Hamilton Green: A life built on violence and destruction of democracy

Dear Editor,
Hamilton Green’s letter in yesterday’s newspaper, parading concern about democracy, demands a direct answer. This is not a man with moral standing. This is the same Hamilton Green who for half a century thrived on dismantling democracy, presiding over bloodshed, and leaving Guyana battered, bankrupt and broken.
We remember 1973, when ballot boxes in Berbice were drenched in blood. Soldiers under your Government opened fire, killing Jagan Ramessar and Bholanauth Parmanand as they tried to protect votes from theft. That was not democracy, Mr Green; it was murder in service of power. The stain of those ballot-box killings belongs to you as much as to anyone else in the PNC regime.
We remember 1980, when Walter Rodney, one of the finest sons of this nation, was assassinated. Your Forbes Burnham’s PNC Government, the one you helped lead as Prime Minister, hounded him, demonised him, and silenced him. His death was not an accident of history; it was the outcome of a regime that saw dissent as treason and opposition as something to be extinguished.
We remember the daily violence and terror of your years in office. Journalists beaten, the Catholic Standard suppressed, and activists driven underground by PNC-sponsored thugs under Rabbi Washington. Citizens were forced to whisper in their own homes, because to criticise the Government was to risk being fired, arrested, or worse.
Ordinary Guyanese went hungry as the shelves emptied and beriberi struck. Mothers queued in endless lines at your Government’s KSIs for a cake of soap, flour and kerosene; children grew thin; medicine disappeared from hospitals; and the economy collapsed into black markets and despair. This was not leadership; it was calculated cruelty dressed up as governance.
And even after all that, you were rewarded. Today, you live on a bloated pension fit for a President you never were, millions of taxpayers’ dollars handed to you. You call that justice? No, it is plunder by another name.
Nor have your instincts changed. In 2024, you labelled the PPP and its supporters “devils” and “demons” and called for rigged elections as a political tool. You showed the country that the violence and contempt of your past were not left in the past at all. They are alive in you still, Elder Green.
Your example has poisoned others. Tacuma Ogunseye regularly calls for open insurrection. David Hinds dresses up blatant racism as ‘analysis’. Travis Chase, Guyana’s own clickbait king, regularly weaponises the media against truth. Lincoln Lewis hides behind union rhetoric while serving the same old politics of division. They are your legacy, Mr Green, your pathetic disciples in the dark arts of destabilisation.
So when you write today about democracy, you insult the dead and the living alike. You insult Ramessar and Parmanand and cut down at the ballot boxes. You insult Rodney, murdered for daring to dream of justice. You insult the Guyanese people who starved while you prospered. And you insult every voter – Black, Indian and Other – who has fought to make this country free of the tyranny you nourished and bequeathed to us.
Hamilton Green, you are not an Elder nor a statesman. You are a vile man whose public life was built on violence, fear, and betrayal. That is your record, and no letter, no sermon about democracy, can erase it.
You will take this sordid record to your grave. Remember them well because the Guyanese people will never forget.

Yours truly,
Walter H Persaud
WCD