Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power: British Guiana’s Struggle for Independence by Colin A. Palmer (review)

Officials and citizens of the United States and Western Europe can take satisfaction in the course of the Cold War, with the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe. A sense of triumph, however, is not the way most people in the Western Hemisphere perceive Cold War history. Central and South American countries suffered a dreadful fate from 1954 through 1991. The overthrow of the popularly elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán of Guatemala in 1954 initiated a cycle of political violence that left more than 200,000 Guatemalans dead. Most died at the hands of right-wing fanatics. Anti-Communist militias and “death squads” also exacted an appalling toll in small Central American countries such as El Salvador. In the Southern Cone—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay—tens of thousands of citizens “disappeared” in the 1960s and 1970s. The ferocious Argentine military killed 30,000 civilians during la guerra sucia (“the dirty war”). General Augusto Pinochet’s minions tortured more than 200,000 Chileans, including the future distinguished president Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010). These atrocities followed U.S. covert interventions in Latin America and were perpetrated by anti-Communist regimes that received stout support from U.S. presidential administrations.

The small South American country of British Guyana (Guyana) also became “collateral damage” during the Cold War. The impoverished British colony, which produces sugar cane and bauxite, has a racially mixed population, with people of African and Indian heritage. They are the descendants of black slaves from Africa and indentured servants from India who suffered centuries of injustice and discrimination at the hands of the European imperial powers. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Winston Churchill and then the United States under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson sought to deny the Guyanese their independence under the direction of Indo-Guyanese leader Cheddi Jagan. British and U.S. interventions in the colony facilitated the rise of the Afro-Guyanese politician Forbes Burnham, a racist demagogue who professed to be anti-Communist. Burnham led Guyana to independence in 1966, and his party, the People’s National Congress, held power until 1992, bankrupting the country and imposing profound discrimination against the Indo-Guyanese majority. In the 1960s, the United States unabashedly helped Burnham rig elections. Only after the Cold War did the United States take an affirmative step on behalf of Guyana. Former President Jimmy Carter oversaw Guyana’s first fair counting of ballots and the election of Jagan as president. Guyana has maintained an open electoral system since 1992. But nowadays Guyana remains a racially polarized country and is second only to Haiti as the poorest country in the hemisphere.

Colin Palmer has written the first scholarly political biography of Cheddi Jagan, whom he dubs “the classic tragic hero” (p. 312). Palmer is a distinguished senior scholar who has written impressive books over the past four decades on slavery in Mexico, the international slave trade, and Eric Williams, the leader of Trinidad and Tobago’s independence movement. He conducted research at the British National Archives, the U.S. National Archives, and the Jagan Research Center in Georgetown, Guyana. It would have enriched Palmer’s analysis if he had also visited the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson presidential libraries, used the Foreign Relations of the United States series, and consulted the records of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which are located near the National Archives. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) worked with the labor union to funnel money and agents into British Guiana in the 1960s. Palmer focuses on the period from 1953 to 1964, when Jagan and his People’s Progressive Party led the struggle for independence.

Palmer takes on directly the controversial issues that surround Jagan’s political career—political ideology and racial politics. Palmer finds that...