Notes on Guyana
Over the summer, I visited Guyana (pronounced Guy-ana), mostly in and around the capital of Georgetown. I had plans to see far more of the country but they didn’t come to fruition. Sometimes while …
Over the summer, I visited Guyana (pronounced Guy-ana), mostly in and around the capital of Georgetown. I had plans to see far more of the country but they didn’t come to fruition. Sometimes while writing these 25,000+ word posts, I feel the need to justify why anyone would want to read about a random country they may or may not have heard of. My pitch for reading about Guyana is that its history involves two death cults, diverse leadership (including individuals of the male, female, black, Indian, white, Chinese, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish persuasion), a semi-race war, a legal argument over the definition of the word, “majority,” CIA-backed regime change, a conspiracy to thwart a multi-national territorial arbitration, and the largest per capita oil discovery in the history of mankind. If you’re not interested in any of the above, skip to the last section where I describe why Guyana is possibly my least favorite national travel destination ever. But before I get to that… My major historical sources include a 1992 US Military-commissioned study of Guyana and Belize. No, I have no idea why they lumped those two countries together, nor why it includes this awful map trying to give a perspective on the size of Guyana: Regardless, I’ll refer to this source as “The Handbook” since it is part of a “Handbook series.” I use a few key articles from a website called “Guyana Under Siege,” which seems to be written by a bunch of Indian Guyanese journalists, who admittedly might have some bias. I’ll refer to this source as “GUS.” Current Event’s Oil Fuels Guyana’s Internecine Conflict definitely comes from a left wing perspective but has a good analysis of modern Guyanese politics and its roots. I read through the National Security Archive’s summary of declassified US intelligence documents regarding covert American and British conduct in Guyana in the mid-20th century. The Pulitzer Center’s Guyana: CIA Meddling, Race Riots and a Phantom Death Squad has more analysis. Fortune’s The untold story of how Exxon scored a $1 trillion oil bonanza that 30 rivals passed up is an excellent bit of journalism on the discovery of oil in Guyana. Other sources I used include Leslie Bethel’s Notes on the History of the Venezuela/Guyana Boundary Dispute, Marjoleine Kars’s Dodging Rebellion: Politics and Gender in the Berbice Slave Uprising of 1763, this Guardian article, this article on Forbes Burnham from Black Past, this article from the Washington Post, and this article from Stabroeck News. Other minor sources are linked within. Population (2022) – 809,000 The land that would eventually become known as Guyana was first claimed by Europeans in 1616. On maps, it was Spanish, but the first few hundred settlers on the ground were almost all Dutch. At the time, Spain and the Netherlands were in the midst of the Eighty Years War, an on-again-off-again revolt by mostly Protestant Dutchmen against Catholic Hapsburgs. The Dutch government had de facto control over Guyana and put it under the management of the Dutch West India Company. In 1648, Spain gave up its occupation and released the Netherlands as an independent state, which took Guyana and a bunch of other Dutch-settled Caribbean territories with it. At the time, no one paid much attention to the precise boundaries between what would become known as “Dutch Guiana” and “Spanish Guiana.” This would come back to haunt modern Guyana about 370 years later. Presumably this carelessness was due to the whole northern South American region being pretty economically weak as a colonial prospect. Nearby, many Caribbean islands were shaping up to be proverbial gold mines with slave-based plantation economies growing sugar, coffee, indigo, and tobacco. But being on a big landmass instead of an island, Guyana is hotter and more humid than the islands, and even today, 91% of the country is covered in dense tropical rainforest. Still, there’s a narrow strip of land on the Guyanese coast and around the mouth of the Essequibo River that is flat and a bit less intensely dominated by jungle. It was here that Dutch settlers tried their hand at sparking Caribbean-style plantation economies, mostly based on sugar. And like so many neighboring regions, Guyana went through a labor cultivation process that would shape its economic, political, and cultural history to this day. Cane sugar is not that hard to grow but it is hard to harvest, especially by hand (video). You have to use a machete to cut a tough, bamboo-ish stalk, and you have to do it while bending over to cut at the very bottom of the plant, and you usually have to do it in a tropical climate where it’s a billion degrees and 99% humidity. Obviously, the pasty white Dutchmen didn’t want to do the actual harvesting, so they turned to their local source of Natives to enslave. But as with virtually everywhere else, they found the Natives were not well suited to the task. Even if they didn’t keep dying off in plagues, they were mostly pre-agricultural people who knew little about farming, let alone in organized Western communities. They were, fortunately for the Natives, shitty slaves, and the non-enslaved ones were smart enough to migrate further inland to get away from the slaving Dutch hugging the coastline. So the Dutch soon turned to Africa. Until it was finally outlawed, about 500,000 slaves were imported to Guyana and neighboring Suriname. And unfortunately for the Africans, like elsewhere in the New World, they turned out to be quite good slaves, and transformed Guyana into a still-lower tier but economically viable colony in the emerging global Dutch trade empire. This process was not without its pitfalls. For reasons I have never seen fully explained, the slaves in Guyana and Suriname were particularly prone to revolt compared to most of the New World colonies. My best guess is that it was a matter of geography. It’s relatively easy to run away from a plantation if it’s surrounded by extremely dense, almost entirely unmapped jungle. Today, over 20% of Suriname’s population identifies as “Maroons,” the descendants of slaves who revolted, fled the plantations, and built entire villages and societies in the inland jungle. Interestingly, this process seems to have been prevented in Guyana by the Dutch’s use of Native scout soldiers to hunt down rebelling slave groups. I don’t know why the Dutch settlers in Suriname didn’t do the same thing. Guyana’s best-known revolt was the Berbice Rebellion in 1763-1764. In response to the brutality of an infamous master, two slaves, both born in Africa, rallied a few local comrades to flee the plantations and start raiding. This snowballed into a revolt joined by virtually every slave in the Berbice region, reaching 4,000-5,000 strong. Dozens of Europeans were killed and the Dutch soldiers and their Native allies fled entirely, leaving about half the region in slave hands for almost a year. The leader, a house slave named Cuffy, set up his own government with its own military, and took the opportunity to (presumably coercively) marry the white wife of a plantation owner. Things seemed to be going well for a while, especially since the Dutch only had, at most, 60 soldiers nearby when the rebellion broke out, so it seemed plausible that Cuffy’s nascent state could actually conquer Guyana. But keeping his people and military supplied quickly became a problem, especially since the freed slaves were not sanguine about the prospect of going back to work on the plantations. Cuffy tried to negotiate with the Dutch Governor to carve out a little African state in Guyana that would be loyal to the Netherlands. Instead, the Dutch got their shit together and rallied some troops from other colonies. There were some skirmishes, the slaves took heavy losses, then Cuffy’s top lieutenant revolted against the revolt, and while the rebellion collapsed into civil war, Cuffy committed suicide. Well over 1,000 slaves died in the fighting, between 75 and 128 were executed, and the rest were re-enslaved. Before and after the Berbice Rebellion, the Dutch colonial authorities were contending with ethnic strife wrought by a far more insidious people: the British. In 1746, a treaty between the Dutch and British governments opened up Guyana to British settlement to encourage colonial development. By 1760, the European population of Guyana’s core was majority British, though of course the Europeans were vastly outnumbered by the African slaves. By the end of the century, the British settlers, who tended to congregate in the urban areas while the Dutch still owned more plantations, had taken over local administrative affairs despite the colony still being a Dutch possession. Guyana’s economic growth accelerated and it became one of the biggest cotton producing colonies in the world. Over the next 25 years, control of Guyana would bounce repeatedly between the Dutch, French, and British throughout the French Revolution as rival governments and alliances rose and fell in Europe. But with the first fall of Napoleon in 1814, Guyana was definitively placed under British rule and would remain so for the next 152 years. The Guyanese plantocracy mostly supported British oversight: the British administration was pro-development, provided labor and capital connections through a vast empire, and generally had better legal protections through its common law system. But their good times couldn’t last forever. In 1807, the British government outlawed the international slave trade. Fortunately for the plantocracy, like the American South, they already had huge slave reserves and could continue using slave labor indefinitely with natural slave reproduction. Unfortunately for the plantocracy, their slave reserves were so big that the lopsided demographics were still a chronic threat to the stability of the colonies. This was exacerbated by local norms that encouraged particularly brutal treatment of slaves, even by Caribbean standards. In 1825, under pressure from London, the local colonial authorities tried instituting more regulations on the treatment of slaves: “The weekend was to be from sunset on Saturday to sunrise on Monday; field work was also defined to be from 6 am to 6 pm, with a mandatory two-hour break. A Protector of Slaves was appointed; whipping was abolished for women as was its use in the field. The rights to marriage and own property was legalised, as was the right to acquire manumission.” These provisions were largely ignored by the Guyanese elite who were too small and relatively poor for the mighty British government to care about. In 1830, there were an estimated 100,000 slaves in Guyana. I don’t have total population figures for the time, but today, Guyana only has about 800,000 people. In 1832, as many as 13,000 slaves participated in a massive two-day rebellion that ended with hundreds dead in battle and dozens executed. The revolt was sparked by rumors that the British government had outlawed slavery but the local colonial authorities were concealing the truth. Though some whites were killed, the rebellion was not a Haitian-style bloodbath and there was nowhere near the scale of violence (or organization) that Cuffy had enacted back in 1763. The vast majority of slaves eventually surrendered and were re-enslaved. The following year, slavery really was abolished throughout the British Empire. The former slaves of Guyana eagerly embraced their freedom by leaving the plantations en masse and moving into the urban centers where they became the overwhelming majority of the population. They were still politically disenfranchised, but they could generally live and work under the protection of British law as they saw fit, and their sheer numbers immediately gave them an impressive measure of political and social power. The Guyanese plantocracy had long despaired of this day. Like in the Caribbean, the cultivation of sugar and cotton was dependent on ample labor that would be willing to do exhausting and somewhat dangerous labor at extremely low cost, and very few Europeans were willing to do it. And like in the American South, many elements of the plantocracy thought the entire plantation system would crash and burn without slavery. However, in some ways, the Guyanese plantocracy was actually better situated to take the slave abolition hit than elsewhere. Unlike in the US thirty years later, the British slave owners were financially compensated for their lost property by the British taxpayer. And in Guyana, there were plenty of local prospects for that money; unlike the Caribbean islands, most of which had already maxed out their agricultural capacity, Guyana had a vast hinterland that could be theoretically cleared and developed with the right investments. Also, according to one source, Guyana’s plantocracy already had a relatively large amount of money sunk into non-slave capital such as sugar processing plants. And finally, the Guyanese plantocracy potentially had access to new cheap labor to replace their slaves. The British Empire was the largest the world had ever seen and permitted the cheap flow of capital between ports on opposite sides of the world, so it was only a matter of finding a new population that was poor enough to be shipped across the globe to farm cotton and sugar in a tropical climate for extremely low wages. The British and Dutch population of Guyana would end up importing so much labor that they would marginalize themselves to an almost entirely insignificant political, economic, and social force in the country, at least by the middle of the 20th century. To set up what Guyana would become with its tumultuous, conflict-fraught, and honestly pretty disastrous independence, it’s worth going into the major population groups, both those that were already in Guyana and the immigrants that would increasingly dominate the fate of the nation. By last census, the descendants of the slaves in Guyana, known as Afro-Guyanese, are 29% of the population and make up a significant portion of the 20% that identifies as multiracial. Their population continued to grow after slavery ended but only by a natural birth rate that was hindered by significant emigration in the 20th century to the US and Canada. By the end of the 1800s, the Afro-Guyanese had already lost their majority, and their percentage would continue to erode even when labor stopped being imported since the natural birth rates of the other immigrant populations outpaced them. As mentioned, the Afro-Guyanese rapidly left the plantations after their liberation and congregated in the cities. There they formed the manufacturing base of the country and a significant portion of the merchant and professional classes. Later, many would leave the cities again to work in bauxite mining which became overwhelmingly associated with black labor. As the immigrant populations became better organized and more entrenched in the 20th century, the Afro-Guyanese became known as the poorest ethnic group in Guyana besides the Natives. A description of Afro-Guyanese culture from the Handbook: “Descendants of the Africans, the Afro-Guyanese came to see themselves as the true people of British Guiana, with greater rights to land than the indentured workers who had arrived after them. The fact that planters made land available to East Indians in the late nineteenth century when they had denied land to the Africans several decades earlier reinforced Afro-Guyanese resentment toward other ethnic groups in the colony. The Afro-Guyanese people’s perception of themselves as the true Guyanese derived not only from their long history of residence, but also from a sense of superiority based on their literacy, Christianity, and British colonial values.” That’s a fascinating description of how cultural norms can develop in the midst of conquest, immigration, and assimilation. There was a Native Guyanese population, but it was supplanted by European colonialists who then kidnapped Africans, brought them to Guyana as slaves, and then they became so numerous that they overwhelmed their colonial masters by population, adopted colonial cultural norms, were liberated, and then became the sort of de facto native population of Guyana. The Handbook also made some cultural observations that skirt the line of modern acceptability. It says that according to British planters, the Afro-Guyanese were characterized as “physically strong but lazy and irresponsible.” Once liberated, they were considered “improvident” for refusing to work for low wages on the plantations. During slavery, black families were discouraged and broken up both for the sake of suppressing slave organization and for raw economic benefit (like selling away slave children). According to the Handbook, this had a long-lasting impact on the cultural attitudes of the Afro-Guyanese by destigmatizing loose family norms. Even in the late 20th century when the Handbook was written, the Afro-Guyanese supposedly had more children out of wedlock, fewer marriages, and fewer monogamous relationships. Likewise, since slave times, the Afro-Guyanese had always been very Christian and the suppression of African norms was so successful that there was little syncretism. Over time, the weak family bond trend became less pronounced in the black professional middle class which held even tighter Christian norms than the poorer blacks. On the other hand, the Handbook claims that the Afro-Guyanese had strong pro-education norms because they “saw education as a means of escape from the drudgery of plantation labor.” Teachers in particular took on village leadership roles and had high status. The most educated in the communities went on to form the professional black middle class. Thus, despite the low average income of the Afro-Guyanese, they had an unusually high literacy rate compared to other post-slavery populations. In 1838, 396 Indians were brought to Guyana on indentured servitude contracts. For the plantocracy, this was the labor jackpot. They were hard workers, they were paid such low wages that it was economically feasible to ship them in from the other side of the world on sailboats, and they were so socially isolated and used to agrarian life that even after their near-slavery contracts ended, they would just sign on again. Guyana had found its new people. In time, 286,000 Indians immigrated to Guyana, constituting 80% of migrant workers. By the end of the 19th century, they became at least a plurality, if not majority of the population of Guyana. Currently, Indians have the highest median income of any ethnic group in the United States. While there are cultural contributors to this trend, it’s probably mostly a result of an extremely powerful selection effect wherein only the very economically best and brightest out of the 1.4 billion people in India manage to immigrate to the US. The Indians who immigrated to Guyana were not their economically best and brightest. They were the poorest of the poor in British-controlled regions: mostly Uttar Pradesh, but also Bengal, Punjab, and Gujarat. They were nearly all subsistence farmers or bottom-tier laborers, illiterate, and with no economic prospects back home. They took the Guyanese contracts not for the money, but because they were (honestly) told that land in Guyana and the New World was cheap, and they could probably buy their own land eventually. And so the vast majority of imported Indian workers ended up staying in Guyana for life rather than returning to India. The emergent Guyanese demographic trend in the 19th century was that the Afro-Guyanese increasingly dominated the cities and what became known as the Indo-Guyanese increasingly dominated the countryside. Unlike the Afro-Guyanese, the Indians were noted for maintaining close family structures, in-part because they brought families intact with them from the motherland, and in-part because (unlike the African slaves) they were permitted to maintain their religious and cultural customs in Guyana. This allowed the Indians to