Eric Gairy
Eric Gairy led Grenada's workers out of the estates in 1951, led the country to independence in 1974, and was overthrown in 1979 by the son of a man his enforcers had beaten to death. He was born in 1922 in a village in St Andrew, worked in the oil refineries of Aruba, came home in 1949, and in February 1951 called the estate labourers of a sugar-and-nutmeg colony out on a general strike that burned plantation houses and doubled wages in a month; the island called it Sky Red, and the union and party he built from it, the Grenada United Labour Party, won every election for a generation on the votes of the people it had freed. He was chief minister from 1957 and was removed by the British in 1962 for spending public money on himself; the report is called Squandermania. He was back by 1967 as premier of the associated state, which is when the government turned. The Mongoose Gang, a private force of criminals paid from the treasury, beat and sometimes killed his opponents, and the police fired on demonstrators. Rupert Bishop, the father of the young lawyer leading the New Jewel Movement, was shot dead in January 1974 during the strikes against independence. Independence came on 7 February that year regardless, with the capital dark and the docks closed, and Gairy as prime minister. He believed in flying saucers, addressed the United Nations on them in 1977 and proposed an agency to study them, and ran the country as a mixture of patronage, superstition and fear. On 13 March 1979, while he was in New York - to talk to the UN about UFOs, the story goes, though he had other business - Maurice Bishop's forty-six men took the barracks and the radio station in a morning, and the crowds came out for them. He stayed in exile in the United States until the Americans invaded in 1983, came home, lost the elections of 1984 and 1990 with a third of the vote, and died in 1997, blind and still leading the party.
- Lived: 1922 CE – 1997 CE
- Nationality: Grenadian
- Roles: head_of_government, trade_unionist
