By Gary Oswald
As discussed in a previous article, the British Empire in 1807 abolished the slave trade and stopped importing slaves to its colonies. However, it did not free any of its existing slaves by that decision. British Caribbean colonies such as modern Guyana, the UK’s only colony in mainland South America, still had tens of thousands of slaves for the next three decades.
In 1800 there were around 100,000 black slaves in Guyana but over the next forty years that number had dropped to 85,000 thanks to the high death rates of the slaves. Moreover the slaves in Guyana routinely worked 20 hour days, including when pregnant, and had little health care meaning that many women were unable to give birth and in 1824, the death rate of new infants born to the slaves was at nearly 50% within the first two years of birth.
This status quo of brutal misery was, of course, challenged by the slaves. In the year 1828, over 20,000 acts of disobedience and rebellion were recorded and in 1823, as a result of an anti-slavery bill being discussed in the Houses of Parliament, there was a mass uprising of around 13,000 slaves.
Though the rebellion was remarkably bloodless on the part of the slaves, with white masters being largely captured unharmed, the counterattack to it, by British troops, was anything but, with huge numbers of slaves massacred in battle and many more executed after being captured. The bad press from this bloodshed, and the money required to put down the revolt, pushed the United Kingdom further towards abolition, and so, in the aftermath of another similar rebellion in Jamaica, all 85,000 slaves in Guyana were finally freed in 1838.
This emancipation without compensation resulted in the creation of a black underclass in the colony, unable to vote due to lack of property and sickeningly poor. They lacked both the capital and the access to drained land to reinvent themselves as cooperative rural farmers as occurred elsewhere post emancipation and so instead largely drifted into mining, policing, and factory wage work in the coastal towns.
The rich white minority of land and plantation owners replaced the slaves primarily with immigrants bought in as indentured servants. This was largely encouraged by both the British government and anti-slavery groups, who hoped to win over plantation owners to their cause by providing an alternative economic model. However, the difference between the labour conditions of the slaves versus that of the indentured servants was far more theoretical than actual. While in theory the contracted workers were legally granted reasonable working and living conditions, in practice they were foreign immigrants operating in a country where the courts and police were created and run by a white supremacist elite who sympathised entirely with the plantation owners and were unwilling to challenge them on worker’s conditions.
As a result these new indentured workers ended up working under largely the same terrible conditions that the slaves had. Because the plantation owners, who were competing with slave labour in Brazil and Cuba, didn’t want to see a loss of income by losing hours worked, the workers suffered a death rate that was comparable to the slaves. In 1863, for example, 1,718 indentured servants died in the colony out of 32,001 servants working there.
The main difference between the slaves and the indentured workers was not the work but how long they must do it. Slavery was not only a lifelong condition but one passed onto their children while indentured workers were on fixed year contracts and would be free after that. But even that was not entirely true in practice, around 25% of all indentured labourers were charged with breaking their contracts and then forced through biased courts to give more labour to the plantation owners in compensation. The five year contracts they signed were extended to an average of ten years with immigrant workers having to work extra hours to pay fines or their passage back home. These abuses were investigated by the UK but there were no serious attempts to challenge them.
Between 1838 and 1917, around 240,000 indentured workers arrived from the Indian subcontinent, alongside around 25,000 from British Hong Kong and around 25,000 from the Madeira Islands of Portugal, and perhaps two out of every three workers who survived their service stayed in the colony, either staying on the plantations or moving into retail work or rice production (rice being a crop which didn’t require the draining that had stymied the ex-slaves attempt at farming).
This resulted in a second underclass forming within the colony. But this underclass was fundamentally different from the black underclass; racially, of course, but also religiously and linguistically as the Asian population of Guyana were much more suspicious of the religious schools and so far less likely to send their kids to them then the ex-slaves. As a result the Afro-Guyanese became increasingly Anglican and English speaking whereas the indentured workers initially largely kept their native religions and languages. Moreover they largely worked in different industries and lived in different areas, the urban areas and the bauxite mines were largely African in descent with the rural areas and the rice paddies being mostly Asian.
