Late night guard patrols for Le Repentir cemetery

Watching the dead

– Town Clerk reveals ambitious plan

The City Council has a number of plans for maintaining Guyana’s historic Le Repentir Cemetery, and one of those ambitious plans will literally involve placing security guards within the cemetery to patrol from sundown to sunrise.
Speaking to this publication on Thursday, Town Clerk Royston King identified this as one of the City Council’s planned initiatives. He identified the rationale behind

this as a bid to stop the desecration of the cemetery.
“We’re going to lock the gates and we will have security in the cemetery, patrolling the cemetery to secure the cemetery and ensure it is kept in a tidy state. The reason we’re going to lock the gates is that we’ve had reports that you have criminal elements hiding out in the cemetery,” King related.
“When we had the last prison break, we had a number of reports that escapees were hiding out in the cemetery. We can’t have the cemetery like that. It is an indictment on our own ability to keep a large area of the city in order.”
Despite attesting to it being the Council’s responsibility to upkeep the cemetery, King expressed the hope that persons would still maintain the surroundings of their loved ones’ tombs. He noted the importance of keeping the cemetery maintained in case overseas-based persons wanted to visit and view the resting places of their loved ones.
Long viewed as Guyana’s most recognised cemetery, the vastness of its size has caused headaches for city administrators to maintain over the years. And garbage is not the only thing that has been dumped in the cemetery. There have been a number of bodies discovered in the cemetery in the past, some of whom were victims of murder.