Why do American journalists like Clifford Krauss find it so easy to describe Guyana as a ‘Sh—t Hole’ country?

Jul 23, 2018 News

By Harold A. Bascom

The July 20, 2018 New York Times article ‘The $20 Billion Question for Guyana’ written by Mr. Clifford Krauss begins thus:
‘…Guyana is a vast, watery wilderness with only three paved highways. There are a few dirt roads between villages that sit on stilts along rivers snaking through the rain forest. Children in remote areas go to school in dugout canoes, and play naked in the muggy heat.… Hugging the coast are musty clapboard towns like Georgetown, the capital, which seems forgotten by time, honeycombed with canals first built by Dutch settlers and African slaves. The power grid is so unreliable that blackouts are a regular plague in the cities, while in much of the countryside there is no electricity at all.Such is the unlikely setting for the world’s next big oil boom.’
Deeper into the article Mr. Krauss writes:
‘… A plague of ethnic tribal politics has produced a fragile state with an economy propelled by drug trafficking, money-laundering, and gold and diamond smuggling. A vast majority of college-educated youths emigrate to the United States or Canada, while those who stay behind experience high rates of H.I.V. infection, crime and suicide.’

Harold A. Bascom

New York Times journalist Clifford Krauss

So, two questions to begin this discourse: (#1)WHO is Clifford Krauss? (#2) Are there any excuses for him to have written the above? Let’s examine the writer’s biography. His profile—garnered from a link to his name reveals that he is a national energy business correspondent based in Houston, Texas. Right off, one might quickly conclude—”Oh! Maybe he never left Texas. Maybe he doesn’t know much about life in these parts.” But then one reads on and discovers that Mr. Krauss was previously the agency chief for the New York Times’s Buenos Aires and Toronto bureaus. Brazil is next door, so he ought to know the region. From the article’s photographs and interviews it is clear that Mr. Krauss interacted with Guyanese professionals and local entrepreneurs like Ms. Dawn Chung Layne. I am sure he was treated well and was at the receiving end of great Guyanese hospitality. How, then, could he have walked away to write those insulting descriptions of Guyana at the start of his otherwise thought-provoking piece?
What is it about third world countries that tell some foreign correspondents—especially from the United States of America—that it’s okay to abandon truth and journalistic integrity, and replace it with discriminatory condescension that leads to descriptions like what started Mr. Krauss’s piece? This has been going on since the news of the Jonestown mass-suicide broke back inNovember 1978. A lot of American reporters rushed in for the scoop and began peddling stories about Guyana being some sort of ‘backwater jungle’ in South America.It hasn’t stopped.
Quite recently—exactly on June 24, 2018, there was an article in the Kaieteur News on Guyana entitled ‘Skepticism Surrounds Guyana’s Oil future’ written by someone from Duke University, North Carolina, USA. That piece describes Georgetown, Guyana as a ‘sleepy capital of moldering wooden houses…’ It also referred to Guyana as ‘this poor backwater of fewer than 800,000 people…’ and a ‘poor and isolated South American nation…’ Mr. Krauss is even more dramatic in his description of Guyana being ‘a watery wilderness.’ Let’s examine these words clinically for their literal meanings. WILDERNESS describes a region in the world that is ‘uncultivated, uninhabited, and inhospitable.’ To label Guyana as ‘a watery wilderness’, therefore, is to grossly insult our country!
BACKWATER describes ‘a place that seems stuck in a rut—a place unmoved by current events. The description ‘Backwater’ therefore does NOT fit Guyana. Let’s look at the word ISOLATED. This description fits a country that is cut-off or penalized by countries like The United States of America, Great Britain, and Canada. North Korea, for example, is an isolated country but clearly, Guyana is not. None of thelatter words fairly describes Guyana, and I feel we are left with the right to protest this epidemic of journalistic misrepresentations!
It is high time that Guyana’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Guyana Minister of Tourism take a stand to reject Guyana being described the way, Mr. Clifford Krauss did. The way he and others have described our country to the rest of the world must be damaging on many levels. Maybe it is high time the Government of Guyana lodges a formal protest to the Ambassador of the United States to Guyana, Mr. Perry Holloway, on this debilitating matter.
(Harold A. Bascom is a prize-winning author, artist and former columnist)