pool their meager wages and buy out their contracts or their own land plots over the decades. With smaller plots compared to the European plantocracy, sugar and cotton were less viable, so the Indian landowners primarily switched to cultivating rice. Eventually, some Indo-Guyanese drifted into the cities and set up their own merchant operations, though their economic activity mostly remained contained within their ethnic boundaries. The Handbook does not spare the Indo-Guyanese from non-PC cultural descriptions. The European planters considered them “industrious but clannish and greedy.” While the Afro-Guyanese were seen as profligate, the Indo-Guyanese were seen as stingy and selfish for living in squalor and privation for the sake of saving money to buy their own land. Interestingly, caste was not (and as far as I can tell, is still not) an issue among Indo-Guyanese. By the Handbook’s accounting, 31% of Indian immigrants were “untouchables” (Dalit), 30% were “from agricultural castes,” and 14% were Brahmin. And yet the castes were almost entirely ignored in Guyana because everyone was equally dirt-poor, and the European plantation owners applied the good old fashion liberal norm of not giving a shit about caste, and so all the Indians of all the castes worked and housed together. (The Handbook notes that only the Brahmins may have faced some discrimination because British colonials were wary of their leadership potential.) Likewise, there seems to be little division between the Hindus and Muslims, the latter of which constituted 16% of Indian immigrants. Initially, the Europeans tried converting the Indian immigrants to Christianity but they found little success, especially when the Brahmins among them started countering by reforming their Hindu rites to be more egalitarian. Eventually, a Hindu syncretism emerged and, according to the Handbook, Guyanese Hinduism adopted many aspects of Christianity and Islam. In contrast to the Afro-Guyanese, the Indo-Guyanese were skeptical of education: “Until the 1930s, Indo-Guyanese often were opposed to primary schooling for their children. The Indo-Guyanese plantation workers feared both discrimination and the influence of Christian education on their children. They were also reluctant to forgo the labor their children provided.” This cultural norm began to shift in the 1930s and 1940s when many Indo-Guyanese had accumulated enough land to become fairly wealthy and they began to seek education for their children to move beyond the farms. The native people of Guyana were largely squeezed of out key economic and political affairs by the Dutch, then the British, and then the Indo/Afro-Guyanese hegemony. Many Natives died of disease during the early colonization period, then more died under slavery, then most fled further into the jungles to live in primitive isolation while a small minority remained under European control, some of whom served as military auxiliaries. They don’t come up much in the sources after that point, though they interestingly aligned with conservatives in the 20th century to counteract the Indo/Afro-Guyanese majority. Many still live in Native communities that have special government protections and benefits. When I was in Guyana, there was some sort of Amerindian pride celebration going on, so there were signs all over Georgetown celebrating them, but I don’t think I saw many actual Natives. Though obviously not a British possession, Portugal and its surprisingly large colonial empire were politically and financially tied to Britain, so it was easy to set up labor contracts for Portuguese citizens to move to Guyana as indentured servants or not much better. In the 1830s, a few thousand Portuguese arrived and more would continue to trickle in throughout the century. However, in the words of the Handbook, the “Portuguese had not taken to plantation work.” They seemingly left the farms the nanosecond their contracts ended and went to the cities. Despite being European, the “British and Dutch planters refused to accept the Portuguese as equals and sought to maintain their status as aliens with no rights in the colony, especially voting rights.” So the Portuguese formed their own insular economic networks in the cities and carved out a professional and merchant niche. Eventually, they cooperated with Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese activists against British political dominance. As the British and Dutch plantation owners slowly trickled out of Guyana throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Portuguese became an increasingly dominant share of the European population. With their relative wealth and status, they would go on to form the backbone of the small but influential conservative faction in the country before and immediately after independence. But I guess they also steadily emigrated over time, especially in the second half of the 20th century; by last census there are only around 2,000 Portuguese left in Guyana. Chinese workers were tried as an alternative to Indian workers by the British and Dutch plantocracy. From 1853 to 1914, 14,000 Chinese came to Guyana and nearly all stayed after their contracts ended. But like the Portuguese, they left the farms as soon as they could and overwhelmingly set up shops in the cities. According to the Handbook, the Chinese were the “most acculturated” of the immigrant groups and pretty much entirely abandoned their Chinese customs for Guyanese culture and often Christianity. And since the Chinese immigrants were almost all men, they heavily interbred with the locals, and in-turn, integrated economically with the rest of the population to a great degree. The 2012 census says there were only 1,637 Chinese left in Guyana. That seems too low for today based on what I saw in Guyana and Suriname. There are lots of Chinese restaurants, hotels, some casinos, and they seem to have a literal monopoly over supply stores outside the cities. I’m guessing there has been a more recent influx of Chinese immigrants and investors to Guyana just as there has been to almost every other country on earth over the last 20 years. Guyana ended up gaining independence from Britain like nearly all of its colonies after World War II. But the preamble has enough unusual factors to make Guyanese independence interesting. By the early 20th century, the European locals had declined in population and relative share of the wealth to the point where the economy and political sphere were dominated by the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, two non-native ethnic groups that had only been in Guyana for around 200 years and less than 100 years respectively, and whose natural cultures had gone through a mangling evolutionary process to produce something wholly unique on the other end. The Afro-Guyanese were generally poorer, stayed in the cities, had looser family structures and organization, and saw themselves as the true nationalist successors to the British legacy. Meanwhile, the Indo-Guyanese dominated the countryside, were buying up the old plantations on which their ancestors had worked, kept tight family and economic bonds with each other, and saw themselves as outsiders fighting for their rightful piece of the pie. In between, the remaining British and Dutch planters, the Portuguese, and the Chinese carved their own paths as small minorities with outsized economic strength. Ethnic tensions had increased throughout the 19th century, but finally coalesced in the early 20th. The emerging leadership of both the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese were opposed to the British legal and economic system. Both were leftist, organized around labor, and wanted increased local representation in colonial management. Tragically the two groups embarked on a protracted war for control over Guyana that has lasted to this day not due to any significant ideological difference, but due to a materialistic struggle for ethnic spoils at the expense of the other. The earliest violence between the two groups came with labor agitation. In 1905, a group of black stevedores went on strike to protest low wages. It was peaceful at first but began to get rough as more workers joined in, with some coercing worker solidarity and others engaging in looting. Within a few days, “masses” had formed on the streets as the strike arguably turned into a general riot. The police were called in to confront a gathering at the Rumiveldt Plantation; the police demanded dispersion, the crowd refused, the Riot Act was read, and the police fired into the crowd, wounding four. This prompted more striking and rioting and looting and police violence over the next few days until it all wound down in less than a week. The cause of the strike and unrest was mostly economic, with declining wages for workers due to falling commodity prices. But it had the effect of opening or revealing the ethnic rift between the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, with the former starting and spreading the strike, and the latter mostly avoiding it plus sometimes working as scabs to replace the strikers. In 1917, Guyana’s first labor union was formed to represent the mostly black dockworkers, and it amassed 13,000 members by 1920. The Indians, being more rural, dispersed, and owning land in greater numbers, took longer to form their own counter-balancing unions but established their own unions by the 1930s. In 1924, there was a second strike-turned-riot based in the same Rumiveldt Plantation. Once again, there was looting, coercion of non-striking workers, and police intervention, but at least this time there was brief ethnic solidarity. The strike was started by black workers but joined by many Indian sugar workers who marched to the cities, though the head of the East Indian Association sided with the authorities and tried to stop the strike. The police eventually clamped down and killed 13 people, 12 of whom were Indian. In response to concerns over the rising violence, the British authorities tightened control. In 1928, Guyana was made a Crown Colony and a new constitution was written; the already weak representative body was consolidated into an even weaker chamber with most members appointed by the British Governor. In theory, this would grant more power to the Governor who was still aligned with the plantocracy even as its membership steadily bled due to low commodity prices and Guyana’s declining economic prospects. In the 1930s, those economic prospects would reach a new low as the global Great Depression hit. Sugar production, long in a glut, was further marginalized in favor of rice which could be locally consumed. The urban-based black population somewhat retreated from the cities to work at the proliferating bauxite mines, for which there had been ever-higher demand since World War I. With wages lower than ever and suppression from the colonial authorities, the labor movements of both the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese began to consolidate into serious political factions. Fearing more violent unrest, the British considered loosening their political grip. A 1938 commission from the Crown recommended serious democratic reforms and even extending the franchise to women, but implementation was delayed until after World War II. By then, the leading local Guyanese factions were in place. The battle for control of Guyana before and after independence was not just a two party race, but basically a two-man race between Cheddi Jagan and Linden Forbes Burnham. These two would briefly work together, then split, form their own parties, and lead the ethnic struggle for dominance over Guyana for the next forty years. Admittedly, this is probably editorializing too much, but I see the Jagan-Burnham conflict as a bit like the famous Trotsky-Stalin conflict. Cheddi Jagan is the Trotsky analog. He was more outspoken, charming, friendly, and likable, but his intellectual bearing limited his political acumen. He was born in 1918 in poverty in rural Guyana as one of 11 children of Indian immigrant parents. He worked on a sugar cane plantation as a child and probably would have continued to do so for life except he was too damn smart. He did well in school, converted to Christianity, became a teacher, and then his family scrounged up enough money to send him to the United States to study dentistry. He lived there for seven years, survived on odd jobs and scholarships, and earned degrees from Howard University and Northwestern University. He met and married a white, politically active communist Jewish woman from Chicago. Both moved to Guyana in 1942. Linden Forbes Burnham is the Stalin analog who ultimately outfoxed Jagan. He was blustery and boisterous, but a natural leader, better at behind-the-scenes politicking, more pragmatic, and eventually developed a mastery of reading the political winds. He was born in Georgetown to a middle class family with a schoolmaster father who descended from slaves. Education was a family priority that suited Burnham as he went to some of Guyana’s best schools and won lots of academic awards, but his small stature and intelligence made him a frequent victim of bullies. In 1942, he got into the University of London on a scholarship but couldn’t go due to WWII, so he stayed in Guyana. When he finally could go, he got a law degree from the London School of Economics and met up with a bunch of revolutionary leftists from around the world, including Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. In 1949, he returned to Guyana. In 1942, Jagan and wife moved to Guyana and he set up a prosperous dentistry practice. As one of a fairly small number of highly-educated and ideologically committed Guyanese professionals, he was perfectly suited to rise to political prominence. In 1946, Jagan co-founded (along with his wife and a few others) the Political Affairs Committee (PAC), an intellectual and political organization situated to the left of the already existing labor parties. Meanwhile, Burnham joined the more moderate leftist British Guiana Labor Party (BGLP) while living abroad in London. While there, the British government finally got around to reorganizing Guyana’s constitution on a more liberal basis, and scheduled elections with a newly expanded legislature and electorate (increased from 9,514 in 1935 to 59,193) for 1947. Jagan’s PAC did well for a first time party and nabbed a few seats, including one for Jagan. In 1948, one of the usual strikes/riots erupted into greater violence than normal and the police were called in to quell it; five Indo-Guyanese strikers were shot. Fearing a violent retaliation, Jagan intervened and “organized a large and peaceful demonstration, which clearly enhanced Jagan’s standing with the Indo-Guyanese population.” In 1949, Burnham moved back to Guyana, established his own legal practice, and then rapidly rose to the head of the BGLP. Again, I get the sense that there were very few financially well-off foreign-educated Guyanese people, so the few who lived in Guyana could grab political power quickly and easily. Jagan and Burnham were both in this cohort. I really wish I could find a detailed description of what was to follow, but Jagan and Burnham went to the same prestigious high school and presumably knew each other as prominent politically active Guyanese professionals. In 1950, they joined forces and merged their parties to form the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) with Jagan at its head and Burnham as Chairman. They seemed like a great team at first – Jagan was an Indo-Guyanese with a rural base, and as the more well-known of the two, he took the slightly more prominent role, while Burnham as an Afro-Guyanese with an urban base took the secondary role. From these different backgrounds, they converged ideologically; both were solid leftist nationalists who wanted Guyana to gain independence from Britain and then institute wide-ranging systematic economic reforms on a socialist model. The PPP was perfectly situated to be a multi-ethnic party of workers and intellectuals that could electorally crush the conservative opposition. In 1950, with little preparation, the PPP had a strong showing in the municipal elections. This was not great news to the British colonial government carefully watching the new Guyanese constitution come into effect. They were not a fan of the PPP’s “often strident anti-capitalist and socialist message,” and were especially concerned about rumors that Jagan and possibly Burnham were outright Marxists with Soviet sympathies. The British, still wary about Guyana’s stability, reformed the constitution yet again and scheduled new legislative elections for 1953. Early polling looked good for the PPP as poor blacks and Indians flocked to their banner. The opposition consisted of right-leaning middle class blacks and Indians aligned with the Portuguese. The problem for them was that the colonial government granted universal suffrage in 1950, and so more and more poor black and Indian Guyanese kept registering to vote while the middle class voting rolls were already saturated. A PPP victory started to look inevitable. But all was not calm behind the scenes as (for reasons I wish I could find more details on) Burnham plotted a power play. In 1952, he convinced Jagan to move the PPP Congress to his base in Georgetown instead of leaving it in Jagan’s base in Berbice. Then, Burnham covertly fucked with the party by-laws to get more of his supporters into party Congressional seats. Then he blindsided Jagan with a vote to put himself in control of the party. The scheme worked until another prominent black party member realized what was going on and gave such a great speech shaming Burnham that his support collapsed. Instead of taking over the party, Burnham settled for the Chairmanship again. Either Jagan and Burnham reconciled, or Burnham was too powerful to get rid of, or they needed each other too much to openly fight; regardless, the PPP proceeded to dominate the 1953 election, winning 18 of 24 seats. Under the new constitution, the PPP set up a Parliamentary government with Jagan at its head while Burnham was put in charge of the Education Ministry at his request. Jagan immediately introduced a new slate of business and labor regulations, including a bill to regulate unions that was designed to entrench his union backers with government support. The regime ended the censorship of leftist publications and repealed a law prohibiting the immigration of leftist radicals. Meanwhile, the Jagan-Burnham split entered a new phase of political warfare as the two tried to grab as many civil service and ministerial positions as possible for their respective supporters. Right from the start, the conservative opposition protested to the British governor that Jagan and his whole regime should be shut down. Declassified MI5 documents now reveal that the British government was worried that Jagan was a Soviet agent launching a communist revolution, and there’s even a quote from Winston Churchill suggesting that the Americans should overthrow the regime. Jagan seemed to be aware of the plotting and became increasingly cagey. Fearing that he would be removed from power, he escalated his opposition to the British government. In October 1953, on Jagan’s orders, workers flooded the streets in a pro-regime strike that brought nearly all economic production to a stand-still. The maneuver backfired; within days, British soldiers marched to restore order, and the Governor dissolved the Jagan regime and suspended the new constitution. Some top PPP officials were arrested for disturbing the peace. The Jagan PPP regime lasted a grand total of six months. Faced with a powerful mutual enemy, Jagan and Burnham briefly put their feud aside to travel to London to protest their overthrow, but their efforts went nowhere. While in Britain, both were surveilled by MI5 and the CIA. When they returned to Guyana, monitoring continued, particularly of Jagan who was legally prohibited from leaving Georgetown for the following three years. He violated the order in 1954 and was sentenced to six months in prison. Rather than continue to mutually rally