Jamaica’s Seaga in U.S. for Talks About Debt

Prime Minister Edward Seaga of Jamaica arrived unannounced Tuesday for two days of talks on his country’s $3.2-billion foreign debt and a worsening political situation.

An aide to Seaga, Don Brice, said the prime minister would be talking with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, major lenders to Third World countries.

Earlier this year the fund and bank urged a series of austerity policies on Seaga, in addition to the tax increases and reduced government spending he had already adopted.

Seaga had an appointment Wednesday with Barber Conable, the new head of the bank.

Brice said in a telephone interview that Seaga will not be seeing President Reagan or Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Robert Levine, a Treasury Department spokesman, said Seaga had no appointment with Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III either.

Jamaica is not on Baker’s list of 15 heavily indebted countries for which the United States has been seeking help from international lenders on condition that they adopt more conservative policies.

Seaga’s Jamaica Labor Party was badly defeated at local elections in July by the People’s National Party of former Prime Minister Michael Manley. Manley’s left-of-center policies included strong ties with Cuba.

Seaga broke relations with Cuba, Jamaica’s close neighbor, soon after he came to power in 1980.

The prime minister has said he has no intention of holding national elections soon. His term expires in 1988.

Seaga’s arrival was preceded by sharp words from the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress which does not often criticize foreign governments. The GAO called Seaga’s government slow to act on policy changes it promised.

It quoted an unnamed member of a U. S. mission to Jamaica as saying it was hard to negotiate “because the Jamaican prime minister believed he could bypass AID (the U. S. Agency for International Development) and go directly to the U. S. president when he objected to U. S. conditions.”

Timothy Ashby, an analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a study group which usually supports conservative causes, called Seaga’s government a disastrous failure despite nearly $1 billion in U. S. aid.

“Because Edward Seaga is identified so closely with the Reagan Administration,” Ashby wrote, “the failure of his economic revitalization program will be viewed internationally as a setback for U. S. development and regional security policies.”