Cheddi Jagan In Los Angeles Editorial Image

Cheddi Jagan, widely regarded as the father of the independent nation of Guyana in South America, holds up his book, `The West on Trial,` during a lecture in a half-filled classroom at the University of Southern California in 1975. Jagan was feared by both Britain, the colonial ruler over British Guyana, and the United States as a Marxist and a possible stalking horse for Soviet Communism. History has thrown these assumptions into doubt as Jagan was in reality a democratic socialist. Jagan had strong ties to the United States spending decades in America, studying at Howard University and the Northwestern University School of Dentistry. Jagan was deposed as prime minister and president in 1964 as his country suffered through a chaotic period of racial, economic, and political strife, with a newly-independent nation divided between a South Asian Indian population and an equal number of people of African descent, led by his rival, Forbes Burnham. Jagan became a labor movement leader but again assumed leadership of the nation from 1992 until 1997 when a heart attack forced him to be evacuated to the United States for treatment. He died on March 6, 1997 in Washington, DC, 2 weeks before turning 79. Upon his death, his American-born and raised wife, Janet Rosenberg Jagan, assumed Guyana's leadership and left office in 1999. She died in 2009 in Georgetown, Guyana, at the age of 88.