against the British, the Jagan-Burnham split hit the point of no return. Neither knew how long the British-appointed interim regime would last, but both figured that if they weren’t put in jail indefinitely or banned from politics, they would eventually get another shot at power. So over the next three years, each tore the party apart to gather support for himself over the other. Jagan situated himself as the more leftist and Marxist figure with deeper intelligentsia support, while Burnham was the more moderate and practical leader with more union support. Recent document releases have revealed that Burnham had “tacit support” from the colonial authorities as a means of counter-acting Jagan who was perceived as the more likely Soviet agent. In 1957, the British announced a new constitution with new elections. Democracy had clearly been scaled back and the legislature would have less power than before, but nevertheless, it would be elected from the Guyanese people. By this point, the PPP was by far the dominant party, but it had de facto split into two. Desperate to take control, Jagan and Burnham began targeting their factions’ campaigns toward their respective ethnic groups. Jagan, promising the development of more rice land, the strengthening of sugar unions, and more government jobs for Indians, won decisively with nine seats to Burnham’s three, and all other parties only getting two. Since there was no Prime Minister post in the weakened government structure, Jagan became the Minister of Trade and Industry while staying the head of the PPP. Burnham took the defeat hard and disappeared from politics for a year. He realized that Jagan had straight-up beaten him, not just in campaigning and organizing, but in strategy. Burnham’s support base within the PPP had mostly shrunk to working-class blacks, while the energetic and charismatic Jagan swept not just the Indians but black middle class professionals who were taken by his calls for independence and rejection of British economic and cultural dominance. The Handbook describes Burnham’s response: “From 1957 onward, Burnham worked to create a balance between maintaining the backing of the more radical Afro-Guyanese lower classes and gaining the support of the more capitalist middle class. Clearly, Burnham’s stated preference for socialism would not bind those two groups together against Jagan, an avowed Marxist. The answer was something more basic — race.” This is one of those focal points where you can discuss whether history is determined by “great men” or “trends and forces.” Burnham’s race strategy obviously didn’t create the racial divide in Guyana, but it would deeply entrench it, and eventually institutionalize it. This strategic maneuver is probably one of the worst things to ever happen to Guyana. For a year, Burnham laid low. He worked as a lawyer and became President of the British Guiana Bar Association. In office, Jagan used his limited power to fulfill his campaign promises to back the Indo-Guyanese population; most notably, he vetoed Guyana’s entry into the West Indies Federation, a brief merger of a bunch of British colonies that were dominated by black populations. At the same time, Jagan was not doing himself any favors with the British whenever he opened his big mouth. From the Handbook: “Though candid in expressing his admiration for Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and, later, Fidel Castro Ruz, Jagan in power asserted that the PPP’s Marxist-Leninist principles must be adapted to Guyana’s own particular circumstances. Jagan advocated nationalization of foreign holdings, especially in the sugar industry.” In 1958, Burnham returned to politics by boldly announcing a breakaway from the PPP. His new party, the People’s National Congress (PNC), was entirely based on implementing his racial strategy and moving his ideological platform a little to the right. Burnham timed it perfectly as the black population grew increasingly alienated by Jagan’s favoritism for his Indian cohorts, and the moderate professionals were worried about his Marxism. Meanwhile, the actual conservatives in Guyana rallied around a new party, the United Force (UF), consisting of Portuguese, Chinese, Natives, and wealthy businessmen. In 1961, elections were held again under yet another new constitution which created a slightly more powerful local government. Burnham played the race card hard, Jagan fired back with his own race card, the UF called everyone else communists. The result – Jagan won again. I don’t know if he was some sort of master gerrymander or something, but despite only getting 1.64% more of the vote than Burnham, Jagan’s PPP got 20 seats to Burnham’s 11, while the UF got four. Jagan assumed the role of Premiere, the highest non-British administrative office in Guyana. Now going on three electoral losses to Jagan, Burnham went on the warpath: “He appealed to his constituents intensely, suggesting that a PPP government meant an “Indian” government (and “Indian racial victory”) and the destined subjugation of Blacks.” The election results triggered a Burnham-led strike by black workers in the cities which escalated into outright race riots. These strikes ebbed and flowed for months while, behind the scenes, Burnham went to the British colonial administrators and asked for yet another constitutional reform with warnings that a communist takeover of Guyana was imminent, and that Jagan would give the Soviets an American foothold. Jagan did absolutely nothing to dispel these worries. He refused to institute an American blockade against Cuba, met with Che Guevera, and then accepted Cuban loans. He also set up new trade deals with Guyana’s natural commercial partners: East Germany and Hungary. Things were getting out of control. The British were losing patience with the time, money, and energy being put into trying to keep this colony from collapsing in on itself. Much of the rest of its empire had already broken away or was in the process of doing so, and they knew Guyanese independence was imminent, especially with Jagan at the helm. The British colonial mandate became to try to leave some sort of nominally stable government and economy in place so an independent Guyana wouldn’t immediately break down into a civil war or go full communist. And this wasn’t just a British concern. The American government was becoming increasingly involved in monitoring Guyanese politics since this Jagan guy wouldn’t shut the fuck up about Marxism. In their background checks, the US government wasn’t positive if Jagan was an actual communist (or just a Marxist socialist), but they were pretty sure his wife Janet Jagan was since she had been a member of the Communist Party USA. In a National Security Council meeting held in May 1961, stopping a communist takeover of Guyana became official American policy. In October 1961, shortly after his election, Jagan travelled to the United States to meet President Kennedy and other top American officials. Jagan’s goal was to smooth things over and assure them he was no threat. He presented himself as an intellectual, a patriot, and yes, a far leftist by American standards, but an anodyne policy-oriented type. He compared himself to Aneurin Bevan, the socialist British politician who spearheaded the creation of the National Health Service. One of Jagan’s advocates in the White House called him a “London School of Economics Marxist filled with charm.” It’s not clear whether the meetings didn’t go well or if his charm was sabotaged by Burnham. Shortly after he got back to Guyana, Jagan’s government proposed an austerity bill that would raise taxes and import duties that would primarily fall on the black population. The ongoing Burnham-led strikes flared up and the ensuing rioting destroyed 56 businesses, damaged over 100 more with fires and looting, and led to dozens of injured police and strikers. With Georgetown in flames, both the US and British governments decided that Jagan wasn’t a viable leader and it became official US-British policy to remove him from power. The British government even agreed to a US proposal to delay giving Guyana independence so the CIA would have more time to set something up. If the US and British weren’t working with Jagan then they had to work with Burnham. Which was a bit awkward because it wasn’t like Burnham wasn’t a leftist. He definitely was. In its own internal memos, the US government referred to the PPP as “Communist-oriented” and the PNC as “socialist,” and Burnham had been in Jagan’s party for years and arguably rode Jagan’s coattails to higher political prominence. Sure, Burnham had publicly denounced Jagan as a radical, but it wasn’t clear to the US government whether Burnham really was a moderate leftist or just better at keeping his mouth shut. In May 1962, Burnham visited Washington DC and met with President Kennedy and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Apparently, Burnham said whatever he needed to say, because he secured their covert support. Both the US and Britain pledged to back Burnham in the 1964 election so he could lead the soon-to-be-independent Guyana. Burnham’s job until then was to continue raising hell against Jagan, which he did with the assistance of CIA funding. He wasn’t officially in the Guyanese government in any capacity, but he became the head of Guyana’s largest labor union and proceeded to lead crippling strikes at every suggestion of reform offered by the Jagan regime. Street marches escalated to something closer to gang warfare, including the targeting of private homes, politicians, and foreign-owned ships. In turn, Jagan organized the sugar cane workers into their own powerful union and personally led marches on occasion. Each strike formed into more and more of a race riot between Burnham’s Afro-Guyanese and Jagan’s Indo-Guyanese while the Portuguese and Chinese largely stayed out of the fray. In early 1964, the largest strike of all led to “at least 170 dead, thousands injured, and more than 1,000 homes destroyed. Dispossession of thousands led to the establishment of today’s ‘squatting areas,’ as people moved to neighborhood dominated by their own race.” In May 1964, there was the Wismar Massacre: “… the Negroes at Wismar formed themselves into gangs and went to the business places and homes of the Indians and demanded the keys of the safety boxes and drawers in which they kept their cash, jewellery and other valuable articles. Shortly afterwards, a house at Third Alley was set on fire and soon the whole area became an inferno as the gangs roamed looting, burning and terrorizing the 1,600 Indians as they tried to escape. Every man, woman and child was attacked. The men brutally beaten and the clothes of the women and even girls of tender ages were ripped away. The women and girls were raped in full public view by gangs of men.” In the summer before the election, “houses were being torched at a rate of five or more a day. More than 2,600 families (15,000 persons) had been forced from their homes. The political season brought nearly two hundred murders and a thousand persons wounded.” During a meeting between Jagan, Burnham, and the head of the UF to turn down the temperature, the PPP headquarters was bombed. Behind the scenes, Burnham was working on a more subtle strategy. Through extensive negotiations, he formed an alliance with the UF, which was also being covertly funded by the CIA. Burnham’s pitch to the UF was that he was the lesser of two evils to the wealthy and liberal middle-to-upper class of Guyana due to his more moderate ideological outlook. When challenged on his violent rhetoric and blatant racial tribalism, Burnham accused Jagan of playing the race card first. Back in 1962, the CIA and British both projected that Jagan’s PPP was set to win the 1964 election if there was no interference… so the CIA and British set about interfering. In addition to funding Burnham’s strikes, funneling American union leaders into Guyana to help organize Burnham’s unions, and buying campaign merch for Burnham, the CIA infiltrated the PPP and launched a little splinter party to pull away some Indian support. More importantly, it dumped money into something called the Help Guiana Committee (they used to spell it “Guiana”), a New York-based Guyanese expat club that was instantly supercharged into a PNC campaign operation. The Committee encouraged tens of thousands of Guyanese expats, most of whom were Afro-Guyanese, to vote for the PNC while living overseas. The result was that “more overseas votes would be cast than there were voters on the rolls.” Despite the opposition, all was not lost for Jagan whose Indo-Guyanese were a plurality of the population. Months before the election, polling still put him slightly ahead, especially since most of the violence was attributed to Burnham supporters. Plus the Tory government in Britain fell and a friendly Labor regime was in place that was far less enthusiastic about the American operations in Guyana. Jagan became increasingly paranoid that the CIA was funding Burnham’s operations (is it paranoia if it’s true?) and made multiple attempts to contact British and US officials for a parlay, but he was ignored. On December 7, 1964, the election was held. In a genuinely remarkable demonstration of Jagan’s political acumen, compared to the 1961 election, the PPP’s share of the vote increased by 3% to 46%. The PNC remained flat at 41%, meaning with all the CIA help, Burnham actually did worse than in the previous election. The CIA’s splinter Indian party got 5%. That left the remaining 12% with the UF. After all the strikes and protests and violence, it was the political alliance with the conservatives that got Burnham over the finish line. The PNC and UF formed a coalition government and assumed control over Guyana with Burnham as Premiere. Jagan officially became Leader of the Opposition. After four elections, Burnham had finally beaten Jagan. Guyana immediately began to stabilize with Western aid flowing in from the US and IMF. The Guyanese government signed a 25 year contract with Reynolds, a major American bauxite company, premised on doubling bauxite output and with a $500,000 advance. Burnham broke relations with Cuba and co-founded the Caribbean Free Trade Association to form closer ties with nearby black-dominated countries. Burnham went to London to attend a constitutional conference to nail down a date for independence; Jagan was invited, but refused to attend. In 1965, Jagan tried to go to the US to join a Vietnam War protest but his visa was denied. He went back to Guyana and focused his protesting energy against the chosen Guyanese independence date – May 26, 1966 – the two year anniversary of the Wismar Massacre in which dozens of Indo-Guyanese were beaten and raped by an Afro-Guyanese mob. When the day came, British Guiana officially became Guyana. At independence, Guyana was 51% Indo-Guyanese and 33% Afro-Guyanese, with the rest split between Portuguese, Chinese, and Natives. Given the prior five years, political support had become extremely stratified along racial lines. In October 1965, the CIA wrote a memorandum predicting that Burnham would work out for both Guyana and the US. Given the strength of Jagan and the PPP as an opposition party, Burnham’s moderate socialist platform would have to compromise with the UF to stay in power. Plus, given the ethnic makeup of Guyana, Burnham would inevitably have to reach out for some Indian support to subvert Jagan. Thus, Burnham would be a relatively weak leader dependent on a careful balance-of-power and would be amenable to foreign advice and maintaining something close to the status quo in independent Guyana. This was wishful thinking. When Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq with a similar demographic imbalance, he opted for a secular approach that mollified the Sunni-Shia divide by focusing on alleged mutual enemies outside the country (Iran) and within (Kurds). While Burnham was thankfully never quite as brutal as Saddam, he wasn’t as clever either. His path to supreme power resembled more of an African dictator strategy of going all in on tribal spoils to cultivate an unshakably loyal base that could periodically dish out violent repression to keep the rest of the population in line. Burnham got off to a quick start, with one of his first acts as Prime Minister being the passage of new national security laws permitting “near unlimited search-and-seizure powers and detention without trial for up to 90 days.” Unfortunately for Burnham, one does not become supreme dictator overnight. Guyana had its first independent election scheduled for 1968, and with all the foreign aid coming in, he couldn’t just do away with it. So priority number one for the Burnham administration was cheating as much as humanly possible to pull off another win. And he wasn’t especially subtle about it. A July 1966 telegram from the US ambassador read: “Burnham had confessed to colleagues that he intends to remain in power indefinitely – if at all possible by constitutional means. However, if necessary, he is prepared to employ unorthodox methods to achieve his aims” Fortunately for Burnham, the CIA was still onboard. In July 1966, Burnham went back to Washington DC to meet with President Lyndon Johnson and suggested a plan to induce the immigration of 15,000-20,000 black Caribbeans to Guyana to bolster his electoral base. This did not get off the ground because Guyana was a dirt-poor country with a 15% unemployment rate and they didn’t think they could get that many people to move to Guyana in two years. Always an ideas man, Burnham threw out two more pitches. They could merge Guyana, Antigua, Barbados, Grenada, and St. Kitts into one country with a majority black population! Or they could legally disenfranchise all illiterate voters in Guyana! For some reason, the CIA did not opt for these stratagems either. Fine, if the US couldn’t do that for him, it could at least pay for “staff and campaign expenses, motor vehicles, small boats, printing equipment, and transistorized public address systems” and “for the services of an American public relations firm to address his image abroad.” The CIA agreed. Also, Burnham informed the US government that he would need some money to rig the overseas vote even harder this time. He would “issue identification cards to all Guyanese above the age of 10, and to identify and register all Guyanese of African ancestry in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States in order to get their absentee votes in the next election.” But not all overseas Guyanese… “Burnham acknowledged with a smile, East Indians living abroad may have trouble getting registered and, if registered, getting ballots.” The CIA agreed. In 1968, finally Burnham’s electoral headaches came to an end. The rigging went really well. The Guyanese government had registered 68,588 overseas voters from 55 countries, constituting almost 22% of the electorate. According to an independent analysis, only about 15% of the registrations could be validated, and some of the alleged voters included “two horses in a Manchester field, a boarded-up butcher’s shop in Brooklyn, a stretch of railway in London, and many bemused housewives who had never heard of the voters purportedly at their addresses.” Combined with various other more traditional counting shenanigans and voter suppression tactics, the PNC won 56% of the vote to the PPP’s 36%. The UF got 7%, and realizing it had been thoroughly outplayed and would soon be discarded, the UF founder denounced the election as “a seizure of power by fraud.” By this point, everyone pretty much knew that democracy was over in Guyana. Everything Burnham did in 1968 could be repeatedly indefinitely in future elections from an even more entrenched position. The UF was booted from the coalition government and the PNC began to rule alone. The PPP was permanently relegated to a toothless opposition party and Jagan could denounce elections forever but he got the message that his political career was no longer viable. Finally, Burnham ruled Guyana uncontested. Now what was he going to do with it? In 1970, four years after British