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Friday February 18, 2005

Unlikely leader of Guyana

Film traces Jewish woman’s rise to power in Latin America

by jennifer liss
staff writer

Growing up Jewish in Chicago, feeling like an underdog, helped Janet Rosenberg Jagan later to connect to the people of Guyana.

“To be a Jew was something horrible,” recalls Jagan, a mild-mannered yet gritty-as-gravel 84-year-old.

In 1997, Jagan won the presidential election in Guyana, a small South American nation infamously known for the Jonestown massacre.

Jagan’s cousin — documentary filmmaker Suzanne Wasserman — pays tribute to Jagan and her unlikely rise to power in “Thunder in Guyana.” In the Bay Area it will air 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 22, on the KQED program “Independent Lens.”

Wasserman’s documentary celebrates the determination of a woman who left her Jewish upbringing to commit to the freedom of an oppressed population.

Wearing flower print dresses that fall mid-calf, Jagan doesn’t fit the bill as a freedom-fighting revolutionary, but her dedication to Guyana certainly came with great sacrifice. The film makes that clear.

In addition to the peculiar story of a Jewish woman’s rise to power in a colonized country, Wasserman’s revealing historical footage spans 50 years — from burning sugar canes in the ’40s to voter fraud in the ’90s — providing insight into the small country’s history.

The somewhat baffled and enamored testimony from Jagan’s living Jewish relatives in the United States show how far removed she was from her roots.

However, Wasserman fails to put the story into a historical context. A brief mention about Cuba is the film’s only reference to the turmoil and revolution throughout Latin American and Caribbean that coincided with Jagan’s fight in Guyana.

To its disadvantage, the film is shot exclusively through a celebratory lens. Wasserman quickly paints a negative picture of what evolved as black opposition to Jagan’s political party. She notes the controversy of Jagan’s unusual position but refuses to look at her cousin’s story critically. She lionizes Jagan and criticizes everyone who fought against her.

Jagan was the kind of girl who used her childhood allowances for flying lessons. In retrospect it was no surprise to her family when she married Cheddi Jagan, a Guyanese Hindu man she met at college. But at the time, her racist and Marxist-fearing family rejected the 1943 marriage of the love-struck communists.

The Jewish girl arrived in her husband’s country, the only British Colony in South America, on a Pan American seaplane. At the time it was a country populated by ex-slaves from Africa and indentured servants from India.

In no time, the young and fiercely good-looking couple was well received by the nation’s oppressed. Their political organizing efforts strengthened. They pushed for fair health and labor laws, but chiefly for freedom from British rule.

In 1950, they formed the multiracial People’s Progressive Party. And in a shock to the world, Cheddi was elected the first communist leader in the Western world in 1953.

Jagan served as the country’s first female minister and deputy speaker of Parliament.

Exactly 133 days later, Winston Churchill intervened and jailed the pair.

Relentless turbulence rocked the Jagans in the second half of the century. The country was racially split between blacks and Indians. There were covert attempts by the CIA to weaken the Jagans through economic strikes and race riots. The economy of the country weakened. And the Jagans’ personal safety was at risk.

In the first free elections in three decades, Cheddi was elected president in 1992. Tragically for both the country and Jagan, he died five years later; shortly after Jagan was elected president.

After 20 months in office, she suffered a heart attack and resigned. But still, at 84, Jagan travels to work every day, bangs away at a typewriter and continues to fight for the social and political rights of those in her adopted country.

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