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U.S.A. IN SOUTH AMERICA             JAGAN

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., admits in his book, A Thousand Days, that after a conversation with Burnham in Washington in May 1962, he recommended to the late President Kennedy that the United Stated should back Burnham, and that the way to destroy the PPP Government was by the introduction of proportional representation. And Drew Pearson, the American columnist, reported on March 22, 1964, that Kennedy made a special trip to London in the summer of 1963 to see Harold Macmillan to persuade him not to grant independence to Guyana. According to Drew Pearson, the 1953 strike was secretly inspired by a combination of United States CIA money and British Intelligence and gave London the excuse it wanted for withholding independence and changing our electoral system. 

In the 1964 election, the CIA intervened with money. According to the New York Times of April 28, 1966, the CIA “has poured money in Latin American election campaigns in support of moderate candidates and against leftist leaders such as Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana.”

The Sunday Times story of April 23, 1967, stated that the CIA resorted to corrupt means to split my party. it took out an insurance policy for “one ex-Jagan supporter for $30,000 dollars in 1964.” This is in line with bribes to an number of trade unionists who received money from the American Institute for Free Labor Development, another CIA-backed organization, that is today in charge of the Critchlow Labor Institute which provides trade union eduction in Guyana.

Little wonder that Guyana is today a land of bribery, corruption, nepotism, “squandermania” and racial discrimination. The main motivation is selfishness and get-rich-quick. Anyone willing to maintain the old order, no matter how corrupt he may be, can climb to the top.

The Deputy Lord Mayor of the capital, Georgetown, a government supporter, in a broadcast in May 1967 cried out against a new elite creating “a new, larger area of snobbery,” and bribery which “is all over the place and is fast becoming a national industry . . . the harm done in any situation in which bribery, corruption, nepotism and favoritism assume national proportions and is a way of life from top down, can never be calculation.” 

The Civil Service Association, which helped to bring the coalition parties in the government, in August, 1967, accused the government of causing a breach of industrial principle and a display of gross

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