Guyana, a Caribbean nation settled by former slaves from Africa and indentured servants from India, appears poised to choose as its next president a remarkable contender: a white, Chicago-born woman journalist and socialist revolutionary.
That Janet Jagan is the widow of the late President Cheddi Jagan, who died of heart failure in March, is only part of her appeal. For much of Guyana’s Indo-Guayanese majority, the white-haired 77-year-old is the mother of the nation, a tough street fighter who helped lead the country to independence from Britain in 1966.
“I didn’t particularly want to run. I got pushed into it,” said Jagan, who now serves as prime minister and runs her party’s newspaper, her chief love. “But now I’m enthusiastic,” she said. “It’s looking good.”
On Monday, voters in this steamy, tropical South American nation of 750,000 people will choose among 10 contenders for president. Jagan’s closest rival is Desmond Hoyte, the leader of the predominantly Afro-Guyanese People’s National Congress and Guyana’s president from 1985 to 1992.
The election will be decided on two key issues, economic progress and ethnicity, said David deCaires, publisher of Georgetown’s leading independent paper, the Stabroek News.
In most recent Guyanese elections, voters have split along ethnic lines, with Indo-Guyanese supporting Jagan’s predominantly Indian People’s Progressive Party and Afro-Guyanese backing Hoyte’s party.
With no reliable census carried out in nearly a decade, no one knows the nation’s current ethnic breakdown. Heavy immigration from India in recent years, though, is thought to have made the Indo-Guyanese a strong majority, with Afro-Guyanese representing around 43 percent of the population.
That suggests “if voting patterns hold, it’s a matter of demographics,” DeCaires said.
Indo-Guyanese have long worked on Guyana’s coastal sugar cane farms, but in recent years have moved increasingly into black-dominated Georgetown as merchants. Afro-Guyanese, concentrated in the capital, traditionally have served in most public service posts. In recent years, however, many blacks have lost jobs to cutbacks and political appointments made by the majority People’s Progressive Party.
Hoyte’s backers charge that Jagan and her party have done too little to bring down unemployment, estimated at 10 percent, and have clung to their socialist roots in an era of free-market reforms, dragging their feet on privatization and doing too little to woo foreign investment.
“If you walk the streets here during working hours you see young people out playing ball in the streets,” said Aubrey Norton, general secretary of Hoyte’s People’s National Congress. “We need to kickstart the economy.”
The party points to Hoyte’s success in his first term in negotiating a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund as the basis for the investment that has come to Guyana since 1992.
Jagan’s party hasn’t “shown much dynamism in their economic performance,” DeCaires agreed. But the party inherited a country mired in an economic disaster after 20 years of PNC graft that predated Hoyte’s term, he said. “One has to keep context in mind,” he said.
The government is currently negotiating with a Canadian buyer for the country’s antiquated electrical power generating system, DeCaires said. But years after Jagan’s husband told voters they should judge him on how efficiently he provided reliable power, electricity continues to fail almost hourly even in Georgetown, the capital.
In the weeks leading up to Monday’s election, Jagan’s age, health and foreign-born status have come under attack. Political opponents charge she is too frail and forgetful for the job, charges that bring chuckles from the front-runner, a small, tough woman in lilac-rimmed glasses and sandals.
“In the last week I don’t know how many times I’ve died. Yesterday I had a heart attack I hear,” she said. Her 67-year-old chief opponent, she notes, has himself had bypass surgery.
Complaints that she is a foreigner also have not stuck. Jagan, who came to South America with her Guyana-born husband in the 1940s and later gave up her U.S. citizenship, has been here as long as most of her challengers. She would be the nation’s first woman president and its first foreign-born.
The only poll conducted so far in the race, by the main government newspaper, gives Jagan a 55 percent majority but she is suspicious of the numbers.
She is more encouraged, she said, by the crowds of 40,000 or more supporters she has drawn at recent political rallies.
“I think people remember that I’ve been there championing their rights for over 50 years,” she said. “They know I was in the streets with them.”