By 1945, the Indian ethnic population of the colony was around 160,000 and the African ethnic population of the colony was around 145,000. But both were locked out of power and riches by a tiny white minority, backed up by the imperial power of London. As such they increasingly radicalised, joining trade unions and political parties and engaging in strike action and protests. In the post war period, there first emerged a generation of anti colonial leaders who hoped to work towards Guyanese independence. Most notable of these figures were Forbes Burnham, an Afro-Guyanese lawyer who earned his law degree in 1940s London, and Cheddi Jagan, an Indian Guyanese dentist who’d earned his dentistry degree in 1930s Chicago. Jagan would be one of the founders of the People’s Progressive Party, which Burnham, alongside other black intellectuals, would soon join, becoming their first Chairman.
Whether this alliance of the African underclass and the Asian underclass would survive independence was a hot topic of debate during this period. Different reports came to different conclusions about the level of ethnic tension within the colony. Certainly there was no outward violence, an increasing adaption of English as a lingua franca meant that the two groups were increasingly engaging with each other as allies, and most cricket teams in the colony were mixed between Afro-Guyanese and Asian-Guyanese. But the two voting blocks largely had different priorities, rural Asian workers demanded an extension of water, electricity and roads into their neighbourhoods which was much less of a priority for urban black voters who largely already had that. Likewise a reform of the education system was far more of a priority for the Asians, who avoided the existing Christian schools much more than the Africans. Moreover the black population, despite being only the second largest ethnicity in the country and one growing at a slower rate than most others, were hugely over represented in the colonial service and the police force, something that was pointed to as a possible future conflict spot.
But because both ethnicities were discriminated against by the British imperial system, the alliance held within that system. In 1953, when Guyana was first allowed to vote in a democratically elected legislature (albeit one which could still be overruled by the British Governor), the PPP won 18 of the 24 seats available, gaining the majority of the votes from both the Asian and African communities and forming an executive council of six which included both Burnham and Jagan and was evenly distributed being black members and Asian members.
More than just being a multi-ethnic party, the PPP was a deeply socialist one. In power it laid out a programme of socialist policies, saying that it aimed to repeal bans on subversive literature, strengthen unions, tax the wealthy, and create schemes for the extension of education, workers compensation, land reform, and low income housing. Moreover on the foreign policy front, it immediately passed a resolution urging the US to not execute the Rosenbergs (Soviet spies whose trial and death sentence had become a cause célèbre among the left).
This was not a programme that was ever going to be popular with the man whose government still ran the colony, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, an avowed imperialist and enemy of socialism. In reaction to the PPP’s victory, Churchill openly asked whether he had to accept the result and commented that with such a left wing government, surely the USA’s vaunted anti-imperialistic commitment would falter and they’d let Churchill cancel the colony’s self-government. After all, the Eisenhower government was far more anti-communist than anti-imperialist and American trade unions, funded by the CIA in return for enforcing anti-communism in the international trade unions movement, had already come out against Jagan due to his rejection of the existing unions on the sugar plantations as being tame and ethnically biased. If the USA would just send Joe McCarthy to Guyana, Churchill joked, he’d come back with a full recommendation for the imperial system continuing without self-government.
Churchill was not alone in contemplating removing Guyanese democracy since they’d obviously chosen wrongly. By this point the sugar plantations had all come under a single owner, the Booker Brothers Company, who had for most of the last 50 years ran the colony as an extension of their business. They wrote numerous letters to the Governor, Alfred Savage, demanding that the government protect the plantations from any actions by the PPP. Savage himself, however, largely resisted this pressure, arguing in his reports to London that the PPP were legitimate rulers, whose multi-ethnic status was binding the majority of the population together and whose removal would cause more problems than it would solve and he had the support of most of the civil servants within Guyana on this.
However in late 1953, around three months after the election, rumours came to the attention of the colonial police of a planned arson attack by PPP members. This was passed onto Savage and then Churchill, and the order was given for Savage to suspend the constitution and retake control of the colony. British troops were sent to Guyana to enforce that.
The rumours themselves were third hand and never confirmed by any source but Churchill’s government drew up a white paper to justify the removal of self-governance, accusing the PPP of being paid agents of the USSR who were fermenting violence in the colony. Jagan was jailed for five months as a result, after he disobeyed a travel ban to visit India. No evidence was ever found to back up the claims that the PPP was receiving money or direction from communists or that they had any plans for violence within the colony despite a yearlong investigation into the matter. The colonial office asked to arrest all the PPP’s leadership anyway, without any charges, but this was a step too far for Churchill and his government.
