By Nigel Westmaas
“To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world; our stories are singular but our destinies are shared – the new dawn of American leadership is at hand.” (President-elect Barack Obama, November 4, 2008 )
The Obama victory celebrations were held all over the world − and Guyana was no exception. Arguably, for the first time, there is the greater prospect of better global relations, not only in the hot spots, but as Obama stated, in the forgotten corners of the world. It is too early to speculate what relations the new administration will pursue with countries like Haiti, and of course Guyana. Third-world states like Guyana are generally only recognized by the US after tragedies like Jonestown, or when there are ideological or geo-political imperatives that elicit their concern. Yet there have been long standing connections, diplomatic and otherwise, between Guyana (colonial and independent Guyana) and the American behemoth. This article attempts a selective summary of a few defining moments that may have been lost to history.
Early ‘relations’
Nearly two hundred years ago, on February 24, 1813, two “sloops of war” representing the United States and Great Britain clashed off the coast of British Guiana (near Mahaica on the East Coast of Demerara). The encounter between the USS Hornet and HMS Peacock lasted for all of eleven minutes resulting in the sinking of the British navy Peacock. This naval battle was just one engagement of a resumed war that raged then between the United States and Great Britain. It however symbolized the dawn of extended and turbulent diplomatic/political relations and association between colonial British Guiana (later Guyana) and the United States.
At the political strategic level, the Americans began flexing their muscles in the region with more potency at the end of the 19th century. After the affirmation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States took a dim view of foreign influences (especially Spanish and British) in the hemisphere. President James Monroe’s statement on the issue was categorical. It said the hemisphere, “by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power.” Armed and influenced by this political strategic philosophy, as subsequent performance testifies, the USA intervened in the Caribbean as a dubious anti-colonial power intent on disposing of Spanish colonialism. This principle would determine US behaviour to the region for the next two centuries. It launched two wars in the hemisphere against Cuba and in Puerto Rico invading both these countries in 1898. Indicative of its growing influence in the region, US lawyers, including a former US President Benjamin Harrison, also appeared as counsel for Venezuela at the 1899 Tribunal hearing in Paris which decided the British Guiana-Venezuela boundary. That award represented a true and final settlement. The United States was firmly in the Venezuelan camp consistent with its geo-strategic concerns.
The early period
The United States invariably, although not always publicly, held British Guiana as an important economic and political asset. At times the ‘economic’ would achieve higher status, at other moments the political imperative gained ascendancy. Restricted to the arena of trade and economic concerns, the colony’s economic survival was sometimes bound up with the American market. For instance, in the early 19th century the US broke Guyana’s brief interlude as the biggest cotton producer in the world and as the huge American market began to predominate on the world market, it affected both the import and export trade relations of the British colony. Reciprocal trade between the two countries began to pick up in mid-century consisting mainly of sugar (from Guyana) and foodstuffs from the American side. The historian Alan Adamson argued it was only when Britain removed the “special preference duties” in 1845 that America “dominated the export of food to British Guiana and continued to do so until the end of the century.” In 1855, an American and British joint stock company was established. According to Adamson, barely “7.5% of the total value of colony’s sugar” sold on the US market at that time. By the end of the century US trade ties had grown with British Guiana in sugar and molasses and other products. Between 1872 and the turn of the century the famous “Demerara (sugar) crystals” were desired on the US market. The United States soon became an important destination of goods from British Guiana including bicycles, boots and shoes. Capital equipment from the United States also became more available by the 1890s.
20th century designs
With the advent of Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in the early 20th century, US interests in the Caribbean intensified. Wilson’s expanded notion of American foreign policy in the hemisphere was buttressed by military intervention and the expansion of economic and social ties to the region.
Local historian Roberta Kilkenny wrote that US interests in British Guiana increased in intensity when US capital “became actively involved in the exploration for, and exploitation of Guianese bauxite deposits.”
Alcoa, the Aluminum Company of America absorbed in bauxite held powerful connections to the Republican Party and its operations possessed “a tremendous wartime significance.” The British Governor of Guiana at the time faced American diplomatic pressure for lease of land to Alcoa.