Guiana became Guyana, it became the Cooperative Republic of Guyana. If that sounds kinda commie, that’s because it was. 90% of the economy was nationalized, including the sugar industry and the foreign-owned mines. Most imports were banned. A new national bank was opened to funnel funds to state-owned enterprises, including a textile mill, a glass factory, and a hydroelectric plant. Diplomatic relations were cut with Britain (though not the US) and diplomacy was reopened with the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba, and Guyana was used as a staging ground for Cuban soldiers to fight in the Angolese Civil War. In 1972, Guyana hosted the Conference of Foreign Ministers of Nonaligned Countries where Burnham gave a speech on “the evils of imperialism and the need to support African liberation movements.” Guyana’s military budget was increased by 500% in three years. At the lower levels, Burnham had to fulfill his campaign promises. The Indo-Guyanese were systematically purged from existing government roles save for a few high-level PNC allies, and the extensive new jobs were given almost exclusively to Afro-Guyanese. Loyalty to the party was often judged by attendance at PNC rallies and events, and no-showing could lead to job blacklisting. The courts were packed with obvious PNC lackies. The major media outlets were nationalized and turned into propaganda rags while pro-PPP newspapers were outlawed. With its microeconomic power, the government systematically promoted the industries, wages, and unions of the black Guyanese over the Indian Guyanese. At the center of it all was Burnham, the undisputed dictator in all but name: “No English-speaking Caribbean personality wielded more power over a section of the region, as nationalization of assets, extensive electoral fraud, political repression, party paramountcy, cult activities, IMF/World Bank intervention, mass migration, and Burnham’s own “cooperative socialism” all became tenets of a political landscape substantially reflecting the leader’s dreams.” The CIA watched as the leader it had propped up with American tax dollars and covert capital suddenly did all the stuff he said he wouldn’t do. And the CIA’s response was… to do nothing. There are tons of recently declassified documents about the US government supporting Burnham’s rise to power and their fears of Jagan, but when Burnham more-or-less did all the stuff Jagan was going to do anyway, they seemingly balked and walked away from Guyana. The revolution was not without its friction. Repression was supplemented by paramilitary support from the newly formed and ominously named Guyana’s People Militia, which consisted of Burnham supporters who were willing to intimidate or assault pockets of resistance. Even with the entire state apparatus behind him, Burnham wasn’t entirely confident he could rig the 1973 election as well as the previous one. As a last resort, he ordered the military to simply seize all the ballot boxes (under the pretense of protecting them) so he could change them as he saw fit. Two Indians were shot dead while protesting and became known as the Ballot Box Martyrs. In 1974, Burnham made the Declaration of Sophia, a speech given in the notoriously dangerous suburb of Guyana (I was warned numerous times not to go to Sophia, but I boldly walked past it at one point). Burnham told the crowd that he was just getting started. Guyana was undergoing a revolution that would end foreign exploitation, transfer “economic power to the masses,” end poverty, abolish the profit motive, abolish classes, and usher in a prosperous socialist society. The revolution would be led by the PNC, which would become synonymous with the state. The PNC flag soon flew over many government buildings. A nickname for Burnham emerged among his supporters: Kabaka. It’s a derivation of a Ugandan word meaning “king.” This made a lot of sense since Burnham’s approach to ruling Guyana was far more reminiscent of an ambitious African dictator than the standard Latin American tinpot. He was loud, brutish, charismatic in his way, and revealed a flair for showmanship. It started with the naked appeal to ethnic spoils, continued with the systematic takeover of the government, and ended with an emerging cult of personality. His picture and face were put up all over the country on posters and billboards. Burnham eventually took to wearing dashikis or the more elaborate “flowing, white robes usually worn by African tribal leaders” (like The Gambia’s Jammeh). He took a page from North Korea and started “Mass Games”. And of course, he got super rich and was rumored to be one of the wealthiest black men in the world at his peak. Another Stalin analogue was Burnham’s treatment of his underlings. He adopted an infamously haughty demeanor, making and abandoning plans at will that impacted the responsibilities of thousands. Burnham “derived a kind of sadistic pleasure in making people be at his beck and call. He would call ministers, bureaucrats and treat them with such abandon… He dedicated himself to subordination.” Despite his populist pretentions of being a champion of the masses, the arrogance extended to the common man (unlike Stalin, who for all his vices, was extremely courteous to servants). Burnham was known to possess a fanatical love for horseback riding, often going for hours per day. Trailed by cheering children, he took regular laps through Georgetown where he would figuratively and literally look down on the impoverished people of his capital and bask in their (presumably not always earnest) admiration. Later on in his regime, when the economy began to collapse, the government began conscripting citizens to work on Burnham’s estates, and he would ride around on horseback barking orders at them. To the extent that Burnham’s regime had any successes, they were diplomatic. In meetings with the US, he was apparently able to cool tensions enough to forestall direct CIA opposition, and then he would immediately go to meetings with Cuba or the USSR and denounce the US as an evil imperialist state. He was even more energetic in his support for nationalist governments in Africa and did what he could with limited state funds to support friendly parties. This was used as propaganda domestically to convince PNC loyalists that all his black nationalist rhetoric was legitimate. Whatever his faults, Burnham seemed to be genuinely good at saying the right things in meetings and projecting the right image politically. Burnham’s political career somehow had not one, but two scandals involving cults. The first and less famous one was the House of Israel, a black nationalist group with hazy beliefs founded by an American named David Hill. There’s not a ton of info about Hill online, but he gained some level of fame for – according to this – launching an African American boycott of McDonalds Hill’s friend, a self-proclaimed prophet, saw himself owning a McDonald’s franchise in a dream, but when he tried to buy one, he went to the meeting with McDonalds corporate with a bunch of security guards and shouted at the McDonalds executives, so they got weirded out and rejected him. Hill and his friend took this as a racist slight and then when the friend was shot and murdered, Hill believed McDonalds was somehow behind it. Hill went back to McDonalds corporate and demanded they open a bunch of black-owned franchises and put special royalties on the sales to go to this black nationalist group called Operation Black Unity. McDonalds refused again, so Hill announced a boycott and sent “‘carloads’ of Black-jacketed, black-beret wearing demonstrators” to a bunch of McDonalds in Cleveland and harassed enough people that four franchises were nearly shut down. This got national press attention and the endorsement of the NAACP and National Urban League. Hill then went back to McDonalds corporate for another negotiation in which he demanded the opening of five black-owned McDonalds franchises, “territorial rights for future McDonald’s in Black communities,” “irrevocable” franchise rights, royalties going to Operation Black Unity, and Operation Black Unity’s right to select and veto franchise owners. McDonalds corporate said “no.” The franchises continued to suffer, and a bunch tried to sell, but corporate stopped them. Eventually the NAACP and National Urban League were too embarrassed by Hill’s antics and told him to step aside in the negotiating, and the Mayor of Cleveland stepped in to end it personally. Hill gave up and walked away from the whole thing. …Anyway, Hill eventually ran into legal trouble for running a bunch of fraudulent schemes (including arguably the entire McDonalds thing) so he fled the US as a fugitive and went to Guyana because Burnham was considered a black nationalist and there was no extradition treaty with America. After another brief stint in conartistry with a fake visa scam, Hill; “re-established his sect [called the House of Israel]: he now called followers his “flock”, over whom he was “king”; his partner, ‘Lulu’, “queen”, and his lieutenants “princes”. They wore Black, Red, and Green, Black nationalist colors used by Burnham’s Political Party (the PNC), and generated funds by selling peanuts and chips in the capital.” In another instance where I can’t tell if Burnham was an idiot or just eccentric, he took on Hill as an agent of the regime. His House of Israel became a de facto paramilitary unit for the state, able and willing to do dirty work that even Burnham wasn’t willing to go near. Hill’s men were sent to join pro-PNC protests, beat up PPP protestors, and commit voter fraud. They opened up a radio program which preached that “Africans were the original Hebrews and needed to prepare for a racial war.” For his service, Hill was given a 100-150 acre plot of land for his (alleged) 8,000 followers to form their own compound. Post-Burnham, some House of Israel members were arrested for murder and other crimes, and the whole cult seemed to wind down. And somehow that was only the second largest cult scandal during Burnham’s reign. But unlike Hill and the House of Israel, there is lots and lots of information out there about Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. So the very condensed version: Jim Jones was born to an impoverished and extremely religious family in Indiana. He got super into evangelical Christianity and then super into communism (with a brief detour through Naziism), and then combined them both under his own heterodox teachings which formed the basis of his own religious group called the People’s Temple. To his credit, Jones was a legitimate hardcore civil rights advocate in the 1950s and 1960s; to his detriment, he was a mentally unhinged evangelical communist who constantly predicted race wars and nuclear holocausts. Also, the People’s Temple was obviously a cult. First due to actual racist attacks, then due to a vision that Indiana would get nuked, Jones sought to relocate the People’s Temple, which only had about 100 followers in the early 1960s. He stopped briefly in Guyana on a scouting trip, then considered Brazil for awhile, then got another vision that all of the United States would be engulfed in nuclear war before the world became a socialist paradise, but northern California would be safe so they should go there. Over the following years, the People’s Temple grew to 300 congregants and Jones refined his philosophy of “apostolic socialism” which started to be a lot more socialist than Christian. In fact, Jones claimed the Bible was a tool of oppression of women and non-whites and that there was no god in heaven because he was the only god. Of course, he soon descended into all manner of culty quackery like rampant drug use, faith healing, performing alleged miracles, raping congregants, and taking totalitarian control over his followers’ lives. In 1973, Jones decided to take the People’s Temple out of America, allegedly because racist forces like the US government were getting close to massacring them, but probably because he had mounting legal troubles, including getting caught masturbating in a movie theater bathroom. Jones wanted to go to a full-fledged communist country, but settled for Guyana, which was led by an anti-racist anti-imperialist. Burnham considered Jones to be a vague ideological ally, and liked giving the finger to the US, so he let them in and gave them a bunch of special permissions to do whatever they wanted. In 1974, the People’s Temple purchased a plot of jungle in the absolute middle of nowhere, without even road access, and built a little frontier settlement compound called Jonestown. Over the next four years, Jonestown developed mostly in peace. Jones continued to become weirder and more paranoid, and used Maoist and North Korean indoctrination techniques over his followers. Members worked like slaves to keep the jungle at bay and Jonestown operating, and were often woken in the middle of the night to run “readiness drills” to prepare for some sort of attack. According to the Handbook, “The People’s Temple of Christ was regarded by members of the Guyanese government as a model agricultural community that shared its vision of settling the hinterland and its view of cooperative socialism.” Back in the US, an organization of ex-People’s Temple members were rallying political support to investigate Jones for various allegations of abuse (rape, kidnapping, etc.). In November 1978, Congressmen Leo Ryan went on a fact-finding mission to Jonestown at the behest of the defectors. They were seemingly welcomed with open arms by Jones, but some Jonestown residents asked to leave with Ryan, and another tried to stab Ryan, so the Congressman got spooked and hurriedly tried to leave early. Apparently worried about what Ryan would tell the world, Jones deployed his security forces who met Ryan at the small nearby airport; they gunned down Ryan along with four others, but some of Ryan’s entourage escaped into the jungle. Jones, who had rapidly declining health by this point due to drug abuse, called his congregants together and announced that American military commandos would soon arrive to slaughter everyone in Jonestown. Jones determined that the whole organization should commit “revolutionary suicide.” Cyanide-dosed Flavor Aid (not actual Kool-Aid) was distributed by armed guards to almost all members. Most drank, some took cyanide injections, and some swallowed the cyanide directly. A few were killed by the guards or knifed by more loyal members for resisting. Jones shot himself in the head. Of the 994 inhabitants of Jonestown, 85 survived, most of whom weren’t in the settlement on the day. The $7.4 million in People’s Temple assets was willed to the Soviet Union. According to some sources, Burnham’s wife and Deputy Prime Minister were two of the first people to get to Jonestown once the massacre was known, and they looted “nearly $1 million in cash, gold and jewelry taken from the buildings and from the dead.” But the whole thing was a debacle for the Burnham administration. It brought international scrutiny on Guyana and made Burnham look like an idiot or insane for palling around with yet another crazy cult. The following year, Burnham’s government may or may not have burned down a building with a bunch of government records to cover up its full extent of communication with Jones and the People’s Temple. By the late 1970s, Burnham had bigger problems than bad PR induced by cults. As in countless other former colonial post-independence nations around the world that had embraced leftist economic policies in reaction to Western free markets, the Guyanese economy was in steep decline. From GUS: “Millions spent in nationalization resulted in staggering losses as most projects failed. The hydroelectric dam in Mazaruni amounted to a US$100 million loss. Ineptitude, corruption, and willful mismanagement (yearly audits neglected etc.) resulted in little production, forcing the government to turn to the IMF/World Bank by 1978. By the time of Burnham’s death, Guyana was some US$2 billion in arrears (US$150 million to Trinidad and US$100 million to Barbados). In addition, despite the lavish foreign tours Burnham undertook with enormous entourages and social projects that failed, millions remained unaccounted for by the PNC.” It wasn’t just the big stupid projects causing economic drag. Resources were being siphoned away from the vital sugar and rice industries, which were Indo-Guyanese dominated, to support Afro-Guyanese dominated industries. International sugar prices actually increased in the 1970s, but the new profits were captured by new taxes. More importantly, the key Indian unions and government boards that oversaw production and set wages/prices were stripped of their leadership and replaced with PNC lackeys. Wages and prices were pulled down, investment declined, and by the early 1980s, the national “average acreage under cultivation plummeted from 250,000 to 90,000.” By that late 1970s, economic production was weak enough to make the food supply a serious issue. The PNC responded by preaching autarchy and launching programs encouraging Guyanese to make their own food, even in their small yards. At the same time, the government-run import-export bank had tanked the nation’s foreign currency reserves, so imports were restricted to near non-existence, including on wheat flour, which the regime tried to substitute with domestically-made rice flour, with the former being declared “imperialist” food. To impose even more control, private food selling was banned and all food was to be distributed by government shops that were for some reason called “Knowledge Sharing Institutes.” In 1977, the sugar workers organized massive strikes against the strangling of their industry. In 1978, the PNC passed a bill delaying the scheduled election until 1980. In 1979, the Minister of Education was shot to death on the street and an opposition leader was killed by a car bomb. By this point, even PNC strongholds were seeing significant labor unrest. From the Handbook: “The economic crisis facing Guyana in the early 1980s deepened considerably, accompanied by the rapid deterioration of public services, infrastructure, and overall quality of life. Blackouts occurred almost daily, and water services were increasingly unsatisfactory. The litany of Guyana’s decline included shortages of rice and sugar (both produced in the country), cooking oil, and kerosene. While the formal economy sank, the black market economy in Guyana thrived.” The World Bank’s per capita GDP numbers for Guyana actually show good though inconsistent growth during Burnham’s regime. Given the above, I assume the data is simply wrong. It’s probably very difficult to accurately measure per capita GDP changes in such small economies, and Burnham could probably rig it anyway. The Handbook claims: “Real GDP fell during the late 1970s and decreased by an estimated 6 percent per year during the 1980s. The fall in GDP in terms of United States dollars was even more dramatic because of repeated devaluations of the Guyanese dollar (for value of the Guyanese dollar—see Glossary). In 1990 the GDP was only US$275 million. Per capita GDP amounted to less than US$369 per capita, making Guyana one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere.” The official opposition to the PNC tried to organize, but another one of Burnham’s political skills seemed to be using the right combination of bureaucratic confusion and violent repression against his enemies, so the PNC continued to dominate the legislature. Jagan was still kicking around but under tight surveillance, and he completely boycotted the government in 1973 and 1974. In 1975, he returned to the legislature and oddly reached out to Burnham in an act of reconciliation, either out of a genuine desire to support Burnham’s revolution which was not too different from his own plans, or just to get himself in position for a strike against Burnham when the time was right. Burnham cautiously accepted Jagan’s public support but didn’t offer him any access to power. For awhile, Burnham’s biggest internal threat was Dr. Walter Rodney, a black moderate leftist intellectual. He wrote a