Eisenhower had been informed of Churchill’s decision to suspend the constitution only twelve hours before British troops secured Georgetown. They had no diplomats in Guyana and relied primarily on second hand reports from London as to what was happening. As Churchill predicted, the removal of a supposedly communist leader in the New World, even by the means of imperial control, was considered a good thing by the Eisenhower administration. The USA repeatedly defended the British action in conversation with Latin American leaders, who were largely spooked by the prospect of British troops shutting down a government in the New World.
Churchill, and then Eden, resolved that the PPP could never be allowed to take control of Guyana. Given their overwhelming victory in the 1953 election and the Guyanese outrage over the suspension of the constitution, that meant no more free elections until something drastic had changed. Albert Savage was removed and replaced by a hardliner, while the battalion of British soldiers was to remain in Guyana throughout the 1950s, supporting an authoritarian and unpopular government made up of the opposition parties, while the British funded an anti PPP propaganda campaign in the colony.
In 1955, a colonial report into the situation argued that the poverty and under development of the colony, which had 30% unemployment rates, had driven the population to the left and a proper investment into Guyana by London would undercut the PPP’s support. The new Governor asked for 96 million dollars to be invested over the next five years. The Colonial Office, pleading poverty, countered with an offer of a maximum 25 million dollars, 5 million of which would be provided by the USA.
In reaction to this inability to fund investment, the government changed tack. It had spotted that the weakness in the PPP was their divided voter base, and began to play divide and conquer with that, offering the Afro-Guyanese majority in the civil service and the police encouragement to break with their Asian-Guyanese allies. It offered funding to Afro-Guyanese trade unions on the secret conditions that they broke with the PPP and made public statements that while it could never allow Jagan’s PPP to take power, they would have happily made a deal with, say, the Party’s Chairman, Forbes Burnham. This wasn’t true: Burnham had been written off a communist just as Jagan was back in 1953. But in 1955, he was publicly deemed acceptable.
And Burnham bit on the offer, challenging Jagan for the leadership of the PPP, and when he lost, founding his own party, the People’s National Congress, in 1958. And he took the Afro-Guyanese politicians with him.
The alliance between the two underclasses was over. From 1958 the PPP was firmly a vehicle for the Asian-Guyanese and the PNC represented the Afro-Guyanese. Guyanese politics had been split along ethnic lines and both parties would resort to race baiting as a result, with the PNC warning their voters of Asian-Guyanese threats to black jobs and businesses while the PPP chanted ‘vote for your own’ in Hindi at marches. The PNC was correctly seen by both the UK and the USA as their best chance of a non PPP leader, and the American trade unions began funding them as a less communist alternative to Jagan.
In truth, Burnham was just as socialist as Jagan. Though he argued that he had split with the PP because of their communist links, he was firmly left wing in his rhetoric. But he was ambitious, having previously challenged Jagan for leadership in the early 1950s and he also felt that Jagan had become a hindrance to the cause of Guyanese independence. Not only had the British said they would never allow Jagan to become leader of an independent Guyana, not only had he earned the enmity of the United States, but he had also ruled out Guyana joining the West Indies Federation, which Burnham viewed as the best chance of Britain’s Caribbean colonies emerging from the empire as a working country.
In 1957, the new Macmillan government, which had seen the writing on the wall for the British Empire, reversed the travel ban on Jagan and allowed the PPP to start holding political rallies again. Moreover new elections would be held in 1957. Burnham had not yet left the PPP at this stage but had broken all ties with Jagan, and so would stand his own slate of Afro-Guyanese candidates under the PPP label to oppose Jagan’s Asian-Guyanese PP slate. Jagan would win in a landslide, gaining nine of 14 seats, to Burnham’s 3. As a result the new executive council was dominated by the Asian-Guyanese PPP and not ethnically split as the 1953 council had been.
For the next three years, the PPP governed largely as they had hoped to in 1953. They mandated paid workers annual leave, extended worker’s compensation laws and built new houses and irrigation schemes. But they no longer represented the Afro-Guyanese population and so their efforts were focused far more on the rural workers who had voted them in, in particular a campaign of spraying DDT on rural areas to eradicate malaria which was funded by urban voter's taxes but didn’t benefit them.
