Cheddi Jagan; Guyana Leader Helped Growth

Cheddi Jagan, the president of Guyana in South America, died Thursday of apparent heart problems. He was 78.

Jagan died at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where he was being treated. He had undergone heart surgery to clear a blocked artery after coming to the United States for medical treatment Feb. 15, complaining of chest pains.

“That extraordinary light that shone in Guyana and the world for nearly 79 years has been extinguished,” Guyana’s prime minister, Samuel Hinds, said in a statement read on Guyana radio and television.

Information Minister Moses Nagamootoo told Reuters that Hinds, who has been acting president since Jagan became ill, was to be sworn in as president later Thursday.

Jagan’s wife, two children and five grandchildren had rushed to his bedside for an all-night vigil.

Jagan had returned to power in Guyana after nearly three decades in the political wilderness and was the driving force in putting the former British colony back in the Caribbean mainstream.

The former Marxist led his left-leaning People’s Progressive Party to a striking victory at the polls in October 1992--the country’s first democratic elections in 28 years.

Under his rule, Guyana enjoyed a relative economic boom.

He steered Guyana toward what some experts called one of the most successful adjustment programs anywhere, including a 1996 agreement to reduce by 67% the country’s debt with the Paris Club of creditor nations.

Inflation fell from a high of 105% in 1989 to 4.5% in 1996, as the country opened to foreign investors eager to tap vast resources in mining, forestry and agriculture.

The author of a wealth of books on Caribbean political history, Jagan became Guyana’s first prime minister after the former British colony was granted self-government in 1961, only to be deposed three years later after race riots.

A frequent visitor to communist Cuba, he antagonized Washington and became a target of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Although Jagan repeatedly described himself as a socialist and a Marxist, he made it clear that he planned to achieve his socialist goals by democratic means.

His ouster meant that his longtime rival, Forbes Burnham, would lead the country out of colonial rule in 1966. Burnham’s People’s National Congress ruled with an iron fist for the next 26 years, creating a mix of government control and socialist experiments.

Jagan was born March 22, 1918, in Port Mourant, Guyana, and qualified as a dentist in the United States. Here he married Janet Rosenberg of Chicago, a relative of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for espionage. Of East Indian descent, Jagan said his experience with treatment of plantation workers in Guyana and racial prejudice in the United States influenced his political path.

He returned to Guyana in 1943 and practiced dentistry for a few years before forming the People’s Progressive Party together with Burnham in 1948.

He first headed an elected party government in 1953, but six months later Britain suspended the constitution, charging communist subversion, and Jagan was imprisoned for six months.

Jagan was awarded the Lenin centenary medal and the Soviet Union’s order of peace and friendship among peoples.

Among his many literary works is “The Role of the CIA in Guyana and Its Activities Throughout the World,” published in 1967, which did not endear him to Washington. He wrote his autobiography “The West on Trial” in 1966.

Jagan’s party represents much of the Asian majority--descendants of indentured laborers brought from India in the 19th century--yet he chose Hinds, a black executive in the bauxite industry, as his running mate and eventual prime minister.