Guyana: 20th Century Developments

Guyana, then the colony of British Guiana, saw the rise of an anti-colonial movement centered on the People's Progressive Party (PPP), founded in 1950 by Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham. The PPP won the colony's first election under universal adult suffrage in 1953, but Britain, wary of the party's leftist orientation amid Cold War tensions, suspended the constitution within months and sent troops to remove the elected government.

Burnham broke with Jagan in 1955 to form the more moderate People's National Congress (PNC), splitting the independence movement largely along ethnic lines between Guyanese of Indian and African descent. Jagan's PPP won subsequent elections in 1957 and 1961, but constitutional changes introduced before the 1964 vote, widely seen as favoring Burnham, allowed the PNC to form a coalition government, with Burnham becoming premier.

British Guiana achieved independence as Guyana on May 26, 1966, with Burnham as prime minister. In 1970 his government declared Guyana a "Cooperative Republic" and pursued closer ties with Cuba and the Soviet bloc. Burnham and the PNC retained power through subsequent decades via elections that international observers and opposition figures widely criticized as marked by fraud, a pattern that shaped Guyanese politics well into the 1980s.