Jagan resolved to economically rejuvenate the country, which still had over 25% unemployment and infant mortality of 7% and as such in 1958 he asked for 120 million dollars from the Colonial office to be invested in the colony. London, as it had done three years earlier, refused but said that its richer allies like the USA, West Germany, and Japan had more spending money and perhaps Jagan should ask them for loans instead. Jagan did exactly that. After being turned down by Italy, West Germany, and France, he travelled to Washington in 1959 where he asked for 34 million dollars and was, once again, turned down. Jagan then made possibly his greatest blunder yet, when he told US officials that if they weren’t willing to loan him money then perhaps he’d be forced to ask for a loan from the USSR instead.
This was not remotely a smart thing for a small country in the Americas to threaten to do in the 1950s and Jagan compounded this error in 1961 when he agreed a future loan from Castro in Cuba. In this he was treading in slightly safer ground than accepting a loan from the USSR. The British Empire, of which he was a part, had never broken commercial ties with Cuba and actually encouraged trade between Castro and its Caribbean colonies, jointly funding projects with it in the Lesser Antilles and pushing for a trade deal on rice between Guyana and Cuba. But he was still trying to play both sides against each other, in the manner of his hero Nehru. Jagan told President Betancourt of Venezuela that the UK would almost certainly forbid him to accept Castro’s loan (he was right in that) but then they would feel honour bound to match it (he was wrong about that), which was his real goal.
This was a dangerous game to play within the British Empire, but far more dangerous outside it. The USA would come quickly to the conclusion that Jagan was an enemy of theirs who they must oppose to the fullest.
Despite the lack of funding, 1961 was a good year for the Guyanese economy. Export sales grew by 20% and its per capita income increased significantly. The PPP used that political capital to pick a fight with the church by trying to establish secular education in a country where 269 out of 297 schools were ran by Christian churches and as a result Hindu and Muslim Asian-Guyanese children were often uneducated entirely. The establishment of state authority over fifty of these church run schools inevitably threatened the jobs and power of the Afro-Guyanese religious community, and again reinforced the ethnic lines the split between Burnham and Jagan had established.
Jagan attempted to fix this divide. For the 1961 elections he put forward a slate of fourteen Indians and 12 Afro-Guyanese, with 8 of the latter being given safe seats, a deliberate rebuke to the idea that he only represented the Asian population. For the third election in a row, it was a victory for the PPP. They won 20 seats out of 35 while Burnham’s PNC won 11 and Peter D’Aguiar’s United Front (a conservative party mostly popular along Portuguese shop owners and indigenous ranchers who felt unrepresented by both the major parties and who would go on to forge documents linking Jagan to the USSR and pass them to the CIA) taking the remaining 4. Jagan founded his third government and a conference to decide the date of independence was set for 1962, with the UK assuming that it would happen in Jagan’s term.
Burnham reacted to this result by claiming that it was a victory for the Indian race over the black race and it would result in the Afro-Guyanese being returned to the sugar fields as slaves. The Kennedy administration of the USA, who had privately asked the UK if they could fix the election so the PPP wouldn’t win, were equally inclined to dark fantasies about the result of the PPP’s election, fearing that Guyana would become a second Cuba.
Both of Jagan’s enemies would soon move against him. In 1962 the PPP proposed a new budget which would see a tax on the wealthy introduced in order to fund more roads and canals in the rural interior and a forced saving programme wherein 10% of all workers incomes would be taken from then and returned 7 years later as a deposit for a house. This was super unpopular among the black civil servants who were already living pay check to pay check and the opposition parties of the PNC and the UF (increasingly working together) took to the streets to stop it, leading multiple marches and protests which quickly became violent.
The PNC, armed and abetted by the CIA, stoked riots among the urban Afro-Guyanese population of Georgetown, which had been the major victims of the PPP’s focus on rural problems and where youth unemployment had risen to as much as 50%. The rioters burned down fifty Indian owned businesses and damaged and looted 60 more warehouses, killing five people and destroying as much as 1/6th of the colony’s GNP, sending its export economy into a steep decline. And they did this without any intervention from the Police, because the Afro-Guyanese police force refused Jagan’s orders to confront Afro-Guyanese rioters attacking Asian-Guyanese businesses.
Instead Jagan called in forces from the UK and Jamaica to put down the riots, and quite possibly save his own life, given the rioters had approached his house. And in the aftermath of this humiliation, he publicly withdrew the proposed budget.
