Guyana to host two-week Tradewinds military exercise
By Shaquille Bourne and Godfrey Broomes
Guyana is set to host the 2021 United States (US) Southern Command-sponsored, multinational, Caribbean security Exercise Tradewinds on Sunday.
The two-week exercise will see the participation of 13 nations, including The Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, the Dominican Republic, France, Haiti, Jamaica, the Netherlands, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The US Embassy in Guyana said the event will be held at several locations across the country. All training locations will provide opportunities for joint, combined, and interagency partner nation capacity building exercises focused on increasing regional cooperation in complex, multinational security operations.
Lead Planner of the exercise, Guyana Defence Force (GDF) Lieutenant Colonel, Lloyd Souvenir said the event has been streamlined and is expected to run smoothly.
“We are prepared for the Tradewinds. When the decision was made that we will be hosting Tradewinds, we made a plan and we had a planning conference here.
The final planning conference was held here in April and we went through a Memorandum of Understanding where we established what are the expectations, what we can do and what the US would be doing.”
The Lieutenant Colonel said the military exercise would put participating nations in a better position to respond to natural disasters, as well as land and marine threats.
“At the end of it, we will also be better able to respond to situations because we will create scenarios that we will have to respond to and we respond to them under a controlled environment,” Lt. Col. Souvenir said.
Earlier this week, the United States Airforce landed a C5 Galaxy aircraft at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport with military personnel and equipment on board.
There have been sightings of Blackhawk helicopters over Region Four in recent days as other military personnel from the various nations continue to arrive in the country.
Media representatives will be provided an opportunity on June 18 to observe aspects of the training.
Earlier this month, the GDF advised the public not to “panic nor become alarmed” by the military personnel from the various nations, who would be present in some communities throughout the exercise. Guyana last hosted Exercise Tradewinds in 1999.
