Cheddi Jagan railed for decades in hundreds of articles and thousands of speeches at the unfair and exploitative extraction of wealth by the developed industrial countries from the poor South, with an unenviable command of facts and figures. In the 1980s he travelled with a chart of figures in the trunk of his car. Whenever he saw a group of people, he would stop the car, take out the chart and deliver an impromptu lecture on the issue of exploitation. He demonstrated over and over again that the wealth extracted from poor countries, particularly Latin America and former British colonies, which he knew best, far exceeded the aid and investment that was received. No one who ever listened to him would be unaware of the overthrow of the Arbenz Government in Guatemala in 1954 and the Mossadeq Government in Iran in 1953. Both tried to defend and protect their countries from exploitation – Arbenz by agrarian land reform and Mossadeq by nationalising the Anglo-American Oil Company. Both countries suffered decades of brutal dictatorship, and genocide in Guatemala, thereafter.
