THE TIMEHRI AIRPORT

On a high noon of April 27, 1989, I was waiting at the Timehri airport to meet Ciro De Falco, our powerful new manager. As in every work situation, and particularly in a multicultural bureaucracy, key personnel changes bring uncertainty. Our bank was rife with rumors about the new U.S. Treasury man, supposedly a hard-liner with a mission to put order in a Latin institution gone astray.

With its headquarters located two blocks from the Treasury Department in Washington, DC, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) was established in 1959 to finance economic and social development in Latin America and the Caribbean and thereby help prevent another Cuban Revolution from occurring in the Western Hemisphere.

One of the key characteristics of this institution was that Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) governments, with a combined voting power of 53 percent of the bank's capital, appointed its president, while the United States, the single largest shareholder with 35 percent, filled several key managerial positions.

As the IDB's resident representative in Guyana, I felt both honored and anxious to learn that the new manager's South American tour included the sleepy outpost of Georgetown. The visit and the timing were not chosen by chance. After prolonged negotiations, the government had reached an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the US Treasury was expected to give the "green light" for the debt rescheduling. De Falco's Guyana "back-to-office report" was therefore invaluable.

A recent IDB publication displayed the new manager's photo: inquisitive eyes, aquiline nose, prominent cheekbones and a tall forehead sprinkled with thin graying hair. Since his name was of Italian origin, the joke abuzz at IDB headquarters was that ours was the only bank in the world that could have a manager with such a name: in Spanish "desfalco" meant "rip-off"; in Italian, in turn, it simply meant "of a falcon."

A few days prior to De Falco's arrival, I called an Italian colleague at the IDB headquarters and obtained some additional information. I was told he left Italy as a child and was raised and educated in New York City. Not a Republican appointee; but rather a career public servant who rose through the ranks of the treasury thanks to his ambition and hard work. He speaks fluent Italian and Portuguese and has a working knowledge of Spanish.

De Falco's mandate is not only to help restructure the bank, but also to promote market oriented reforms in Latin America and the Caribbean. As the manager in charge of "plans and programs," he effectively controls the IDB's fat checkbook and sends for approval to the new president and the board of directors only those loan documents that commit countries to "painful" policy and institutional changes.

Timehri is located on the right bank of the Demerara River, some 25 miles south of the capital Georgetown. Formerly called Atkinson Air Force Base during World War II, the British leased it to the United States to serve as an important airfield for planes crossing the Atlantic. The lease terminated in 1966 when Guyana obtained its independence from the United Kingdom.

The loudspeaker announced that Pan American 217 from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, was two hours late and scheduled to land at 3:15 p.m. This would have given me more time to revise the documentation prepared for De Falco. Instead, I started reflecting upon the Timehri images from the last 18 months that I had spent in this isolated and mysterious "Land of Many Waters."

THE BITTER TASTE OF SUGAR

Three flashbacks from the Timehri diplomatic ceremonies were symbols, in my mind, of the country's tangled predicament.

The first one had to do with the reception of the president of Suriname, a short East Indian who spoke Dutch, greeted by a tall Afro-Guyanese who spoke English. The former wore a dark-blue suit with a crimson tie, while the Guyanese President was clad in a long-sleeved, light-green shirt-jack. The British and the Dutch continued casting their long shadow.

It was the Dutch engineering talent that made these low-lying Atlantic shores viable for agriculture. They built extensive drainage and irrigation canals, established its capital, Stabroek, at the mouth of the Demerara River, and modeled it with a Vermeer-type precision and symmetry. When the IDB President informed me that he was sending me to Guyana, he was full of praise for the Dutch-inspired architecture of Georgetown.

One of Guyana's first explorers in the early 17th century, Sir Walter Raleigh, was convinced that he had found the entrance to the mythical El Dorado. He described in great detail his discoveries and concluded that Guyana could provide more gold for Britain than Peru had done for Spain. But after repeatedly failing to deliver on his promises to King James I he returned, resigned to his ignominy and beheading at Westminster in 1618.

The first white settlers, mostly rural poor from Northern Europe, did not fare any better as they died by the thousands from tropical diseases. Still, it was the natives first, and Africans thereafter, who did most of the suffering and dying. As the production of sugar became one of the most profitable businesses of the 17th century, the Dutch and the Portuguese brought in tens of thousands of slaves, first from Brazil and then, massively, from West Africa.

The British took Stabroek away from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars and in 1812 changed its name to Georgetown in honor of their reigning monarch, George III. All along the Guyana coast, they quickly expanded and vastly improved the technically demanding and labor-intensive plantation system so that sugar production became one of the leading precursors of the Industrial Revolution.

When in 1838, the Westminster finally abolished slavery, the British brought into Guyana and elsewhere in the Caribbean indentured laborers, mostly from West Bengal. This was the first time that real Indians set foot in the Western Hemisphere. The Caribbean became the West Indies, but Columbus' original misnomer for the indigenous populations of the Hemisphere persisted.

Well versed in the strategy of "divide and conquer" the colonial authorities stimulated racial antagonism because it afforded the plantation owners protection from social unrest. The maxim became: "negroes in the military and indians in the fields." The physical separation between the two major races sealed one of the principal characteristics of the country.

The Indo-Guyanese were the descendants and survivors of sugar plantations. Their social advancement was based on agriculture, and their cohesion was remarkable considering internal religious (Hindu and Muslim) and caste divisions. The Afro-Guyanese, on the other hand, owed their emancipation to the urban opportunities provided by the local colonial administration, especially in public service, education and the military.

The Amerindians, i.e. the original Guyana natives, decimated by disease brought in by the Europeans, (flu, smallpox and measles) had no choice but to flee deep into the interior. They survived thanks to their knowledge of the jungle and skill in navigating the mighty rivers; they...