The ruling Unity Labour Party (ULP) in St. Vincent and the Grenadines has condemned the recent police killings of two people in the United States saying, “the persistence of the trend of killing of innocent Black and brown people by the police in the USA is one such matter of grave global importance”.
In a statement signed by the party’s leader Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, the ULP made reference to the murder of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols and 26-year-old indigenous Venezuelan environmental activist, Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, aka Tortuguita.
Nichols died in hospital three days after he was beaten by several police officers following a traffic stop on January 7, 2023, while Teran was killed on January 18, by the Atlanta SWAT police officers. Five police officers have been charged with second degree murder in Nichols death.
The ULP said the killings “are egregious examples of extra-judicial state activities,” adding “the video images and other credible reports of these killings are most disturbing and heart-rending”
The party, which has been in power since 2001, said it does not “usually comment on the internal affairs of countries in accord with the basic precepts of non-interference and non-intervention, except when it considers an event, trend of events, or extant condition so wholly abhorrent and offensive to international human rights, a matter of such magnitude that goes beyond national borders and poisons inexorably the well of humanity”.
The ULP said the killings are “a damning indictment of one of the coercive apparatuses of the State in the USA that in 2022 the police killed 1,176 people, more than in any of the preceding ten years.
“The ULP is aware that the USA possesses a judicial system through which the police perpetrators of such extra-judicial killings can be held to account; but there are reports, oft-times that the judicial system has frequently failed the victims and their families.”
The party said it is pleased that the federal government, headed by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamla Harris, “is taking action on several fronts to stamp out the occurrences of sudden and unnatural slayings of innocent persons by the police and to reduce as far as is humanly practicable in the extant circumstances in the USA the legacies of the enslavement of African bodies, ongoing racism, and their cumulative compact on the contemporary political economy and society, and the terror of easily-available firearms “
It said these are factors which largely fuel extra-judicial killings by the police “in that great, but highly flawed country.
“We pray that the noble efforts of right-thinking people in the USA will bear fruit against the barbarism of excessive and brutal coercion by the impugned state authorities.”
The ULP said the easy availability of guns and ammunition in the United States and their illegal export to the 33 member-countries of the Community of States of Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAC) “are affecting quite adversely the lives and livelihoods of the people of the member-countries of CELAC and threaten to undermine democracy, law and order in our nations”.
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