parika to get comments from her family.
Oh, and if time allowed, we’d stop to speak with people about the cost of living as part of my original brief, which suddenly now seemed relatively inconsequential.
Located in the northeast of South America, Guyana is sandwiched between a hostile Venezuela (president Nicolás Maduro lays claim to the oil-rich territory of Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana) and Brazil and Suriname, with a North Atlantic coastline stretching about 460km.
As a former British colony, Guyana’s official language is English. While geographically speaking it is a South American country, it shares more cultural similarities with Caribbean neighbours such as Trinidad and Tobago.
Guyana’s colonial past has given it a rich ethnic make-up, with the country comprising six distinct ethnicities – African, Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, British and the indigenous Amerindian people.
But in the decades since Guyana’s independence in 1966, a racial divide between the two largest ethnic groups – Indo-Guyanese, who make up 40 per cent of the population, and Afro-Guyanese, who account for 29 per cent – has fractured society, with political parties often using it to gain or hold power.
Wintress White, of grassroots women’s advocacy group Red Thread, said the public response to Adriana’s death was the first time she witnessed a divided people coming together for the greater good.
“Guyana is a deeply divided country by politics and race,” she told me at the organisation’s Georgetown headquarters.
“But I have seen Adriana’s death create a closeness. People are now sensing the pain. Usually we are divided by political parties who use it for their own agenda.
“The PPP ruling party thinks they own all the Indians, and the APNU, which is predominantly African, believes they own all the blacks.
“But I’ve been amazed to see people speak out. I see Indo men crying for this Afro-Guyanese girl. This has really brought the races together and the powers that be don’t like that.”
Back on the beat with Khadidja, we walked through the rubble of the Double Day International Hotel in Tuschen, where Adriana’s body was found, while a few late-to-the-scene looters looked for any valuables missed in earlier raids.
The sad sight of an empty swimming pool filled with debris made me imagine scenes where children and families once happily played and it served as a reminder about the tragic loss of life.
Later, we gave a lift to Adriana’s grieving and emotional aunt, who is demanding answers from authorities about gaps in the investigation, before dropping her off at Parika.
There, with the locals, we spent some time watching and photographing the river boats as they burned, before our 90-minute drive back to the newspaper’s offices in Georgetown.
The following day, after the government introduced a curfew banning all public gatherings between 12.30am and 5am, a tense calm was noticeable in the capital.
Meanwhile, Adriana’s family postponed her funeral in advance of final postmortem results and toxicology tests. The wait will last more than a week.
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