Word: seaga
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Manley's successor is Edward Seaga, 50, American-born, Harvard-educated leader of the Jamaica Labor Party. An experienced international economist whose campaign promised closer ties with the U.S., Seaga has already obtained financing from commercial banks to cover the country's $157 million debt through the end of the year. The shootouts that terrorized Kingston's slums during the bloody nine-month campaign have tapered off as a result of nightly curfews and police raids; tourist bookings are picking up again, and Jamaican professionals who went into exile during the hard times of Manley...
Food shortages, in fact, provided Seaga with a key theme. "We are in a country that produces sugar, and you can't get a bowl of sugar." The election soon boiled down to a choice between proffered economic solutions: Manley's Third World socialism vs. Seaga's Western-backed free-enterprise monetarism. A cascade of reckless rhetoric from both parties also tried to turn the election into a false battleground between "godless Communism" and "sinister fascism...
Manley's followers claimed that the CIA was supporting Seaga and covertly supplying him with arms, while Seaga's supporters characterized Manley as a closet revolutionary who would turn the island into another Cuba...
...Harvard graduate (in sociology), Seaga, 50, spent several years in a rural part of Jamaica studying child development and also wrote a book on the island's spiritualist cults. At the age of 29 he became the youngest member of the legislature, where at the time he was considered more leftist than Manley. He held Cabinet posts in both the Labor governments that ruled from 1962 to 1972; as Finance Minister he earned a reputation as a tough administrator, especially in plugging tax loopholes. He and his wife Mitsy, a former Miss Jamaica, have three children...
Last week Seaga dismissed accusations that over the years have painted him alternately as a Communist and a fascist. "The fact of the matter is that I am very much in the center," he said. His most immediate problem, he explained, would be to renegotiate the country's $1.5 billion debt and deal with the country's virtual bankruptcy. As to warnings of continued violence, he expressed optimism that he would be able to bind the nation's wounds "Once the decision has been made." he said, "the people who are the losers usually move...