Godfrey Teixeira, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, was the first person to be murdered in the People’s Progressive Party’s ‘Hurricane of Protest’ terrorist campaign and the Guiana Agricultural Workers Union’s strike in East Demerara. His sisters, Anne and Marie, were among eleven children who were injured when terrorists threw a bomb into a sugar estate school bus on the Lusignan Public Rd., in broad daylight, on 23rd March 1964.
Other schoolchildren were murdered during the ‘Disturbances’ in 1964. Thirteen-year-old Joseph Porter was beaten to death and his head bashed in with an axe by a mob on 15th June. Twelve-year-old Cecil Wilkinson was hacked to death on 28th June. Fourteen-year-old Leonard Cummings was shot to death while travelling with his relatives by ballahoo to their family farm aback Buxton on 3rd July.
Historian and former President David Granger speaking on the programme – The Public Interest – recalled that the PPP’s terrorist campaign and GAWU’s strike aimed at causing mayhem and intimidating the masses to make the country ungovernable in order convince the British Government to change its policy on electoral reform.
The systematic nature of the terrorist campaign was evident by the fact that 88 per cent of the murders occurred in villages on the coastland. Once the Army and Police stanched the slaughter in the West Demerara sugar belt, the terrorists extended their operations into the East Demerara villages.
Mr. Granger recounted that the lives, homes and farms and properties mainly of persons of one ethnicity on the 34-km corridor – between Beterverwagting and Mahaica – were targeted. Unaccompanied children and farmers were easy prey to terrorist attacks in the farmlands of Ann’s Grove, Annandale, Bachelor’s Adventure, Bee Hive, Beterverwagting, Enmore, Golden Grove, Good Hope, Lusignan, Triumph and Victoria.
Known victims included Edgar Abrams, Cecil Adams, Alphonso David, Leonard Cummings, Vincent Madray, Alvin Nunes, Frank Perry, George and Clothilde Sealey, Edgar Stanford, Albert Thompson, Bobby Wade, Cecil Wilkinson, Vivian Mackenize and William Woodroof among others in the bloodshed from March to July.
Sir Richard Luyt’s appointment as Governor of British Guiana on 7th March signaled the commencement of a comprehensive counter-terrorism offensive that included declaring a ‘state of emergency’ on 22nd May, the evening after the murder of the Sealeys in Buxton-Friendship; deploying the British Guiana Police Force and cancelling leave for policemen; embodying the British Guiana Volunteer Force on full-time service; requesting British Army reinforcements; imposing curfews in trouble-spots and incarcerating suspects through ‘Preventive Detention’ measures.
The Governor also embarked on ‘meet-the-people’ visits, spending several hours speaking to villagers in East Demerara trouble spots. He established civilian ‘home-guard’ units armed with wooden staves particularly to patrol Beterverwagting-Enmore, Buxton-Annandale and Bachelor’s Adventure-Non Pareil village boundaries.
The former President expressed the view that the decisive actions to divest the PPP administration of its public safety functions, arrest 32 senior PPP, PYO and GAWU officials and launch a centrally-directed, joint Army-Police counter-terrorism offensive forced the GAWU to call off its savage strike on 27th July. In the final analysis, however, the East Demerara murders had the unintended consequences of eroding social cohesion in previously peaceful rural communities over the last sixty years. 󠄀
