By Dr. Leslie Ramsammy

AFTER once visiting the Kaieteur Falls, he said “I have visited the Seven Wonders of the World, but the Kaieteur Falls is truly the world’s eight wonder”. But he also stated in his autobiography that during his mission to observe Guyana’s election in 1992, he had never felt more in danger anywhere else in the world.
Yet Jimmy Carter, the man who is now known as the best former president ever anywhere in the world, played a pivotal role in changing Guyana from those dreadful times. The journey we began in 1992 with Jimmy Carter has led to Guyana being the most exciting possibility for a country of progress and prosperity.
Jimmy Carter has an indelible place in the pages of Guyana’s history; he will always be a hero in the eyes of most Guyanese.
For obvious reasons, there are those who would not embrace this notion, but even among those, there are people who grudgingly acknowledge that Jimmy Carter played an indispensable role in placing Guyana on the road to freedom and democracy, modernisation and progress and prosperity.
The Guyanese people mourn along with our American sisters and brothers, and with countless millions around the world, the passing of an iconic figure in our history.

President Jimmy Carter swooped into Guyana on October 12, 1990, and, barely 24 hours later, breezed out after having secured a deal with the then Guyanese President, Desmond Hoyte, for electoral reforms; something many others had tried and failed to accomplish.
The local opposition parties at the time, led by Cheddi Jagan, had tried for more than two decades to obtain those same reforms. CARICOM leaders, even if half-heartedly, tried for over two decades and failed.
The Commonwealth and other leaders tried, but the PNC-led dictatorship, first under the leadership of Forbes Burnham, and then under the leadership of Desmond Hoyte, would not bend.
Just before President Carter landed in Guyana, President Hoyte declared, on October 10, 1990 that Guyana was a sovereign state, and as such it had no obligation to listen to Carter; that the counting of votes at the polling station was never going to be permitted, and that Guyana was not interested in any foreigner dictating to it, famously insinuating that Carter should mind his own business. Within 24 hours, in spite of Hoyte’s bravado and intemperance, he wilted and meekly bent under the pressure, some would say “magic”, brought by the presence of Carter.
In reality, even before President Carter had left the USA to come to Guyana, the deed had already been done. First, President Carter had informed Dr. Cheddi Jagan that one of the conditions for agreeing to intervene in Guyana was that all political parties, including the Guyana Government, must agree and must issue an invitation to the Carter Center.
I was nervously preparing for an important Journal Club presentation at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, where I was a professor of medicine, on the morning of September 27, when the State Department in Washington announced that the Guyana Government had issued an invitation to the Carter Center.
We all knew, there and then, that the US Government had had enough; had issued an ultimatum, and that Desmond Hoyte had buckled. I knew, there and then, that the “writing was on the wall”.
But we knew for sure that the deed was done when Jimmy Carter arrived at the then Timehri International Airport in Guyana. The media, dozens of them, from Guyana and the wider Caribbean, and from America, were in a frenzy. They had expected to engage President Carter, who also had announced a press briefing at the airport.
The press briefing was one of the shortest-ever press briefings in history. It lasted just a few seconds. President Carter took the microphone without being introduced by anyone, and made a short, single-sentence declaration, and simply left without taking a single question.
He declared that he was visiting Guyana to see if the possibility existed for a free and fair election, and, if in his mind the possibility is slim, he would not be coming to observe the elections.
It was at that point that he changed the dispensation; it was no longer the opposition trying to gain reforms, and to have Jimmy Carter come to Guyana, it was now up to Desmond Hoyte to get President Carter to come.
Desmond Hoyte and the PNC had no choice, because, if they allowed him to leave with the pronouncement he was not coming back, he would have declared unequivocally that there was not even a slim chance that the PNC, under Desmond Hoyte, was prepared to permit a free and fair election. Desmond Hoyte and the PNC played a game of poker with Jimmy Carter and lost.
In a brief personal discourse with President Jimmy Carter at breakfast on October 13, 1990, I asked him if this was the strategy all along. He looked at me, smiled, said nothing, and shifted the conversation to the famous Stabroek Market.