While America had not yet entered the First World War when negotiations were taking place in 1914, the fact of war prompted the Wilson administration in the hunt for raw materials. The British were initially resistant, but the possibility of munitions supplies being withheld by the Americans was a factor in their eventual acquiescence. Alcoa, being the “most complete private monopoly in the US at the time” enjoyed the firm support of the US government and quickly overcame any residual British opposition. Together with the support Alcoa received from the US government, this was decisive.
Kilkenny added that American interests and pressure grew in the 1920s when “US and Guianese businessmen, with the support of the State Department, agitated for an exception to the British prohibition on foreign investment in strategic resources to allow for US involvement in the anticipated development of a Guianese petroleum industry.”
Petroleum is still to materialise, but the basis for 20th century US interest in British Guiana had been laid. During the Second World War, the US War Department country survey stated that British Guiana had “three resources (bauxite, timber and sugar) of potential value to the parent country or other power which can control and develop them.”
There was a military component to US strategic interests as they negotiated their way into the establishment of naval and military bases in the anglophone Caribbean. As part of this initial package, the Americans signed a ninety-year lease in May 1941 when two US military bases described as the “first in South America,” were built on Guyana soil, one of them the army base established at Hyde Park on the Demerara River. Better known as Atkinson Field, this facility, along with a naval air Station at Makouria on the Essequibo River, joined the worldwide constellation of US bases. Under the 99-year lease, “6,800 persons, including 5,007 Guianese, were involved in the construction of these bases over a twenty-month period.”
The 99-year lease was not peculiar to Guyana but was established by agreement with Britain with several other countries in the hemisphere in exchange for 50 “near-obsolete destroyers.” Other countries with US military outposts and naval bases included Antigua, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St Lucia, Trinidad and Bermuda.
In the wake of the American military presence in British Guiana, a few prominent local protesters called for the removal of the base agreement by the British government. The protestors included Ayube Edun of the MPCA (Man Power Citizens Association), the largest trade union in the colony at the time and Albert Thorne, President of the British Guiana Trade Union Council. Expectedly, the British did not assent to the base removal request.
American intervention intensifies
After the Second World War, US trade with British Guiana expanded further. According to one statistic, the US supplied 28% of the machinery Guyana imported. The little known rubber tapping industry was also part of the American interest in British Guiana. Political-strategic concerns of the Americans grew more intense in this period and this even superseded their economic interests.
In the 1950s, as part of its growing influence in the region in general and concern for the socialist PPP’s victory at the polls in 1953, the US government began to take an even more proactive and public interest in Guiana’s internal affairs. This was preceded by years of consular facilitated intelligence gathering in the colony. Kilkenny has alluded to information gathering on “the intricacies of Guyanese economic and political life, and terrain…” in the period 1940-1945. In August 1954, the Public Affairs Officer of the US Information Service LE Norrie arrived in the country and shortly thereafter, the United States Information Service opened an office in Georgetown. This was part of the general design to counter socialist influence in the colony.
Later the US became entangled in secret diplomatic negotiations with the British to persuade the colonial power to act more decisively against what the Americans perceived as British indecision in the face of the ‘communist’ threat. In assessing the various sides in the local political equation, the Americans decided that the PPP regime constituted a grave threat. The 1950s and 1960s were the decades of “explicit” imperialism on the part of the Americans. The term ‘imperialism’ has become politically unfashionable but no other term can adequately describe the attitude and actions of the United States in that period.
Both Western powers saw the threat of a Jagan government as likely to be more consequential for American and British ‘security’ concerns and acted accordingly. One political analyst observed that “despite concerns about Jagan’s ideological background, as well as US economic and strategic interests in and around British Guiana, later, the administration of John F. Kennedy sought to work with the Jagan government.” This might be an exaggeration of the US approach. When Cheddi Jagan visited Washington in pursuit of economic aid, the Americans listened politely but ideological concerns prevailed. No economic aid was forthcoming and the Americans persisted in their efforts to remove the PPP regime.
Most independent observers concur that the CIA actively intervened in the crises of “the sixties” in British Guiana using the US umbrella labour group AFL-CIO in pursuance of its agenda. The PPP government was finally ousted electorally in 1964 partly on account of an opposition PNC-UF coalition.
With independence in 1966, Guyana immediately established diplomatic relations with eight countries, the United States, India, Canada, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, United Kingdom, West Germany and Venezuela.
