Cheddi Jagan

Cheddi Berret Jagan was born in Port Mourant, British Guiana, on the twenty-second of March 1918, the son of Indian indentured-labor immigrants who had worked the sugar plantations of British Guiana since the 1840s. He took his early education at Queen's College in Georgetown, worked his way to the United States, and took his dental degree at Northwestern University in Chicago (1942).

He returned to British Guiana in 1943, married the American activist Janet Rosenberg whom he had met in Chicago, and entered politics. He co-founded the People's Progressive Party in 1950 alongside Forbes Burnham — also placed in this archive.

He served as Premier of British Guiana from 1953 (his government was suspended within five months by British Royal Marines on the explicit grounds of his Marxist orientation), again from 1957 to 1961, and again from 1961 to 1964 (during which the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the British Colonial Office cooperated to destabilize his government through funded labor unrest — the case is fully documented in declassified Anglo-American records).

The political and ethnic strife of 1962-64 produced the rupture between Indian-descended and African-descended Guyanese political constituencies that shaped the rest of Guyanese politics. Burnham's PNC won the 1964 election under a new proportional-representation system the British had imposed; Jagan's PPP entered three decades of opposition.

He returned to power as President of Guyana in October 1992 after the first internationally observed free elections in Guyanese history (a process the Carter Center and a coalition of international observers conducted at the Guyanese government's invitation). He served twenty-eight months in office before dying of a heart attack at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on the sixth of March 1997, age seventy-eight.

He is honored here as the dentist whose Marxism the British and Americans removed from office three times, and who outlived them all to be freely elected.