pamphlet in which he described the opposite of the Midas touch as the Burnham touch: “anything he touches turns to shit.” After escaping being nearly beaten to death by Burnham’s thugs in a few rallies, he was killed in 1980 by a car bomb set up by a House of Israel member. Street violence extended down to the lowest strata of society where both explicit and implicit PNC policy built up a systematic repression of the still-majority Indo-Guyanese population. From GUS: “It became commonplace to find Indians being bullied by their Black counterparts in any social arena; school, the car park, or at the work place. This was the direct result of PNC policies that advocated that Guyana belonged to Blacks. In no other avenue was this most dramatized than in the culture of crime that proliferated under Burnham’s tenure. Indians became targeted for both the daytime “choke-and-rob” crimes, while at nights, the more violent “kick-down-the-door” robberies during which where people of Indian descent are brutalized, shot, and women raped. If one is to truly acknowledge the legacy of Burnham, one cannot possibly ignore this atmosphere created by Burnham and the PNC under which the Indian had become a demonized being.” In the early 1980s, due to age and unpopularity, Burnham tuned down the showy public appearances and diplomacy, and became more withdrawn. More tasks were delegated to an increasingly large cadre of lieutenants who took the opportunities to construct their own patronage networks. In 1981, Burnham’s sister, Jessie Burnham, a one-time Burnham ally who stuck with the PPP after Burnham started the PNC, published an essay denouncing her brother and urging political support for the opposition. It’s very well written. Some key excerpts: “This burning ambition, if channeled properly, could have made him one of our country’s great Statesmen-leaders. It would have, had he coupled this ambition with a genuine concern for the welfare and needs of the people, given him all he sought, in life. But along with ambition, he developed certain slickness, a sly glibness. He began even as a boy, to depend more and more on his skills with words to achieve his goals.” “I have watched this brilliant brother use his brain to scheme, to plot, to put friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor, and relative against relative. I have watched him use this one and that one, and then quickly discard then when they have served their purpose. I have watched him with his clever wit and charms manipulate people like puppets on a string.” “That is why I say, in all sincerity, “BEWARE, MY BROTHER FORBES.”” Fortunately for many Guyanese, Burnham didn’t rule much longer. No one expected him to die in August 1985 at age 62. He had flown to Cuba covertly to undergo throat surgery, probably due to throat cancer caused by his heavy smoking, and he expired under the knife. Upon his death, Burnham was immediately shipped to the Soviet Union for embalming, and then shipped back to Guyana to be entombed in the Burnham Mausoleum which sits in Georgetown to this day. Desmond Hoyte had a very similar background to Burnham. Both were born to middle-class black families, both did very well in school and went to London for university, and both became lawyers and worked at the same firm. Hoyte entered politics a decade after Burnham, taking high level administration posts in his regime in the late 1960s when Burnham’s power was already established. Despite the similar background, GUS says Hoyte and Burnham weren’t much alike. It describes Hoyte as having an “enigmatic personality” and a career “marked by esoteric occurrences and inexplicable decisions.” Hoyte was not a personality politician and “couldn’t understand the enduring Orwellian games of Burnham and his politics.” Unlike the amiable Burnham, Hoyte was a natural “loner” and an independent thinker (which is not usually beneficial for a politician). However, “one thing Hoyte understood very well was the concept of loyalty,” which, combined with his intelligence, gave him a very successful career in the Burnham administration. The most remarkable aspect of Hoyte’s tenure prior to succeeding Burnham is that he was one of the very few top PNC officials to not engage in blatant racial tribalism. It’s not clear whether this was a political stratagem or his heart really was in the right place, but while other Burnham lieutenants took every opportunity to rattle their sabers at the Indian menace during party rallies, Hoyte avoiding the topic entirely. In April 1985, Hoyte was set to give a May Day speech in Linden, and his whole family was coming to watch. On their way, a car accident killed his two daughters, sister-in-law, and driver, leaving his wife as the only survivor. Four months later, Burnham suddenly dropped dead after ruling Guyana for more than 20 years, and Hoyte instantly leapt into action to take control of the government. Hoyte seemed to have the perfect judgement and temperament to outfox the other lieutenants and take power without leaving a post-Burnham power vacuum or plunging the country into civil war. Burnham was only 62 at his death and not much thought had been given to succession. The likely pick for the last few years had been Ptolemy Reid, a longtime Burnham associate who took over as Prime Minister in 1980 when Burnham stepped back into the Presidency (an initially ceremonial role which Burnham legally enhanced). But in 1984, the 66 year old Reid retired from office to… become a farmer? I don’t know why, but he has a biography called “A Troublesome Man” so maybe he’s an interesting guy, but I can’t find much info about him online. Regardless, Hoyte succeeded Reid and was only Prime Minister for a year when Burnham died. From this vantage point, he charted a “quiet” path to power by avoiding the “factionalism” of the rest of Burnham’s lieutenants. He seemed to be the one guy at the top of the PNC who wouldn’t use the presidency to screw over everyone who opposed him, so he became everybody’s favorite compromise candidate. This doesn’t mean Hoyte was a saint. Elections went on as scheduled in December 1985, only four months after Burnham’s death. The opposition’s hope that the end of Burnham would mean the end of rigged elections quickly died as Hoyte pulled the same levers as always to give the PNC an overwhelming victory, and Hoyte became President. The opposition proclaimed fraud, boycotted the municipal elections a few months later, and were overwhelming crushed at the polls again. But then Hoyte switched tracks. Once securely in power, he immediately began dismantling Burnham’s authoritarian regime. Overseas voting was ended, freedom of the press was mostly reinstated, and on-the-ground violent harassment was halted. Perhaps most importantly, he ordered a top-down end to the discrimination and repression of the Indo-Guyanese, and invited some Indians into high-level party positions. He was just as good on the policy side. Hoyte publicly reversed course on Burnham’s leftist revolutionary economic policies, and invited a slate of Western economists to begin advising on liberal reforms. By 1988, the Guyanese government was $885 million in debt, equivalent to 4X the country’s annual export value. Hoyte launched the Economic Recovery Program, in the Handbook’s words, “with the goal of dismantling Guyana’s socialist economy and ending the country’s self-imposed isolation.” Within two years, the budget deficit had been slashed, most price controls were removed, foreign currency trading was legal again, most import/export regulations were abolished, foreign investment was encouraged, and some state-owned companies were beginning to privatize. The fascinating question about Hoyte and similar figures across the globe is whether his liberalization program was implemented because he genuinely thought it would benefit Guyana, or because he lacked the authority of his predecessor to keep an obviously suboptimal system in place. According to GUS, the former explanation is more accurate. Make no mistake, the economy was in absolute shambles with chronic basic good shortages and practically no foreign investment or foreign imports, but counter-regime unrest was never that bad. There were always strikes and riots, but the military was solidly on the PNC’s side, and the pro-regime Afro-Guyanese base was substantial. This could be because Burnham was just damn good at maintaining power, but I’ve also heard speculation that Caribbean populations are anomalously content and not prone to rebellion. GUS’s take was that Hoyte was a non-ideological technocrat who could finally do his job as he saw fit when his boss/mentor was out of the way: “After his installation of the presidency, the loner in Hoyte became more pronounced. He sidelined Burnham’s underlings who he didn’t know and ran the government as he Desmond Hoyte understood it. Since he adored Burnham and not his party, Hoyte felt that with Burnham no longer around, there was no need to continue his loyalty to a group he hardly had any meaningful relationship with. He concentrated his effort on the presidency and not the party.” Of course, one does not reverse the impact of horrible leftist economic policies overnight, but the Guyanese economy saw moderate growth over the coming decades. Without the systematic suppression of the Indians, the sugar industry rebounded. IMF support staved off national bankruptcy, brought in some minor foreign investment, and restarted international trade. Hoyte followed foreign advice to the letter, but he had trouble wrangling the rest of the party. His usurpation of power was an impressive political maneuver, but he clearly never grabbed the depth and extent of authority possessed by Burnham, so if anything, corruption only intensified under his regime as lieutenants and underlings further carved out their own spheres of power. Maybe Hoyte was too good for Guyanese politics, or at least that’s what he told himself when he lost the 1992 elections. By GUS’s account, Hoyte was almost autistically devoted to policy wonkery to the point where he forgot he was a politician and actually had to persuade people to support him. Between alienating much of the PNC by reversing Burnham’s policies, and failing to sufficiently reconcile with the opposition, he eroded his own base and didn’t create enough of a new one. Despite having lost “faith in the maturity of the electorate,” Hoyte settled in as leader of the opposition to the new regime. But having lost a power base that had been built up for 25 years by a still-widely-revered Burnham, much of the PNC was fed up with Hoyte. In 1994, many of Burnham’s old lieutenants created a splinter party (called Good and Green Georgetown) after Hoyte rejected an attempt by the party to officially re-endorse overseas voting. Hoyte tried to lead the PNC to victory two more times, but kept losing. He died in 2002 at age 73. In 1992, somehow, after losing for 28 years, Chedi Jagan became the leader of independent Guyana for the first time. It was also the first time that independent Guyana had an Indo-Guyanese leader, and for all his faults, Jagan deserves a lot of credit for (mostly) not fulfilling the PNC’s long-standing prophecy that Indian leadership would mean massive counter-repression of the Afro-Guyanese population. For Prime Minister, he even appointed Sam Hinds, an Afro-Guyanese. This was a new Jagan in a new era in a new world. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the USSR was gone, and communism had lost. And so in another “did he change his mind or was he just being pragmatic” prompt, Jagan openly gave up the Marxist revolutionary stuff and just became marginally more left than Hoyte but still basically open to IMF reforms. Thus the IMF’s Extended Credit Facility program would be implemented from 1994 to 2005. Jagan’s tweak was a bit more top-down investment and infrastructure development, and asking the United Nations to tax the wealthy countries of the world to pay off poor country debt, which went nowhere. In 1997, Jagan died of a heart attack at age 78. A brief political shuffle followed which put Hinds, Jagan’s black Prime Minister, in the Presidency. The new Prime Minister was Jagan’s widow, Janet Rosenberg, who to my knowledge is the only Jewish female head-of-government (and later state) in history outside of Israel (and more recently, Mexico). She also briefly served as president during another little leadership shuffle. The 1997 elections confirmed the PPP’s new selections, but not without friction. Looting and racial violence came back with a vengeance and brought Georgetown to a standstill with no one sure who really won the election. The stalemate was broken by CARICOM, sort of the EU of the Caribbean, which brokered the “Herdmanston Accord” to confirm the PPP victory but with promises of constitutional reforms and an early election in two years. In 1999 the Prime Minister post and then Presidency finally consolidated around Bharrat Jagdeo, the most dominant political figure in Guyana’s history after Burnham and Jagan. The son of Indian immigrants, Jagdeo got degrees in economics in Moscow during the tail-end of the Soviet Union, and returned to Guyana to work as an economist in Jagan’s administration. He somehow quickly climbed the ranks to Senior Minister of Finance and then Second Vice President (which, IMO, should be called Vice Vice President), and then at age 35, he was elected President. Jagdeo stayed in power for 11 years, marking by far the longest post-Burnham tenure. The general consensus is that his economic policies were pro-Western, pro-development, and helped Guyana’s economy finally leave the seafloor it had occupied for its entire history of independence. But the official figures are weird; here’s per capita GDP in current USD: What the hell happened in 2005? I don’t know. Gold mining had become a major Guyanese industry by then and would remain so until the current day. But prices started spiking in 2000: Also, the county’s largest gold mine closed in 2005. 2005 happens to be the year of the Georgetown Flood, which resulted in $465 million in property damage, or more than half of Guyana’s GDP at the time. This precipitated an emigration push leading to a decrease in Guyana’s population from 760,000 in 2005 to 744,000 in 2012. Maybe the burst of remittances played a role in the (on-paper) economic growth? But that doesn’t really line up with the data either; here are Guyanese remittances as a percentage of GDP: Maybe there was a huge burst of international aid to help rebuild Guyana after the flood and that propped up the GDP per capita? But then why did the GDP per capita stay elevated and continue increasing after that? And especially how did it stay high after the 2008 financial crisis when the prices of gold, sugar, and rice all collapsed? I don’t know. Presumably, critics of Jagdeo would say that the numbers are just fake. The opposition has always claimed that he is personally corrupt and has built an extensive patronage network into the government and economy. In 2020, Vice caught him on camera allegedly taking bribes from a Chinese company. None of this has stopped Jagdeo from becoming something of an international political darling. Since leaving the Presidency in 2011, he has been on the boards of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, he has done high level advising for the United Nations, he was an envoy for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and he did lots of other stuff for many more prestigious organizations. Meanwhile, he has allegedly become the true powerbroker of the PPP/C (the new name of the PPP since it merged with another party) and maintained a shadowy dominance over Guyanese politics for the last 13 years. In 2011, Barrett was succeeded by another Indian PPP/C President, Donald Ramotar. Whether due to lesser competence or political capital decay, the Indo-Guyanese dominance of Guyana finally started to fall apart under his rule. While the PPP/C regime was never anywhere near as suppressive toward the Afro-Guyanese as Burnham was toward the Indo-Guyanese, there was still at least the perception (I’ve never seen data to confirm it but it seems likely) of widespread implicit systematic support for Indians over blacks, at least for government jobs and contracts. Even more so than Burnham’s government, the PPP/C administrators were known for rampant nepotism which let key Indian figures and families attain a hold of mines and government contractors as Guyana’s economy apparently continued to rise from the bottom. By the mid-2010s, the PPP/C’s time was up. Each election had provoked more protesting and street violence than the last. Resentment against the corruption and nepotism was widespread among not just the Afro-Guyanese population, but poorer Indians who lacked lofty connections, and Guyanese liberals concerned about authoritarian drift. The PNC, having gone through multiple stages of collapse and rebirth, finally found its leader in David Granger. In a first for Guyana, Granger had a military background having retired in 1992 as a brigadier. He then spent 20 years as a journalist and academic before launching into politics and rapidly rising to the top of the opposition. He is described in one article as a “cool, calm and collected guy. Quite light spirited, thoughtful, a stickler for discipline and deliberative. I often heard terms like ‘Granger the chest grandmaster’ and Granger ‘the Brigadier/strategist’, in reference to his politics.” In 2015, fearing a vote-of-no-confidence and subsequent collapse of his government, President Ramotar suspended Parliament and called for new elections. Granger and the PNC rallied all non-PPP/C loyalists into a first-ever multi-racial reform party called A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), and beat the PPP/C machine in the election by an extraordinarily narrow 5,000 votes. This marked the first time Guyana had elected an Afro-Guyanese leader since the extremely rigged 1985 election of Desmond Hoyte who left office in 1992. After watching his party lose without his leadership, Jagdeo reentered the fray and took up leadership of the PPP/C in the legislature. This is when Guyanese politics took another turn south, but to understand why, you have to look at… It’s worth restating that even with decent on-paper growth, Guyana was still one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere through the early-mid 2010s. Its proportionately substantial but absolutely meager economic growth in the 1990s and 2000s was fueled by gold, diamonds, and bauxite – basic resource extraction that was suffused with corruption and granted little substantial benefit to most of the population. The other major economic driver was remittances, virtually all of which went toward consumption. According to this paper, internal government investment into the Guyanese economy was so inefficient that it actually reduced economic growth. Guyana was definitely better off under Hoyte and the PPP regimes than under Burnham, but Guyana was still an economic basket case and third world country. But next door to Guyana is Venezuela, the home of the world’s largest oil reserves. Sure, it has largely squandered its wealth with nearly unparalleled levels of corruption and incompetence, but the oil is still there. And if it’s there, it might be nearby too. Or so everyone assumed, but no one could prove. By the late 90s, there had been 40 attempts by international companies to find oil and gas in Guyana with virtually nothing to show for it. It was weird… every geologist assumed there must be oil in Guyana with the largest oil reserves on earth next door, but no one could find it. In 1997, Exxon Mobil geologist Rod Limbert pitched the idea of looking for oil in Guyana again to his bosses. His personal theory of Guyana’s potential oil wealth actually wasn’t based on Venezuela, but to the east in Suriname, where in the 1960s “villagers accidentally found what became a billion-barrel oil field while drilling for water in a schoolyard.” He was going to target new areas offshore that no other company had tried that theoretically linked to the Surinamese