The Kennedy administration criticized the UK for stepping up, arguing that unpopular administrations should be overthrown by mobs and Britain had preserved a government that its own people had rejected. In a 1962 letter to Macmillan the US government made it clear that, like Churchill nine years earlier, they would not accept Guyana becoming independent under a PPP government. Kennedy asked for full British cooperation in preventing that happening, even to the extent that the USA would support them, if they once again retook direct control of the colony like they had in 1953. Macmillan was unwilling to go that far but he would delay Guyanese independence as a result and push for the next Guyanese election to be fought under Proportional Representation rather than first past the post, which would benefit the PNC whose urban voters tended to be under-represented in the existing system.
In 1963, the PPP would attempt to introduce a law allowing trade union members to leave one union and start another as long as they had 65% approval among themselves. This would finally allow Indian sugar factory workers to leave the tame unions operating in Brookers Brothers and set up a new one, which was less in the pockets of the bosses. Predictably, despite Burnham having called for this himself a decade earlier, the PNC and UF (along with their backers in the CIA and the American trade union movements) reacted to this with outrage and called for a general strike. And, much like had happened the year before, they also stoked up violence from the disenfranchised urban population, with widespread looting, several more deaths of Asian business owners, and Jagan being attacked by an angry mob who injured his bodyguards.
More importantly, since it was the Afro-Guyanese unions that was striking and the Indians who weren’t (and so were scabbing), the ethnic tensions that had been largely hidden by the alliance of Burnham and Jagan in 1950 had become a full on racial war. When the PPP backed down again, withdrawing the legislation and not prosecuting any strikers, Burnham said in his victory speech that racial violence against Asians was an inevitable and natural response to PPP policies that discriminated against the urban unemployed black population.
The Indian population were outraged. From their point of view, a government that they had repeatedly voted in were unable to enact the policies they wished because whenever they tried, the PNC stoked economically damaging and fatal violence against Asians until the government backed down. In response armed gangs of Asian-Guyanese began attacking PNC members, resulting in hundreds more deaths due to another year of racial fighting. As the British had announced that the next election would be held under PR, this became an increasingly hot topic in the violence with the fighting gangs shouting slogans such as ‘Kill to Prevent PR’ or ‘PR or Death’.
The fighting was brutal and filled with atrocities. In May 1964 a black couple were killed and mutilated by Asian vigilantes and in response an Asian-Guyanese village was torched and multiple women raped. In response to that, seven Afro-Guyanese children were killing in a fire bombing. 200 people died during that year, and 13,000 were made homeless thanks to 1,600 cases of arson, 226 explosions, and 675 illegal discharges of firearms. Formerly multiracial villages became effectively partitioned and over 5,000 Guyanese citizens signed a petition for the country to be split in two to prevent any further violence.
This was not however seriously considered by the UK. Instead they pushed ahead with the December 1964 elections, run for the first time under Proportional Representation.
Burnham’s supporters were right to champion PR or Death. The PPP won 45% of the vote, an improvement in their vote share but only won 24 out of 53 seats, while the PNC and the UF managed 29 seats between then. For the first time, someone other than Jagan could form a government in Guyana and the UK could finally offer them independence without backing down on their promise to Washington. In this Burnham was undoubtedly helped by the PR system, by the millions of pound donated to him by the CIA and by the suspicious proxy votes which disproportionately and overwhelming favoured the PNC.
It would be Burnham who would lead Guyana to independence in 1966. He would rule for the next twenty nine years, winning a series of increasingly fixed and fraudulent elections, organising vicious and ongoing paramilitary violence against the non Afro-Guyanese majority - including fighting a three day war against indigenous UF supporters after he declared that the government would not recognize the inhabitants' land ownership certification and that it would be instead distributed to his supporters - and beggaring the country through stealing money and corruption. Even though he had the advantage, which Jagan did not, of being able to rely on aid from the USA, who both lent him money and helped him fix elections, the country fell off a cliff with exports dropping by 50%, infrastructure falling apart and debt increasingly rapidly.
By the 1980s Guyana was poor (with 450% inflation and 30% unemployment and 71% of children suffering from malnutrition), lawless (it had the second highest crime rate in the world after only Lebanon) and brutally racist, with government forces routinely attacking, raping, and killing Asian-Guyanese. They also regularly murdered Afro-Guyanese opponents of the Regime, such as Dr. Walter Rodney. And ironically, given that Burnham had gained power because Jagan was seen as too left wing, he had nationalised every major private company working in Guyana, such as the Booker Brothers sugar estates and the Bauxite mining companies, and switched his alliance from the USA to the USSR, openly accepting money from the communist bloc and allowing Cuban aircraft heading to Angola to fuel at Guyana. Far from preventing a Guyana-Cuban alliance, the USA had inadvertently created one.
