Despite Opposition, Antigua Dynasty Keeps Its Grip on Power

Voters Tuesday extended the corruption-tainted Bird family’s half-century hold on Antigua, sending a new generation into power despite a last-minute surge by the opposition.

Official election returns late Tuesday showed clear triumphs for retiring Prime Minister V. C. Bird’s Antigua Labor Party in eight of 17 parliamentary races and a commanding lead in a ninth race, which would give the party a majority.

Opposing parties had united in hopes of frustrating Bird’s attempt to transfer power to his son Lester, his chief aide for most of the past 17 years.

Analysts on both sides detected a shift of support toward the opposition in recent weeks, spurred by new charges of government corruption.

The opposition, which won only one seat in the last election in 1989, won or was leading in seven races, according to official election returns. The remaining race was too close to call.

Leading the governing party to victory were Lester Bird and his brother, Vere Bird Jr.

Their 84-year-old father rose to run Antigua’s labor movement in 1943, steered his Caribbean homeland to independence and, with U.S. backing, swapped Antigua’s dependence on sugar farming for upscale tourism.

While becoming one of the eastern Caribbean’s most prosperous nations, Antigua in the past two decades emerged as a magnet for money laundering and a conduit for arms to whites in South Africa and to the Medellin cocaine cartel in Colombia. The country is made up of two islands, Antigua and Barbuda.

To a calypso beat titled “Never Again,” at least 3,000 people marched through the capital Monday night, many chanting “No more Birds!” and portraying the governing party as dominated by criminals and drug money.

Blocks away, a sound system boomed “(Everybody Must) Work,” a theme of the governing Antigua Labor Party.

Claxton Brown, 63, said he was voting for Bird because he didn’t want to lose his security job in the government, the nation’s No. 1 employer. Governing party workers wheeled elderly and infirm voters into another center outside St. John’s, the capital.

Annie John Drew, characterized in daughter Jamaica Kincaid’s book “Annie John,” waited patiently in the hot sun to vote for the opposition United Progressive Party.

Afterward, the 74-year-old Drew beamed and displayed her ink-stained forefinger--a precaution against electoral fraud--declaring, “I felt good because I voted for who I wanted.”

The integrity of the election was suspect because of a 5-year-old voting list that counts 43,000 eligible voters--a statistical improbability in a youth-driven nation of 59,000 people. Both opposition and governing party members have challenged the list.