oil deposits. The bosses didn’t buy it. With no authority or permission, Limbert flew down to Guyana, met with the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission in a building with a dirt floor, and then met with President Samuel Hinds “who talked mostly about cricket.” Limbert returned to Exxon headquarters with some new data and got approval to move forward with exploration attempts from his bosses. In 1999, the Guyanese government “secretly” signed a contract with Exxon Mobil to explore the coastline for oil and gas. Their concession for oil exploration (called “Starbroek”) was massive, more than 1,000X larger than the standard oil block in the Gulf of Mexico. If discoveries were made, the Guyanese government would receive royalties of 2% of gross revenues and 50% of profits, with provisions that Exxon gets to recoup 100% of its investment, “as well as annual recoverable costs of up to 75 percent of revenues.” The government also probably got some sort of up-front kicker – less than $100 million – though the true figure has never been disclosed. If this sounds like a terribly lopsided deal in favor of the oil companies, it only became so post hoc. When the deal was signed, Guyana had been a bust for every oil company that came before it, so it was an extremely high-risk, high-reward endeavor for Exxon. The Guyanese government was basically selling a lottery ticket and the oil companies were never going to pay that high of a price for it. Maybe I’m a corporate shill, but I think the popular consensus that Exxon ripped off Guyana – see here for example – is unfounded. When asked later about the ethics of the contract, Limbert said, “I have examined my conscience about it over a period of time, but I don’t feel bad about it… It was a complete fit for what we knew and what we didn’t know.” To defer costs and outsource the early exploration, Exxon sold 30% of its stake to Shell. Early results were good – there was probably oil under the ocean floor of their concession. The next results were bad – their concession’s ocean floor had “stratigraphic traps” instead of “structural traps,” and so even if there was oil, it was probably always leaking out of its pockets and therefore there wasn’t much of it. But as the years dragged on into the late 2000s, oil reached $100 per barrel, so more marginal discoveries became viable. Shell was so confident that it brought its stake up to 50%. But then corporate shenanigans happened and people got laid off and Exxon seemed to lose confidence in the venture. Meanwhile, Shell was trying their luck in a similar oil claim in French Guiana and it went nowhere. Suddenly it was 2013 and no real progress had been made in Guyana. Exxon was still pretty sure there was a decent amount of oil somewhere in their concession, but they only had 1 out of their 75,000 employees working on it. With only a few months left on the contract, this employee, Scott Dyksterhuis, decided to take a shot in the dark and “drill an 8-inch-diameter hole somewhere in an area the size of Massachusetts.” Dyksterhuis identified a zone nicknamed “Liza,” and he estimated there was a 22% chance of there being between $1 billion and $2 billion worth of oil beneath it. He wanted to drill into it to confirm, but since this was offshore drilling, the costs would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This got approval from the bosses, but only if Exxon could defer some of the costs. Coincidentally, Shell was looking to do the same thing and sold its shares down to 30% while the China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) came in at 25%, leaving Exxon with 45%. The drilling would ultimately cost $225 million: “The high-spec drill rig was as long as two football fields, carried 10 truckloads of cement and mud, and could drill more than 7 miles deep. With helicopter crews and support vessels at the ready, the well was soon costing more than $1 million a day.” In the first few months, $15 million worth of equipment was accidentally destroyed and the drilling strategy had to be reformatted on the fly. In 2015, two years after Exxon started exploring Liza, the company announced to the world that it had struck oil, and a lot of it. In 2016, it announced it had struck oil in another section of its concession. In 2017, it announced that it had struck oil in another area of its concession, and then another, and then another. In 2018, they struck oil in a sixth spot and a seventh spot. In 2019, they struck oil in an eighth spot. After the 18th spot was struck in 2020, Exxon stopped numbering them on its website, but another website says they hit 33 in 2022. In 2024, Guyana’s current estimated oil reserves are up to 11 billion barrels. For comparison, see this list which for some reason is not updated to include Guyana: Norway is a famously rich country that has leveraged its oil money into making its sovereign wealth fund the largest investment fund on earth (almost $1.8 trillion at last count). Norway has a population of only 5.6 million with oil reserves of 7.6 billion. Even Qatar, a notorious petrol-rentier state, has a population of 3.1 million with reserves of 25.2 billion. Guyana has a population of 830,000 sitting on 11 billion barrels of oil. It is now the nation with the highest per capita oil reserves on earth. And they’ve only been exploring for oil and gas for less than a decade. I’ve seen the $11 billion figure in articles going all the way back to 2022. I assume it will get higher. As of writing this essay, the price of TWI crude oil has been around $75 per gallon for the last six months. Obviously this is a very rough estimate, but that would make Guyana’s oil reserves worth $825 billion, and even if the oil companies capture 50% of that value (I have no idea what the real figure will come out to), that’s still $413 billion. Guyana’s current GDP is $14.7 billion. The average Guyanese had no idea any of this was going on until May 2015 when Exxon announced the Liza discovery. And they just happened to have announced it a few days after David Granger and the new APNU coalition had taken power from the PPP/C for the first time in 23 years. All of a sudden, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere had won the lottery. Obviously this is very very good, but also potentially very very bad. Even before Guyana was independent, its politics had been contentious, divisive, often ugly, and prone to violence along racial lines. Under Forbes Burnham, the Afro-Guyanese had a strong man who used his force of personality and the state apparatus to suppress the Indo-Guyanese majority and the conservative minority. Once he died, the black ANC and Indian PPP fought in still-fraudulent but not completely broken democratic elections. Though the subsequent regimes were never as brutal as Burnham’s, everyone knew the score. The widely believed perception was that the two dominant ethnic groups of Guyana were fighting for control over the government, economy, and society. Whichever one won would use its power to enrich its supporters through corruption, nepotism, and patronage networks, and whichever one lost would be systematically exploited. The Current History article does a good job of emphasizing how this struggle transcended material concerns. Much of the Indo-Guyanese population felt like the Afro-Guyanese population had run roughshod over them for more than two decades with Dictator Burnham, and they never faced any justice. But much of the Afro-Guyanese felt like the Indo-Guyanese had just built a more subtle Burnham-type system over the two decades of rule and were enacting a slow racial vengeance. In Guyana, I heard this straight from a black taxi driver who went on an impromptu rant about how the Indians were hoarding all the jobs and wealth. (Another insight offered by him – keeping in mind this is just n=1 – was that Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese rarely dated, but that Afro-Guyanese men often pursued Indo-Guyanese women because they were perceived as hot and wealthy. However, Indo-Guyanese women rarely reciprocated because their families wouldn’t approve.) And so with all that at stake and underlying this ongoing racial battle, suddenly in 2015, there was also oil money at play. Everything went into overdrive. The APNU coalition assembled by the PNC and now-President Granger campaigned on building a unifying, multi-ethnic regime. But now all these ethnicities and interest groups and social classes didn’t just have to bind together against a common enemy, now they had to figure out what to do with what was rapidly becoming the largest oil discovery in modern history. On the other side, the PPP couldn’t believe their bad luck that they had lost power after 23 years only days before the government they once controlled had been promised a giant pile of money. If there was anything that could rally back their full Indian base, that was it. And from this extraordinarily precious position, President Granger’s response was not exactly inspiring. From Current History: “Given [Guyana’s] volatile history, there was little reason to expect any dramatic change [from the new administration], and in fact none materialized. One of the first acts of the new coalition government was to authorize substantial pay increases for ministers, even as wages in the public sector remained low. Former and currently serving military men were installed in key positions throughout the government.” The Granger government followed up this political master stroke by quickly shutting down a bunch of economically inefficient sugar estates, thereby firing thousands of poor Indians who happened to be a crucial component of the anti-PPP/C coalition. A public outcry emerged – first from the PPP/C but soon from the APNU coalition – for the government to give more details on the oil money. Everyone knew that Exxon had discovered a ton of oil off the coast in Guyanese territory, but nobody outside of a handful of top officials knew the details of what sort of deal had been hashed out with Exxon all the way back in 1999. Granger balked and tried to keep the contract under wraps, just like the previous regime had done, but the temperature was too high now. In June 2016, the details of the Exxon deal were released and people were not happy. Both within and outside Guyana, the government was accused of corruption, incompetence, and for selling out its miracle asset for pennies on the dollar. Exxon’s arguments about the risks they were taking with exploration and the capital investments and the 22% odds of finding substantial oil in Liza and the volatility of global oil prices did not sway many hearts and minds. Instead, the Guyanese people began protesting for a renegotiation of terms. The regime didn’t budge. The 70ish year old Granger kept his head down and tried to follow through on his takeover of the government, which looked a lot like removing Indians from every post he could and replacing them with black ANC supporters. Soon he was dismissed by many Guyanese as just another useless, corrupt politician who couldn’t be trusted. The next elections were scheduled for 2020 but the opposition didn’t even have to wait for that long. In 2018, the PPP/C had amassed enough power to strike back. In another Guyanese first, President Granger lost a vote-of-no-confidence in the legislature by a slim majority due to major defections in the APNU coalition. 33 out of 65 legislators had voted for the motion. Legally, Granger had to dissolve his government and call for new elections… But he didn’t. Instead, the Granger regime lawyered up and went to court to argue that the vote-of-no-confidence was invalid. Why was it invalid? Uhhhh… try to follow this line of reasoning presented by the Granger government: This argument was rejected in court. More traction was found in an argument that one of the key legislators who flipped on APNU was ineligible to vote or even be in the National Assembly at all because he is a dual citizen of Guyana and Canada, which is prohibited in the Guyanese constitution. The court looked at the argument, found compelling evidence that it was true, and then… said the vote was valid anyway. If I’m understanding correctly, the judge cited an article in the constitution stating that the National Assembly can still function even if it has invalid members. Or something. The attorney general (who was appointed by APNU) rejected the judge’s decision and said the vote-of-no-confidence failed. This bought time for the regime to appeal the decision to a higher court where it won. This prompted the PPP/C to appeal the decision beyond Guyana to the Caribbean Court of Justice, which is run by CARICOM. This court ultimately ruled in favor of the PPP/C, determining that the Canadian objection was valid but needed to be asserted prior to the vote to impact it. By then it was March 2019, 15 months after the original vote-of-no-confidence. The Granger regime finally consented to hold elections in March 2020. Everyone knew the primary campaign topic would be how to spend Guyana’s oil money, which was looking less theoretical by the day with actual oil production set to commence in early 2020. President Granger tried to rally his battered APNU coalition with big national investment plans as well as generous cash transfers directly to Guyanese citizens financed by the impending oil money. Jagdeo led the PPP/C but chose to embody a Dick Cheyney-ish role by naming himself the Vice Presidential candidate. He then hand-picked the Presidential candidate: Irfaan Ali, a 38 year old Indian Muslim with a background in economics and former roles in PPP/C regimes in a bunch of administrative ministries. He also has a great beard. It was a bit of an odd choice given Ali’s baggage: he was facing 19 counts of fraud from a special anti-corruption unit claiming that while in the government between 2010 and 2015, Ali had sold 19 plots of government land at artificially low values ($39.8 million instead of $212.4 million), presumably for bribes or some sort of favors. For his part, Ali claimed the accusations were politically motivated by APNU, which doesn’t sound unreasonable. I tried Googling around for Ali’s alleged positives as a presidential candidate, but he mostly comes off as a party loyalist (he has been a member since he was 18) and Jagdeo puppet. Regardless, his pitch to the Guyanese people was to use the oil money to set up a sovereign wealth fund and integrate it with international financial standards to make sure it wasn’t instantly robbed by corrupt politicians, possibly including himself. APNU actually headed the plan off by creating the Natural Resource Fund preemptively in 2019. When election day came in March 2020, everything was surprisingly calm, probably because foreign observers – including representatives from the US, UK, Canada, EU, Carter Center and a million other international organizations and NGOs – were present to make sure a suddenly relevant geopolitical player wouldn’t meltdown. Problems started after the voting was done and the counting commenced. As more votes came in, a narrow PPP/C victory appeared likely. The head of the government’s election oversight committee mysteriously got sick and had to go to the hospital, so counting paused while they searched for a replacement. Then the replacement mysteriously got sick and had to go to the hospital, so counting was stopped again. Then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs threatened to throw all the foreign observers out of the counting facility for no reason, but they refused to leave. Then there was a bomb threat in the building and the police tried to clear everyone out, but a lot of people refused to leave. Then the original vote overseer recovered from his mysterious illness, returned to the voting center with police, and read out the totally final and official results which revealed a narrow APNU victory. These results were then released to media outlets and broadcast throughout Guyana. For almost two weeks, all the foreign observers condemned the election and the PPP/C filed lawsuits, but APNU forged ahead like nothing was wrong and prepared to swear in President Granger again. Mass protests broke out across Guyana as supporters of both parties met on the streets for violence and looting, with one death at the hands of the police. The US, UK, and a few other countries declared that if a recount wasn’t held, they would regard the Granger regime as illegitimate and levy sanctions, which isn’t great for an impoverished country whose sole source of ample wealth comes from oil almost entirely drilled by Americans. Finally, CARICOM sent five Prime Ministers to broker a deal between Granger and Jagdeo, and APNU folded under international pressure. The recount was set for May and took an entire month. The PPP/C narrowly won, and as per the agreement for National Assembly seat distribution, the PPP/C got 33 seats, APNU got 31, and three smaller parties shared a single seat. Then the Granger regime still dragged its feet on accepting the outcome, but after months of lawsuits and international pressure, including visa sanctions on key regime measures, the vote count was officially accepted in August. Even beyond the power and oil money and ethnic tension, the Granger regime fought tooth-and-nail against the results because they were eventually stuck in a Caesarion situation where losing power likely meant prosecution for various misconducts. Sure enough, In July 2024, nine key APNU officials were put on trial for 19 counts of election fraud and the case is still ongoing today. But back in August 2020, Irfan Ali was elected President, Jagdeo as Vice President, and though I can find little information on him, the 70+ year old Granger seems to have retired. Once in power, the new Ali regime could kick back and watch the oil flow in. Here’s annual production in 1,000 barrels per day: I can’t find a graph for it, but in 2024, Guyana reached 555,000 barrels per day. For comparison, that makes Guyana currently the 28th largest oil producer in the world, behind Egypt (which has 14,000% more people) and ahead of Malaysia (which has only 4,000% more people). As expected, this has made Guyana’s economy go ballistic. Here’s GDP in billions of USD: From 2019 to 2023, from before the global COVID-19 pandemic to its end, the World Bank has the GDP of Guyana increasing from $5.2 billion to $16.8 billion, or an increase of 223%, or an annual average of 74%. In terms of GDP per capita PPP, Guyana went from being comparable to Namibia, Lebanon, El Salvador, Iraq, or Sri Lanka, to being comparable to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, Italy, New Zealand, or South Korea. For some reason, the IMF actually estimates Guyana’s GDP per capita PPP way higher ($79,000 to $55,000), putting in at the 13th highest in the world, in between Iceland and the United Arab Emirates. But of course, the Guyanese people are not seeing the lion’s share of this new wealth. Exxon, Shell, and CNOOK are taking their cuts for production and profits, and almost all of the rest goes straight into the government’s coffers, more specifically the Natural Resource Fund (NRF), Guyana’s sovereign wealth fund. So how’s that been going? For the sake of comparison, in 2018, the pre-oil revenue government spent $1.3 billion. In 2020, Guyana’s oil production netted the government $150 million. I can’t find a good number for 2021 because for some reason the NRF’s website doesn’t have an annual report for that year, but the 2023 annual report says the government earned $1.4 billion in 2022 and a little over $1.6 billion 2023. So annual oil earnings have already eclipsed the entire budgets of the government during its pre-oil days. The only problem is that this sovereign wealth fund isn’t acting much like a sovereign wealth fund. Theoretically, such funds are supposed to make wise investments to generate returns to grow the fund so the national population has a giant piggy bank from which it can pull proceeds. Instead, the NRF spends a lot of the money that comes in; In 2022, it spent $608 million (43% of revenue) and in 2023, it spent $1 billion (63% of revenue). Maybe