LONDON: Premier Wilson is to be asked about the American Central Intelligence Agency’s role in the removal of Dr Cheddi Jagan’s left-wing Government in British Guiana in 1964.

The question, which will be put in the House of Commons on Tuesday [April 18] by Mr Stan Newens, Labour M.P. for Epping, follows allegations in British newspapers about CIA activities in a number of Commonwealth and colonial territories. The Prime Minister is expected to avoid answering it in view of the question’s embarrassing implications.

The “Sunday Times” today argued that there was a considerable element of truth in the Labour MP’s query. “As coups go,” the newspaper said in a front-page story, “it was not expensive: over five years the CIA paid out about quarter of a million pounds sterling. For the colony, British Guiana, the result was about 170 dead, untold hundreds wounded, roughly 10 million pounds sterling worth of damage to the economy and a legacy of racial bitterness.”

American interest in the former colony of British Guiana (now independent and called Guyana) was prompted by the fear of Castro-type left-wing administration taking over the country permanently. The British Press has lately published reports that a similar situation is arising in Bolivia, which borders on Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Paraguay.

Last week, huge transport aircraft of the U.S. Air Force flew arms into Bolivia to crush the Castro-type guerrillas discovered in Bolivian jungles.

[Meanwhile, as reported by agencies in New Delhi,] Delhi Jail was today [April 16] full of Police after a two-day demonstration outside the house of Home Minister Yashwantrao Chavan ended in the mass arrest of 728 striking constables. Two battalions of troops and two battalions of Police from outside Delhi — totalling about 4,000 — were drafted into the capital to help keep order as 4,000 policemen in civilian clothes squatted on the road outside Mr Chavan’s bungalow demanding the reinstatement of seven dismissed Police Union leaders and acceptance of their demands for better pay and housing.

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2017