As a result the USA increasingly turned against the regime that they had helped establish. In 1990, they told Burnham’s successor, Desmond Hoyte, that if he wished for financial help to dig his country out of this hole he would have to first hold fair, unfixed elections. He did in 1992 and unsurprisingly the PNC lost in a landslide, despite attempts by their supporters to storm the headquarters of the electoral commission. The PPP returned to power and at the age of 74, Cheddi Jagan had finally become leader of an independent Guyana. He would die in 1997, and be replaced by his American born white Jewish wife, Janet, as President.
The PNC however, didn’t lose the loyalty of the Afro-Guyanese and in 2015 they returned to power for the first time in a fair election. In the same year oil was first found in the country, transforming a poor country into one of the fastest growing economies in the world and setting the stage for an increasingly combative relationship with its neighbour Venezuela, which wishes to annex the Western half of Guyana. Guyana is currently facing a crossroads and it is difficult to know, given the prospect of both war and extreme economic growth, whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about its future.
What we do know is that the country is still riddled with the ethnic tensions created by the split between the PNC and the PPP and the resulting racial violence. This will have a huge effect on the future of the country and how much the money they are now earning can bridge that gap is going to be key.
Which begs a simple AH question: without the hostility of the UK and US government to Jagan, does that ethnic divide still happen?
After all, this doesn't prevent Burnham from being ambitious and clearly quite racist or the two voters bases from having different priorities. Unless we imagine a much earlier discovery of oil which could pave over the problems with money, you would probably assume some kind of split is inevitable and Jagan was naïve in thinking he could keep both ethnicities in the same movement indefinitely. It is important to not deny agency from the Guyanese: nobody forced Burnham to use race baiting and ethnic violence in his campaign or Peter D’Aguiar to forge evidence. They would still be those men and likely to fight dirty for power.
But it is also important not to deny agency from the West. Likewise nobody forced Churchill to shut down Guyana’s self-governance, for Kennedy and MacMillan to refuse Guyanese independence, or for foreign agents and trade unions to pump propaganda into the country. The violent nature of the ethnic split in Guyana was encouraged by both CIA guns and money and by the high stakes of the situation, namely the delay of independence as long as Jagan kept winning. Without Western interference it does not have to be as bad as it was.
It comes down, in my eyes, to the 1953 British invasion and the justification of that by painting the PPP as radicals which poisoned them in the eyes of the USA for the next few decades. Without that you almost certainly avoid a lot of bloodshed and oppression.
Jagan also didn’t help himself with his actions with Cuba. In hindsight he needed to accept that Guyana was not India and that the USA would not tolerate an unaligned country in their own backyard so he had no choice but to mouth anti-communist notions, even if he meant them as little as Burnham did. Had he been less naïve and idealistic he might have clawed back some leeway with Washington.
But that 1953 invasion was a huge moment towards the collision between Jagan and the CIA, and it would likely have not happened under any other Government but Winston Churchill’s. All post war governments of the UK, from both parties, struggled with their relationship with their colonies but few were as openly contemptuous of them as Churchill was.
With a different government in London, you’d imagine the PPP would have stayed in power and any ethnic split within that would not have been anywhere near as brutal as it ultimately was. Instead you might well see a reduced ethnic character of the various successor parties given the country would have gained independence led by a multi ethnic union and so voting for the wrong party would be less of a betrayal, with urban and rural parties forming rather than Asian and African ones. Certainly it would be an easier job then, without the history of massacres and violence, than it is now. But in OTL the western powers did pretty much everything they could to prevent that from happening.
Even though I think the alliance wouldn't have lasted forever, it could have endured for a while. It is entirely possible that in a world without the 1953 invasion, Jagan hands over power to Burnham peacefully as part of a deal between the two. Which probably means that Burnham still ends up trying to fix elections and murder his opponents, but at least if he’s still in the PPP while attempting it he wouldn’t have the CIA money and guns he got in OTL that allowed him to do so successfully.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.