georgetown, guyana | Voters in Guyana are asking over and over again who Janet Rosenberg Jagan will support in their presidential election early next year.
An 85-year-old Jewish grandmother born and raised in Chicago, Jagan is an unlikely power broker in this remote, Idaho-sized country of 740,000 people on the northern rim of South America.
The Guyanese people elected Jagan president in late 1997 shortly after the death of her husband, President Cheddi Jagan, a lifelong Marxist. She resigned the presidency after almost two years in office after she suffered a heart attack.
Despite her worsening diabetes, she’s up and around these days, attending to business at her office in central Georgetown, the county’s capital. “My allegiance is to my party,” Jagan said. “It will decide who its candidate is when the election date is fixed.”
Jagan and her husband founded the People’s Progressive Party on Jan. 1, 1950, when Guyana was still a British colony known as British Guiana. Her office is located on the second floor of the PPP headquarters, in a wooden building called Freedom House.
Jagan doesn’t offer a straight answer to the question of whom she’ll support because it looks like her son, Cheddi Jr., also known as “Joey,” will run for president. That would pit him against President Bharrat Jagdeo, 41, who was Jagan’s finance minister.
Jagdeo took over when Jagan retired and was re-elected to a five-year presidential term in March 2001.
The chances of Janet Rosenberg heading a Third World nation were about a zillion to one in 1920, the year she was born at Michael Reese Hospital on Chicago’s South Side.
Her father, Charles Rosenberg, was a plumbing and heating salesman. The family moved to Detroit for a time during the Depression, enabling her to go to Detroit University, Wayne State and Michigan State, and in 1942 she was a nursing student at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. One night at a party she met a dental student from Northwestern University, a young man from then-British Guiana named Cheddi Jagan.
The pair fell in love and married, despite opposition from both sets of parents. In 1943 her husband returned to British Guiana to set up his dental practice; Jagan stayed in Chicago a bit longer, but joined him in late December of that year.
They quickly became involved in politics. Plantation workers “always called on Cheddi” when they had problems, Jagan recalls, and soon she and her husband found themselves involved in the trade union movement.
After decades of political activity, in 1992, a quarter-century after Guyana achieved independence, Jagan’s husband won a free and fair election as president, and Jagan was named Guyana’s ambassador to the United Nations. When her husband died five years later, she became president — making her the first white president of Guyana, the first elected female president in South America and the first Jewish head of state in South American history.