US Ambassador on Guyana’s Independence

BY: GHK Lall

I really thought that the script had changed.  I really have to stop making these mistakes.  I erred about America’s regret over its role in changing the history of this country.  What could have been but now can never be known.  US Ambassador, Excellency Nicole D. Theriot, did the honors.  In an OP: Ed piece in Kaieteur News, this is what the now energetic and increasingly vocal American plenipotentiary had to say on Guyana’s Independence Diamond Jubilee: “I am honored to reflect on six decades of friendship, partnership, and shared progress between our two nations.  President Lyndon B. Johnson, welcoming Prime Minister Burnham to the White House just weeks after Guyana’s independence in July 1966, captured the spirit of that moment.”  I am sorry, Excellency, to be the party pooper.  But clinically, this must be dissected, dealt with cards face-up on the table.

President Johnson welcoming Prime Minister Burnham so shortly after Guyana gained Independence was the icing on America’s cake.  Recognition and reward for Guyana holding the line against the spread of communism.  Guyana is not contributing as one more fallen domino in the heat of the Big Power faceoff.  America’s AFL-CIO did its part.  So did America’s CIA and those it cultivated in the local environment to thwart communism’s march.  The PPP was then heart and soul for communism, Marxism, and socialism.  Thus, it lost out on that first battle.  Today, it is proud to count among its own, right up there in the Office of the President, those who were among communism’s (and Jagan’s) vilest enemies.  My word shouldn’t be taken.  The archives are there.

Without giving him any inch than I do, LFS Burnham did what he had to do to cultivate that “friendship and partnership” of which Ambassador Theriot spoke so engagingly, so lushly.  It came at a price, which he wasn’t ready to pay.  Regardless of what was and is still thought of him, there was a line that Mr. Burnham couldn’t and wouldn’t cross.  Not when country and people have to be betrayed and sold down the drain.  He became an enemy.  So, the script was scrubbed.

The PPP of Dr. Jagan first, then Dr. Jagdeo, studied that same script.  In this context, Dr. Ali is of no value, merely a hanger-on, who is in the right place and right time to be a beneficiary, one of the biggest.  Dr. Jagdeo more than Dr. Jagan decided that since the Americans couldn’t be beaten in a head-on fight, then beat them with tricks at their own game.  Become bigger capitalists than the capitalists themselves.  What can be bigger, brighter and more beautiful than “sanctity of contract?”  Now, there’s “friendship and partnership” of the kind that neither Burnham nor Jagan would ever kneel before, come within 100 years of considering, much less approving.  Pres Ali is the one doing the parroting about “sanctity of contract.”  But the credit belongs to Dr. Jagdeo.  When power and its consolidation and retention are part of the equation, then “sanctity of contract” is what it will have to be.

It is fasconating to watch Excellency Theriot manifest some of that famed Louisiana fire, when she lit that Independence bonfire about 60 years of “friendship and partnership.”  To whose advantage, to whose loss?  There is Exxon, redder and whiter and bluer than America.  More Golden Arrowhead nowadays than Guyanese.  Take a bow, Ambassador of Oil, Mr. Alistair Routledge.  With friends and partners of this caliber, I will take my chances with Dr. Guillotin.  It is better to lose my head for standing for what is believed.  It would be a crime inconceivable to join with those who hang themselves by the nuts from their betrayals of people and patrimony.  And for what, but the harlotry of power?  I urge my fellow Guyanese to review what it is that harlots do.  What they surrender.  What they sell.  And to whom they sell.  Those who come and go.  Those who take, then leave.  Whether corporate or country, this is the friendship and partnership between Guyana and America, as I see it, appalled by it, and am sickened by it.  Thanks, Ambassador Theriot for speaking to truth in a funny, most likely unwitting way.