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April 5, 2009, Seattle Times - New York Times, Janet Jagan, former Guyana president, by Simon Romero,

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Obits Janet Jagan

April 5, 2009, Seattle Times - New York Times, Janet Jagan, former Guyana president, by Simon Romero, 


Janet Jagan, a daughter of a middle-class family from Chicago who became enmeshed in anti-colonial politics in Guyana and rose to become the first woman president of that South American nation, died March 28 in Georgetown, the Guyanese capital. She was 88.


Janet Jagan died at 88

Janet Jagan, a daughter of a middle-class family from Chicago who became enmeshed in anti-colonial politics in Guyana and rose to become the first woman president of that South American nation, died March 28 in Georgetown, the Guyanese capital. She was 88.

Mrs. Jagan died at a government hospital after an abdominal aneurysm, said Guyana's health minister, Leslie Ramsammy.

Born Janet Rosenberg in 1920, she was a student nurse at Cook County Hospital in Chicago when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dentistry student at Northwestern University and the eldest of 11 children of an Indo-Guyanese family of sugarcane workers. His grandparents had arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured laborers.

She and Cheddi Jagan married, despite the fierce opposition of her parents, who were Jewish, and in 1943 they moved to British Guiana, where he established a dental practice and they both became involved in politics.

In 1950, they founded the People's Progressive Party, and in 1953, in elections under a new constitution providing greater home rule, Cheddi Jagan became chief minister. But the Jagans' Marxist ideas aroused the suspicions of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who sent warships and troops to topple the new government. The Jagans were jailed.

Even after the Jagans' release, police watched their every move.

A racial rift between Afro-Guyanese, many of them descendants of African slaves, and Indo-Guyanese followed Churchill's intervention. Cheddi Jagan returned to power in 1957, and Mrs. Jagan became labor minister.

Again, their politics, along with their admiration for Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba, caused alarm in a foreign capital; this time, Washington, D.C.

According to long-classified documents, President Kennedy ordered the CIA in 1961 to destabilize the Jagan government.

The CIA covertly financed a campaign of labor unrest, false information and sabotage that led to race riots and, eventually, the ascension of Forbes Burnham, a black, London-educated lawyer and a leader of the People's Progressive Party who had become a rival of the Jagans. He became president and prime minister in 1966.

After Guyana achieved independence that year, Mrs. Jagan remained active in public life as a member of parliament and editor of the newspaper The Mirror. Burnham veered far to the left, nationalizing companies, banning imports including basic foods and declaring Guyana a "cooperative republic" in 1970.

By the end of Burnham's rule, with his death in 1985, Guyana had become one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest nations.

In 1992, Cheddi Jagan was elected president. Mrs. Jagan served briefly as ambassador to the United Nations.

After her husband died in 1997, she ran for president and won. But her government was plagued by protests and tension with the opposition People's National Congress. She stepped down in 1999.

Mrs. Jagan is survived by her son, Dr. Cheddi Jagan Jr., a daughter, Nadira Jagan-Brancier, and five grandchildren.

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