Word: guianas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...general strike has been raging in British Guiana for eleven weeks against the regime of Marxist Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan. The bitter division of the colony between the Negroes and the East Indians (still loyal to their countryman Jagan) is worsening. Violence is spreading from the Georgetown capital to the countryside, where en raged mobs of anti-Jagan Negroes battle with the East Indian farmers...
...fighting continued, Jagan appointed his wife, Chicago-born Janet Rosenberg, a onetime Young Communist Leaguer and the colony's most controversial woman, to be Minister of Home Affairs, making her, in effect, British Guiana's top cop. Neither Janet nor her police have been able to quiet things. All that prevents outright racist civil war is the presence of 500 British troops that Jagan called upon to protect his tottering regime...
...London Colonial Secretary Duncan Sandys rejected any suggestion that Britain suspend British Guiana's self-governing constitution and take charge, but another 145 troops were airlifted to British Guiana "because of a deterioration in the situation." At week's end, the efforts of a British negotiator finally brought a truce between Jagan's government and the striking unions. But the racial differences have cut so deep that no easy end to the violence was expected...
...crowd of 5,000 gathered at the cemetery just outside British Guiana's Georgetown capital for the funeral of a Cabinet minister. But only a few were there to mourn. Most of them were waiting for Cheddi and Janet Jagan, the Marxist husband and wife team who misrule the small, self-governing colony perched on South America's northeast coast. When the Jagans arrived, the crowd surged forward hurling coconut shells, bottles, bricks and stones at their Prime Minister. Pulling a coat over his head, Jagan fled with his wife to a car and sped away...
Jagan still clamors for independence from Britain. But London, which had originally hoped to cut British Guiana loose last year, suspended all talks after a series of riots in February 1962. The continuing unrest seems likely to postpone independence indefinitely -at least under Jagan. By last week, he was making desperate attempts to come to terms with the strikers. But the workers still stayed off the job, and the mounting opposition was determined to use the marathon walkout to topple his government...