Dear Editor,
I am aware that under certain ideologies the facts do not matter; sometimes they do not exist. Manufacture a line of argument, as liberally as necessary, and take the offensive, in all senses of the word. We see this being played out almost daily particularly in the political reaction to the new APNU+AFC administration. No subject is off limits for distortion; not even our crucial territorial integrity at a time of its most dastardly and dangerous threat. Some of those intervening can be so unashamed, outlandish and despicable as to astonish the most debauched anywhere.
It is not my intention to participate in the current exchange arising from the publication in the Sunday Stabroek of July 26, 2015, about the plot sourced in Venezuela in 1964 to overthrow and kidnap Dr Cheddi Jagan except to add three brief points.
First, you state that SN was “alerted to it”, the document on the plot, by a correspondent. I recall, however, that your newspaper did carry an account of the incident drawn from the said US document sometime during 2002 and 2003; I regret that I cannot be more precise. Then, and not necessarily in your newspaper, a senior member of the ruling PPP/C administration sought to implicate Mr LFS Burnham as a participant in the conspiracy.
Second, in my book, Anglo-American Diplomacy and the Re-opening of the Guyana-Venezuela boundary controversy, 1961-1966, published in December 2008, I referred to this plot in its context on pages 304-5. I had located the document in the US National Archives in 2002 roughly coinciding with its publication locally.
And third, your paper published a comprehensive and insightful review of my book by Ambassador Ronald Austin in the Sunday Stabroek of March 15, 2009.
Yours faithfully,
Cedric L Joseph
Editor’s note
Stabroek News printed the text of the document dealing with a Venezuelan plot to overthrow the government and kidnap Cheddi and Janet Jagan in our edition of August 3, 2005. It had been made public the year before by the Office of the Historian of the US State Department. Unfortunately, at the time Mr Maxwell drew our attention to the document in a letter a little over a week ago, we had forgotten that we had already reproduced it ten years earlier. We did not publish a story on its contents in 2005, however, which is why perhaps it did not attract much public attention at that time. In addition, so far we have not managed to locate a reference in our newspaper to a senior member of the PPP/C administration implicating Forbes Burnham in the conspiracy.