Post-independence
relations
Between 1966 and 1970, when the Americans actively courted the ruling PNC-UF party coalition and the country’s voting record at the UN paralleled American global interests, economic assistance was forthcoming. At the domestic level, the PNC-UF acted (right up until their split in 1968) in ideological concert with each other in opposition to the leftist PPP.
During the 1970s, however, relations between Guyana and the United States exhibited strain mostly on account of Cold War and US hemispheric concerns. The Americans reacted negatively to the increasingly leftist foreign policy of the Forbes Burnham regime which by that time had developed close ties with the socialist bloc in general and Cuba in particular.
The Burnham regime even allowed Cuban planes to refuel at the Guyanese airport in 1976 en route to Angola to assist the defence against the South African invasion of the former Portuguese colony. Burnham’s nationalization policy likewise angered the Americans. Guyana was, however, a peculiar case for the Americans. Unlike other countries where there was a ‘balance of power’ in the form of relatively strong right of centre and conservative parties, no such luxury existed for the US in Guyana. This is witnessed in the array of political forces in the country at the time. The ruling PNC had an aggressive foreign policy embracing relations with both the non-aligned movement and socialist countries. In the opposition was the PPP – an explicitly Marxist-Leninist organisation and officially a member of the world communist movement since 1969. Another political party, the vibrant leftist opposition WPA, had appeared on the scene in the early 1970s and posed serious problems for the Burnham regime. But as all main political parties were connected to the left in one form or another – the Americans were presented with a unique dilemma and on finding no rival organisation of any substance on the ‘right’ the US opted for maintaining regular, if tense relations with Burnham. While Manley was pressured out of office in Jamaica and the Grenada revolution went up in self-inflicted flames in 1983 with an American invasion in tow, Guyana continued to embrace diplomatic and economic ties with the US government. Still, subtle and open economic and political pressures were exerted and on a few occasions, diplomatic shouting matches ensued.
New times
With the advent of the Desmond Hoyte regime after the death of Burnham in 1985, US relations with Guyana began to thaw. Aid packages resumed to Guyana when the Hoyte regime embarked on what it termed the Economic Recovery Programme (ERP). This was soon facilitated and buttressed by overseas assistance.
By the 1992 general elections in Guyana, State Department interest in the democratic process was more obvious and was a distinct sign of a ‘relaxed’ United States when one of their former arch-enemies on the left in the hemisphere, Cheddi Jagan, was elected to office. This turnaround was facilitated in large measure by shifts both in Guyanese lobbying efforts in the US and elsewhere and the intervention of several prominent Americans including former USA President James Carter who led the mission named after him to Guyana to pressure the Hoyte regime into conceding the count at the place of poll. The global cessation of the ‘distinctive’ Cold War was another reason for improved relations.
Conclusion
Now the Obama era has arrived, from his spirited campaign rhetoric there will be greater democratic expectations. Will US diplomacy towards Guyana be limited to a few aid packages and dealings designed for a small third world state that would hardly make the Secretary of State’s daily briefing list of approximately sixty countries?
In October this year, a new US ambassador was appointed for Guyana. Normally a routine turnover, this ambassadorial appointment elicited speculation given the state of the United States foreign policy under Bush and its fractured relations with Venezuela and Russia, with the latter strengthening military ties with Venezuela. In the post 9-11, post-Cold War world, the USA was preoccupied with matters of interest in the Middle East, and of course Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama’s success will not immediately imply that US foreign policy will be any less hostile to a Chavez, but given the President-elect’s campaign philosophy there are indications he will be sympathetic to the efflorescence of political and social reform all over South America. Guyana’s geographical location, especially its diplomatic positions relative to Venezuela, can be a factor for US geo-strategic moves in the period ahead.
While the balance of power between the USA and Guyana is dramatically and unmistakably uneven and Guyana may not make the US priority list, there are serious issues that remain, among them narco-trafficking, human rights concerns, and of course the effects of the US and global money crisis on economies like Guyana. It will be interesting to see how the new Ambassador and American foreign policy under Obama’s administration acts in Guyana and the region in the months and years ahead. Let us hope the outreach will move from the imbalanced preoccupations of the past and move to more open and qualitatively different relations between states.