that’s a good thing since the returns generated on investments were 1.6% and 4.8% respectively. On the other hand, I can sympathize with a formerly dirt-broke government finally spending money when it has it. There really are basic infrastructure upgrades that could juice the domestic economy. Currently, the country literally has one highway, and it’s made of dirt and is borderline impassable for the rainy season. Now Georgetown is developing 20 lanes of interconnecting highways (the construction was visible throughout the city), and a new 345 mile highway will connect Georgetown and Lethem. Hilton is building a new 11 story hotel and the first real luxury residential developments are going up. But the big stuff is yet to come. Saudi Arabia has Neom and Guyana will have Silica City: “The brainchild of President Irfaan Ali, the goal is to build an entirely new “smart city” in the tropical savannah some 30 miles south of the capital, Georgetown, near the international airport. Close to $10 million in construction contracts were awarded in February 2023; there are plans for an 18-hole golf course, housing for 60,000 people, schools, industrial parks and more. Architects from the University of Miami will help design Silica City’s master plan; investors as far away as Singapore and South Korea have expressed interest. The government says it may take 20 years to finish, but it expects people to start living there as soon as this year.” Guyana is going to be fascinating to watch over the next decade. One of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere is suddenly one of the wealthiest. A political basket case has been handed an impossible bounty and it could produce one of the greatest national economic transformations of the modern era, right up there with Saudi Arabia and Singapore. To be honest, I’m not optimistic. I think Saudi Arabia really was an anomaly of competence and the other Arab petrol-states followed suit. I think Guyana has low human capital, deeply entrenched tribalism, and impossible-to-dislodge corruption, so, sadly, the world will probably get another Libya/Angola/Nigeria/Venezuela. But I wish it the best. I hope it can overcome Dutch Disease, the Resource Curse, corruption, nepotism, racism, inefficiency, elite theft, mob pandering, and all the other usual problems that come with great resource wealth. But even if it does overcome all that, Guyana might just get invaded. If you’ve heard of Guyana, it’s probably either because of Jonestown or because it might get invaded. Two of its three neighbors, Venezuela and Suriname, have territorial claims and have been saber rattling on-and-off for hundreds of years, but especially in the four years. When I was in Guyana, propaganda posters and billboards were everywhere proclaiming the sovereignty and solidarity of Guyanese territorial integrity. The Venezuelan dispute goes all the way back to 1648 when Spain finally recognized Dutch independence to end the 70 Years War; the colonies that would eventually become Guyana went Dutch, while the colonies that eventually became Venezuela stayed Spanish, but the exact boundary between the two was hazy. As far as I can tell, the border remained disputed for the next 200+ years but there was no actual conflict over it because the border region was, and remains, covered in extremely dense jungle, and was economically useless in a colonial area with very low populations and little capital investment outside cash crop plantations. In 1811, Venezuela got its independence from Spain. In 1814, Britain took control of Guyana. In the 1830s and 1840s, the British sent a series of expeditions into the jungle to investigate where exactly their colony ended and Venezuela and Brazil began. At the center of British Guiana was the Essequibo River, a major waterway that ran north-to-south down the colony, and just east of its mouth was situated Georgetown, the colony’s capital, which had been renamed after Britain’s king in 1812. The question was how far west past the Essequibo River did British Guiana extend. The British agents decided on the “Schomburgk Line,” named after one of the explorers, which went quite far past the Essequibo River and all the way to the south bank of the Orinoco River, one of the most important waterways in modern day Venezuela. Venezuela declared that it didn’t recognize the Schomburgk Line and that the valid border between Venezuela and British Guiana was the Essequibo River itself. This would make Guyana about 2/3rds smaller than it currently is. As a negotiating tactic, Britain abandoned its claim on the bank of the Orinoco River and brought its border to modern-day Guyana’s, but Venezuela still rejected it. Britain renounced its renunciation and claimed the Schomburgk Line again. Negotiations went back and forth until in 1887, Venezuela severed diplomatic ties with Britain and called the US to intervene on its behalf through the Monroe Doctrine. The US supported Venezuela’s claims, but obviously wasn’t willing to fight Britain for them. So in 1899, in a very 19th century, Victorian-era, gentlemanly manner, the US decided to bring together a panel of judges to hear arguments from Venezuela and Britain, and make a binding determination based on legal arbitration. The five chosen judges (agreed upon by both sides) were the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the US, another American Supreme Court Justice, the British Lord Justice of Appeal, the Lord Chancellor of Britain (who died and was replaced by the Lord Chief Justice), and as a tie-breaker, a Russian diplomat. Both sides had a bunch of representatives and lawyers (including ex-US President Benjamin Harrison) and made their cases. Britain claimed that the disputed territory was wild jungle that Spain had only claimed on-paper but had never nailed down with an actual military or economic presence, but the Native population was allied with the Dutch, and the Dutch territory was ceded to Britain, so… it should be British now. The Americans countered that, uh, Natives don’t have territorial sovereignty, so all of that is irrelevant, and the land was rightful Spanish clay, and now Venezuelan clay. Britain almost entirely won the arbitration and was awarded 95% of the disputed territory. The boundaries drawn by the judges were similar to Britain’s earlier compromise counteroffer which gave Venezuela the bank of the Orinoco River but kept the rest. The Venezuelan diplomats were pissed off, but with no viable physical means of enforcing their claims and their diplomatic capital used up, they accepted the boundary. For 60 years the Venezuela-Guyana border dispute was settled, but then… There was this American lawyer named Otto Schoenrich who worked at the law firm, Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP. The “Mallet-Prevost” in the name was Severo Mallet-Prevost, the American secretary of the US–Venezuela delegation at the 1899 arbitration. In 1944, Mallet-Prevost (then an old man) wrote a memorandum claiming that the British had offered the Russian judge some sort of deal on another political manner in exchange for his support in the arbitration, and that the Americans knew of the deal but went along with it anyway. In 1948, Mallet-Prevost died, and as per his instructions, Schoenrich published the memorandum the following year. Nothing was made of the memorandum until 1962 when Britain granted Guyana independence. Suddenly, Venezuela cited the memorandum in declaring the entire 1899 convention fraudulent and revived its full territorial claim up to the Essequibo River. Since then, the map has looked like this: The issue went to the international courts for eight years with various promises to eventually set up some sort of Venezuelan-Guyanese commission to solve it. In 1970, President Burnham worked some of his diplomatic magic to get Venezuela to agree to put its claims aside for 12 years. In 1982, Venezuela demanded the matter be settled between the two nations, but Burnham said the United Nations should decide it, which Venezuela refused. So nothing happened for 20+ years and the territorial dispute became a frozen conflict. Then in 2015, Exxon Mobil announced to the world that it had discovered an ocean of oil off the coast of Guyana. Up until that point, the Venezuelan claim territory was basically just a prestige thing. The land had barely 100,000 inhabitants many of whom were Natives. There were a few small gold mines but nothing serious, and it’s not like anyone was using the Jonestown ruins for tourism. But now there was oil in the sea, and by standard maritime territorial claims, 2/3rds of the Exxon oil zone was in disputed territory. Venezuela instantly sent diplomats to the UN to push for a territorial settlement. Meanwhile, the Guyanese government reaffirmed its commitment to Exxon Mobil, Shell, and CNOOK in drilling offshore. The government’s refusal to renegotiate its terms with these companies was widely condemned inside and outside of Guyana as incompetence and possibly corruption, but the plausible charitable case for the government’s actions is that it wanted to keep the oil companies as happy as possible. Happy mega-oil-conglomerates might rush to Guyana’s defense in the event of a war, unhappy mega-oil-conglomerates might throw their weight behind the enemy. In 2018, Guyana took the initiative by going to the International Court of Justice and asking for ratification of the 1899 arbitration. Venezuela claimed it didn’t recognize the court’s authority. In 2021, Venezuela rewrote the maritime claims around its borders and claimed a chunk of the offshore oil fields. Soon after, the Venezuelan Navy seized a couple of Guyanese fishing vessels allegedly trespassing in its new territorial waters. In 2023, the International Court of Justice officially ruled in favor of Guyana that the 1899 borders were valid and Venezuela had no legitimate claims in Guyana reaffirmed its authority to rule on the case. With Venezuela seemingly finally out of diplomatic options, there was only one recourse left. In October 2023, de facto Dictator Nicholas Maduro announced a referendum for next month which included continuing to challenge the disputed Guyanese territory and granting Venezuelan citizenship to all inhabitants of the territory (estimated at 125,000). Of course, the referendum passed with 95% approval. Since then, the Venezuelan government has continuously built up forces and done a lot of stuff that looks an awful lot like preparing to invade while claiming it isn’t doing so. The Guyanese government has mostly put out calls for international support in case of an invasion since the overwhelming consensus is that Guyana’s paltry military will be crushed by Venezuela’s probably highly incompetent and corrupt but vastly larger and significantly more advanced forces. Two people I met in Guyana claimed that the government has refused to fix its single dirt, chronically washed out, and often impassable highway so the Venezuelan military can’t use it for an invasion. While all of that was going on… Guyana’s eastern border with Suriname was also never 100% nailed down. When they were both Dutch colonies, no one cared, but once Britain got control of Guyana while Suriname (then Dutch Guiana) stayed Dutch, people started caring. In 1814, the Dutch and British agreed that the Courantyne River should serve as the border. All good. But in one of those classic British geopolitical negotiation hiccups, no one knew exactly where the Courantyne River began. They knew it ended at the sea, and they knew it started somewhere in the middle of some of the densest jungle in the world, but not exactly where. I guess they figured they would sort that out eventually. Eventually was 1840 when the British sent an explorer to find the river’s origin, which he did. A line was drawn on a map. Both the British and Dutch were happy. All good. But then, in 1871, this other British explorer traipsed all around British Guiana and discovered, at least in his opinion, that the original 1840 discovery was wrong. The place that the 1840 guy thought was the end of the river was actually just a delta, and the river kept going for, like, 100 miles, and quite a bit to the east, until it finally did end. So he told the British government of his findings and they declared that, in accordance with the 1814 treaty, British Guiana was actually bigger than previously thought. They called the space the “New River Triangle.” Britain then reached out to Brazil to confirm the borders, and since at the time Brazil was very much into currying British favor, it publicly proclaimed Britain correct. The Dutch disagreed and the territory became disputed. Hence: In 1899, Britain, the US, and Venezuela had their arbitration over British Guiana’s western border. Even though the conference had absolutely nothing to do with Suriname and the Dutch weren’t invited, the panel nonetheless also pronounced that the British claim over Dutch Guiana’s territory was valid. The Dutch government, unsurprisingly, did not consider this a valid proclamation. In 1936, the British and Dutch had their own arbitration. The result: Dutch Guiana would get the entire Courantyne River (as in, the waterway itself), but British Guiana would get the New River Triangle (the land carved out by the new waterway boundary). However, World War II then broke out, and British and Dutch politicians had better things to do, so the treaty was never ratified. In the 1950s and 1960s, negotiations reopened, Brazil got involved, new borders and concessions were drawn all over the map, and even though Britain tried to put the matter to bed before Guyana got its independence, they never really did. In 1966, Guyana got independence. In 1967, the Burnham regime declared that it would enforce its claim against what was still Dutch Guiana. Four Guyanese soldiers went to the village of Kuruni, which was then a logging camp, and which now has a population under 100. The soldiers ordered the loggers, who were Dutch Guianese nationals, to leave. The local Dutch Guianese military outpost fought back, a skirmish ensued, and Guyana won. The region was effectively conquered. The following year, a treaty was signed between Guyana and Dutch Guiana for both sides to pull their forces out. To this day, the New River Triangle has remained in Guyana’s possession, but Suriname (which became independent in 1975) maintains a claim on the territory. According to an ex-president of Suriname, there was a plan in the late 1990s to invade the New River Triangle, but it was deemed too politically risky with elections coming up. I am by no means an expert, but in my estimation, no invasions of Guyana will occur. If the Ukraine War has taught us anything, it’s that invading a country is really hard, especially these days, and I’m sure it’s even harder in a tropical rainforest. And also, Guyana may actually be able to put up a fight pretty soon with all this oil money. So I’m predicting that the Venezuelan government will continue to saber rattle to raise internal support, Suriname will continue to angrily simmer, and the Guyanese government will play up the threat of invasion for its own internal support. If you see a white person in Guyana, they’re probably either one of the roughly 0.3% of the European population largely descended from Portuguese settlers, or visiting corporate oil personnel. But if they aren’t one of those, they’re probably travellers, and not the casual sort. Few Americans or Europeans know where Guyana is, and fewer still would go there unless they were running out of places to go. I met two Europeans in Guyana: one had been to 118 countries, the other was in the 160s. Both said that Guyana was possibly the single worst country they had experienced for tourism. To quote this travel blogger who has been to every country: “Guyana is not only my least favorite country South America, but would also be in my 10 least favorite in the world. The capital is dangerous and makes you feel unease, the hotels, transfers and almost everything else are quite expensive, and there’s not a lot to do in the country that I find exciting. The Kaieteur Falls would actually be a highlight. However, my tour there was most likely the worst tour I’ve ever had anywhere, and what’s more, it was a complete rip-off.” I agree. Safety is a contentious issue among travellers in its very conception. I’ve had lots of conversations about what exactly “safety” is, what factors go into it, how to weigh random crime against systemic threats like terrorism or arbitrary government oppression, etc. But generally, more experienced travellers tend to converge on the opinion that the world is a lot safer than most people believe. In my experience, you really can go almost anywhere and walk around and you’ll almost certainly be fine as long as you abide by reasonable precautions like not following sketchy people down isolated alleys in the middle of the night. Even in statistically very dangerous countries and cities, the danger is typically highly concentrated in small geographic areas. I recall reading that even infamous cities like Chicago and Baltimore are (or at least were) strikingly safe as long as you avoid a handful of extraordinarily dangerous zones. (Caveat – all travel risks are elevated for women. But outside of a few particularly dangerous countries, I think the previous paragraph holds for them too.) Still, when traveling somewhere new, I try to attain a reasonably accurate sense of the odds that I, as a white male traveller, will be mugged, attacked, kidnapped, or otherwise harmed in a random event. And I’m not sure I’ve received more warnings about a travel destination than I did for Guyana. Granted, I was cautious about Mali, Iraq, and Ukraine, but only for full-fledged political reasons like getting kidnapped by an Al Qaeda affiliate. But with the possible exception of the Dominican Republic, I never received so many warnings about arbitrary street crime than for Guyana. Sentiments on various forums and subreddits were echoed by the Guyanese woman sitting next to me on the plane to Georgetown and three taxi drivers in Guyana. Don’t walk around anywhere at night, don’t walk around about four different slum neighborhoods, and don’t walk around the city center at all, even though it contains the closest things urban Guyana has to tourist attractions. Don’t wear any jewelry, don’t carry a camera, don’t show cash, and don’t take out your phone. These warnings could be generally applied for everyone, but were multiplied for a white tourist. During my taxi ride from the main Guyanese airport to Georgetown, my driver (the same guy who ranted about Indians getting all the local jobs) said all the same safety warning stuff over again without any solicitation on my part. I asked him if he had ever been mugged. He replied, “no, but I’ve been on the other side.” We then had a long conversation in which he explained that though he was born in Guyana, he grew up in Jamaica where he was in gangs when he was younger (I guessed he was in his mid-20s now). He claimed that Kingston, Jamaica had more organized crime than Georgetown, but the latter was more dangerous because there was less structure to the crime. The Jamaican gangs took marching orders from higher ups while Georgetown’s criminals were just random impoverished people who would try to rob anyone who seemed to have money. By his account, the Jamaican gangs even gave strict orders to never go after tourists because they were good for the economy (or, my speculation, because the police would retaliate) while the Guyanese criminals had no such qualms. I don’t know, maybe it’s all true, or maybe the guy was showing off to me, but he eventually drove me around central Georgetown at midnight and all the warnings appeared plausible. Shirtless, emaciated drug addicts roamed filthy streets next to street-walker prostitutes. The central market was packed with young men who did not appear excessively pro-social. The sparse lighting left plenty of space where crimes of opportunity could surely be committed. There was a small police station outpost right in the middle of it all, but my driver assured me they were useless and just for show. He then drove me in zig-zags throughout downtown and noted demarcations between zones where I, theoretically, could walk around without getting robbed. On the other hand, one local said all the warnings were overblown. By his account, of course Georgetown was dangerous, but as long as you look like you don’t have a shred of wealth on you and follow ordinary safety precautions, you’ll be fine walking around. In support of this notion, in all seriousness, I noticed that there was a Pizza Hut right in the central market area between the drug addicts and hookers and scary young men. So I ended up walking around Georgetown anyway. And I was fine. No muggings, no stabbings, no shootings, just some accosting by the homeless and some odd looks. One time I asked a random guy where to find a taxi, and after he showed me, he wouldn’t let me in the vehicle until I gave him a few Guyanese dollars explicitly earmarked for beer. Admittedly I did far less city walking than I usually do while travelling in part because of the brutal heat/humidity, partially because the city is very spread out so it’s tough to walk around, but mostly because… This comment indeed portended my experience in Guyana, but I wasn’t pessimistic about my travel prospects at first. In further conversation with this woman, she said her single biggest complaint about living in the United States was open container laws, so maybe she was not the best person to answer my questions. But it wasn’t long before I started to run into Guyana’s travel limitations. During my first day in Georgetown, I went to a mall to buy a sim card and exchange money, then I went to the city center to see a church and visit a market and try not to get robbed, then I spent a fruitless two hours walking around a commercial district failing to find a decent car rental service, and then… I couldn’t figure out what to do. There was the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology, but I’m not a big museum guy unless it’s really top-tier. There was a park with a pond with manatees in it, but it was kind of far away. Normally, when walking around cities, I don’t need tourist destinations since I like just wandering around and getting a feel for the city and generating random unexpected encounters with people/places, but, frankly, Georgetown is pretty fucking ugly, and not in an interesting way. It mostly looks like a generic rundown Caribbean city, but less developed, with few buildings over two or three stories. There is almost no indication that Guyana had recently attained stratospheric economic growth besides two or three new malls, hotels, and casinos. The only interesting aspect to the city’s design is that as you get farther from the center, a lot of neighborhoods are built on and across canals since the whole thing seems to be a swamp. And my favorite architectural part of Guyana is that a decent number of houses are built on stilts, which produces this rotting bayou aesthetic: (Most of these pics are from Suriname, but it looks the same in Guyana.) I felt like I had seen all I needed to see of Georgetown after half a day, and though I had fun at night with some cool people, I was ready to leave the city a day earlier than I had planned. Georgetown wasn’t interesting but that didn’t deter me from being intrigued by Guyana. After all, the Caribbean is not known for its cities. These are nations of great untapped natural expanses including some of the densest rain forests on earth. I loved the idea of launching into a deep dark jungle rarely seen even today when the travel world has been conquered by Google Maps, Tripadvisor, and AirBnb. I intended to venture out from Georgetown and see the real Guyana, including the nation’s most famous site… I had to see it. I wasn’t expecting much – probably a bunch of crumbling cabins in the jungle. But still, it’s a fascinating place that has been scarred into American culture and going there would easily justify my entire trip. I even watched the surprisingly good low-budget horror movie, The Sacrament, in preparation. But after a lot of Googling and talking to some locals, I discovered that it’s nearly impossible to go to Jonestown unless you’re willing to spend serious money or time. Surprisingly, Jonestown is genuinely, truly remote, even by Guyanese standards. The closest functional town to it is Port Kaituna, an inland town of maybe 1,000+ people occupied by scattered gold miners and a few Natives. There are no roads to Port Kaituna from Georgetown, or at least no functional ones. Every map app says the route is impossible by road, and this was supported by two Georgetown locals. From some digging, I believe the only way to get there is to take some extraordinarily convoluted series of boats up rivers for numerous days, for which there is no way to plan in advance, or to charter a flight for $10,000+ to fly into Port Kaituna’s airstrip. So Jonestown was a no-go for me. Though I’d expect the Guyanese government to have some sort of pathway to ostensibly its most popular tourist attraction, given what I was to learn about the state of the nation’s infrastructure, I understand it’s probably not worth the investment to beat a real path from Georgetown to Jonestown. Oh well. The number one accessible tourist destination in Guyana is Kaieteur Falls, a massive waterfall about one third of the way into the country from the northern coast. Like churches and flagpoles, waterfalls are another one of these things that countries compete over having the best of through debates over what conceptually constitutes the “biggest” or “largest.” Kaietur Falls’ claim to fame is having the biggest sheer drop of any waterfall in the world at 741 feet, compared to Angel Falls in Venezuela having the largest multi-stage drop, and Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe and Zambia having the “world’s largest sheet of falling water,” and Inga Falls in Congo having the most rapid fall rate. If you want the maximalist Kaieteur Falls experience, you can drive and hike there from Georgetown over 4-5 days, though I’m not exactly sure what that entails. I found two companies that offer the service, but neither had any reviews on their programs, and the prices (about $800 and $1,400) seemed a bit high. In retrospect, I wish I had investigated this a bit more and maybe taken my chances on an unusual trek, but between the lack of reviews, the prices, and being solo (which tends to make these things more expensive and harder to nail down a booking), I had my qualms. Plus I had a much bigger and more time-consuming plan (more on that in a bit) that wouldn’t leave 4-5 days free. So instead, I briefly considered the standard Kaieteur Falls visiting option – fly from Georgetown to Kaieteur Falls, spend 1-2 hours looking at it, and then fly back. Price: about $350. Also, all the reviews said that when you booked a flight tour, it wasn’t really, totally, 100% booked because if there didn’t happen to be enough people booked that day, the company would just cancel the flights entirely. Ugh. That is not my type of travel. I like to meander, to do random shit, to have maximal control over my day-to-day movement and activities. I do not like to burn an entire day and a decent chunk of money to see one tourist thing on what every review said was a very perfunctory tour. And as a jaded traveller, I had seen big waterfalls before. So I decided to declare the Kaieteur Falls flight tour a “maybe” that I would reserve for the end of my Guyana trip if I had more free time. But I never did. After much Googling had led me to be pessimistic about Georgetown, give up on Jonestown, and be wary of committing to Kaieteur Falls, I finally found a model for decent traveling plan at Lukas Eddy’s blog. These people rented a big 4X4 truck and drove south from Georgetown on the country’s sole highway (an extraordinarily generous term for what it is) to Lethem, a mining town on the border of Brazil. Along the way, they stopped for hikes, fishing, and rafting, often with no permission or guidance, and they slept in their car or tents or bartered for rooms in tiny obscure mining towns in the middle of the jungle. It sounded awesome. I sketched out an 8 day road trip with a slow drive south with tons of stops, and then a rapid drive back north. I could follow the same general path as the bloggers and do it all by myself. I could do quasi-off-roading, try to chat up gold miners, and find dilapidated trails known only to a handful of travellers in the world. I was told that, unlike Georgetown, the Guyanese countryside was completely safe and the police weren’t corrupt. And I could stop at one or more of the eco-lodges along the way which had their own camping and fishing and access to wildlife like giant anteaters, jaguars, the largest freshwater fish in the world, and the largest spiders in the world (bonus – Natives eat them, they’re supposed to taste like shrimp). I could see the real Guyana in a challenging manner that was entirely new to me. I even emailed the bloggers and they gave me extremely helpful guidance including coordinates for where to stop, advice on navigation, and a recommendation for where to rent my vehicle. So mid-way through a not-great first day in Georgetown, I found the car rental place they recommended, talked to the friendly owner, told him my plan, and he smiled and said it was both “crazy” and, currently, “impossible.” He told me that just last week, a group from another dealership had rented a big truck for a similar trip, but the road was so bad due to storms and general abysmal maintenance that they crashed on the side of the road somewhere in the middle of nowhere. They signaled for help, the dealer received it, and then sent a car to rescue them. When the rescue car arrived, they found everyone in the truck dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. So now nobody in Georgetown does this sort of rental. The guy even called another company in front of me to ask if they would help me out and they said no. So in 15 minutes, my plan to spend the majority of my time in Guyana, as constructed over the prior three weeks, was dead. Back in Notes on Nigeria, I wrote about how Nigerians tended to tolerate much higher levels of ambient noise than I’m used to as an American. Everyone talked really loudly, music was constantly blasting, it was hard to make phone calls in public or sometimes even to have conversations, etc. My thoughts on this have since evolved to recognize that I am the weird one. The cultural norm of “try to keep most public spaces quiet unless you have a good reason to make noise” is really only present in most of the Anglosphere, most of Europe, and the wealthy East Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, and Singapore). In most of the rest of the world, it’s perfectly acceptable to be extremely loud all the time everywhere: busses, residential neighborhoods, restaurants, wherever, whenever, always. In my travel experience, Guyana is a contender for the country with the most ambient noise tolerance. I met a few individuals who brought this to an almost disturbing degree. There was this one local I talked to a bit before arriving in Guyana, and when the taxi dropped me off to meet him, he said some greetings and then immediately took me to a bar to hang out with him and two of his friends. The problem was that the bar was ABSOLUTELY FUCKING BLASTING its music. Just full-fledged BLASTING. I felt the physical sound waves in my clothes. So my first time meeting this guy, and a bunch of his friends, we could only communicate to each other by leaning into ears and SHOUTING AT MAXIMUM VOLUME to convey a sentence fragment. This went on for about five minutes before I gave up, and stopped talking because doing so was uncomfortable, inconvenient, annoying, and increasingly painful, but they kept right along doing it for the next hour. To clarify, this was not a wild bar or a club. By its aesthetics, this was a normal, chill, hangout bar, except the MUSIC WAS FUCKING BLASTING. It was a week night, it was less than half full, and no one was dancing, but the music WAS STILL FUCKING BLASTING. The next day, I met up with one of the friends in Georgetown so he could drive me somewhere. We greeted each other, said pleasantries, got in the car, and as soon as he turned it on, the music STARTED FUCKING BLASTING. It wasn’t as loud as in the club, but throughout the thirty minute car ride, yet again, our communication was greatly hampered. At my guest house, I was in the common area chatting with this guy sitting nearby on a couch. He announced that he was going to take a nap. He then turned on the tv, flipped to a music channel, turned up the volume, and curled onto his side to enjoy a blissful hour-long nap with pulsing club music in the background. Stuff like this happened constantly. The house next door to where I was sleeping was blasting music throughout every night. Every cab I rode in blasted their music. Lots of little shops blast music. I’ve never been a big Bob Marley fan, but his two or three most famous songs have been permanently seared into my brain. There’s just a lot of NOISE NOISE NOISE in Guyana. Though my road trip plan was ruined, I could still go to the interior of Guyana. There were tours and small flights and entire package deals based on bringing tourists from Georgetown to the inland. The eco-lodges I mentioned had a bunch of these including with just the sort of camping/fishing/hiking stuff I wanted to do. When I was researching the eco-lodges before the trip, I noticed that a lot of them conspicuously didn’t list their prices online. There’s the old saying that if you have to ask about price, you can’t afford it, but I WhatsApp messaged a few of these places anyway. But then there was the “Visitor Head Tax” paid to the local Native village: $19.10. I’m not sure if that was a one-time fee or per day. Then there was the food, a daily fee: $63.20. That adds up to $110.90 if the Visitor Head Tax was daily. That’s a lot more than I usually pay as a cheap solo traveller, but it’s doable. But then there’s actually getting to this place which is deep in the country’s interior. First, I would have to fly from Georgetown to Lethem, which costs over $300 one-way. Then I would have to get from Lethem to the eco-lodge, but fortunately they provide transportation. The price for a one-way journey by bus and river ferry from Lethem to the lodge: $400. That’s one way. I told the Eco Lodge that I would have a vehicle (when I thought my road trip was still viable) and I asked how much transport would cost if I drove as close as possible. Answer: $442 roundtrip for a 2-4 hour ferry. It would be more expensive because I’d be doing it solo. If I was willing to pay all that to get to the eco-lodge, then I could enjoy its assorted activity offerings. A half day “short trip” by boat with a guide costs $97-$124 depending on the speed of the boat. Another half day package reached almost $250. If I really wanted to go all out, I could do the two night camping package which included fishing, bird watching, boating, and animal spotting, with a price for 1-2 people of $1,925. Ok, I’m doing a lot of bitching. But come on… prior to the oil boom (which the people in the inland are definitely not benefiting from) the GDP per capita of Guyana wasn’t much higher than West African levels. How the hell is this place so expensive? I checked a bunch of other eco-lodges and ran into basically the same range of prices. Hundreds of dollars for short boat rides and bird watching and basic eco-tourism stuff that would cost $20-50 in a standard Central American country. But this is still the mid-to-lower tier tourism stuff. The proper higher end tours are outrageously expensive. How about $685 for a one day tour including a flight to Lethem, a town once described to me as an “awful shithole”? Or $235 for a nine hour day trip to a beach town? Or $4,000 for a four day tour (really three days, the last day is just the early morning) of Georgetown, Kaeiteur Falls, and some other eco spot? Or $135 for a four hour tour of Georgetown? Looking at the even higher end, how would you like a 9 day bird watching tour for $4,000? Or three nights at another eco-resort for $1,100? I don’t know much about fishing, but is 12 days for $4,000 reasonable if there isn’t a yacht or swordfish or harpooning whales involved? I don’t know, but seemingly neither does anyone else since not a single tour on this website has any reviews. And why did that (rather tasty) Venezuelan street food meal in Georgetown cost $15? Maybe it’s the geographic isolation, maybe it’s government corruption, maybe it’s the idea that the only people who would actually go all the way to Guyana for big tours are either rich oil executives or wealthy Instagram travellers, but for whatever reason, Guyana is insanely expensive for an impoverished country. Hence, with very few other travel options, I bailed from Guyana after a few days. On my fourth night, I woke up 3:30 AM for a bus to take me to neighboring Suriname. Its capital, Paramaribo, is only 270 miles away, but the trip takes 14 fucking hours because there is one single lonely ferry that crosses the border river, and for incomprehensible reasons, it only crosses once per day at 11 AM, but for even more incomprehensible reasons, the Guyanese border closes at 9 AM, so you have to get to the border and then wait for two hours for the ferry, and then drift across the river at literal walking speeds while you try to imagine if it’s even possible to build a less efficient system, and then when you arrive in Suriname you can thank god for bringing you to a marginally more organized, if equally hellishly hot and humid country. Then you remember that your return flight home leaves from Georgetown, so you’ll have to make the same trip in reverse next week.
Overview
Population Growth Rate (2022) – 0.5%
Size – 88,000 square miles (a little smaller than Romania or Oregon)
GDP (nominal, 2022) – $14.72 billion (less than North Macedonia)
GDP growth rate (2022) – 63.4% (not a typo)
GDP per capita nominal (2022) – $18,200 (a little less than Romania)
GDP per capita PPP (2022) – $55,000
Inflation rate (2020-2024)- 1-5.5%
Biggest export – Crude petroleum
Median age – 26.1
Life expectancy (2021) – 65.67
Murder rate (2022) – 16.2 per 100,000
Founded – 1966
Ethnicity (2012) – 40% Indian, 29% Black, 20% Multiracial, 11% Native
Religion (2020) – 54% Christian, 31% Hindu, 7.5% Muslim
Corruption Perceptions Index – Rank #87
Index of Economic Freedom – Rank #98
Early History
The People
Afro-Guyanese
Indo-Guyanese
Natives
Portuguese
Chinese
Road to Independence
The Burnham Regime
The Cooperative Republic
Kabaka
Cults
The Bottom
New Guyana
Oil!
The Scramble
The Possibly Impending Invasions of Guyana by Venezuela and Suriname
Visiting Guyana
Safety
There is Very Little to Do in Georgetown
When I was sitting next to that Guyanese lady on the plane, I asked her what, as a first time visitor to her home city, I should do in Georgetown. She was confused by the question and didn’t say anything for about 10 seconds. I clarified that I was traveling to Guyana for two weeks, and I wanted to see as much of interest in the country as I possibly could, and I was spending a chunk of that time in Georgetown, the nation’s capital and largest city, which I thoroughly intended to explore. So I asked her what she, a citizen of Guyana, recommend I do while I’m there. She hesitated again but looked a little less confused. Eventually she answered, “hang out and drink.”
Jonestown
If you ask a random American about Guyana, they won’t know what it is. If they’ve heard of it, they will probably think it’s in Africa (happened to me 3X times), and if they know just a little bit more about it, they know it’s the home of Jonestown.
Kaieteur Falls
The Road Trip
Noise
Did I Mention How Absurdly Expensive Guyana is?
The first to respond was the one with the highest reviews and recommendations online. They sent me a multiple-page document detailing everything I could do at the lodge and the costs. I immediately went to the cheapest single-day room option: $28.60. Not bad.
Miscellaneous