An award winning Grenadian journalist, Alastair Hughes, famous in the region for his resistance to the NJM and his courage, saw the crowd move to the fort and bolted home, rather than cover the news.
The Cubans had told the Grenadian military that they would defend the airport area.Bishop denied he started the 1983 rumor.At this point, things become murky. He did, and was locked in a cell.One could without much of a stretch of speculation, add the Americans.The US, however, quickly recaptured its post-Lebanon image as a military super-power. In 1991, after an international outcry, the sentences were commuted to life. They had not reported in days and were turned away by the commander on duty from the NJM.Reagan declared the US medical students to be in grave danger from the crisis in Grenada, said that the NJM was a threat to all regional security.
Discipline appears to have evaporated on all sides. The assembled NJM party witnessed a meeting in which Bishop was exposed as having caused the rumor. Having visited Grenada twice during the revolutionary period, I was acutely aware of how suspicious the NJM leadership was.They were tried by jurors who chanted “guilty” at them during jury selection, in trails led by judges hand-picked and paid by the U.S.I interviewed people who were on the APC’s and many people who watched what followed. The island was rife with rumors about the dissolute behavior of some party leaders, especially charismatic Maurice Bishop, though in some ways his populist reputation was enhanced. From another fort on a mountain about two miles away, Peoples Revolutionary Army APC’s were ordered to quiet the mob.His Mongoose gang was implicated in several murders. A similar rumor, that Eric Gairy intended to kill Bishop and others, preceded the initial NJM revolution in 1979.# Redhead, Lester ‘Goat’ – released 27 June 2007The invasion of Grenada (popular among most Grenadian people sickened by the long collapse of the NJM) was complete in a week. First proposed in 1954, while Grenada was still a British colony, the airport included a 9,000-foot-long runway, which U.S. officials noted would accommodate the largest Soviet military aircraft. Errol George, also a Bishop bodyguard, was not allowed to say that he was right next to St. Paul during the time in question, and heard nothing of the sort. Key witnesses, like a bodyguard who was present when Bishop created and ordered the death threat rumor, were denied the right to testify. The U.S. Army and Marines proceeded to scour the island, arresting officers of the Grenadian military and seizing or destroying its weapons and equipment.As a result of the invasion, Grenada’s military People’s Revolutionary Government was deposed and replaced by an interim government under Governor Paul Scoon. They were mainly youths who had enlisted to get the money to buy shoes for their families. Indeed, it may have in part been a test of the so-called "Vietnam syndrome," the purported "affliction" that makes it difficult for the American public to support U.S. military intervention without a just cause. America was quite worried that Grenada would be another Cuba. It commemorates the freeing, as a result of the invasion, of several political prisoners, who subsequently went on to be elected into office.
Posted Why did the Invasion of Grenada happen?
Bishop could have easily mobilized nearly the entire population of the island to come to the square to support him-and that probably would have been that. Combined Cuban and Grenadian military forces sustained 70 killed, 417 wounded, and 638 captured. He returned to be the warden of the prison in the early 90’s, holding the prisoners who once held him. When asked why he did this, Courtney said, “I am an ethical man and if I do not do this, I am nothing.”# Austin, Hudson ‘H.A.’ also ‘The General’We know the Cuban ambassador to Grenada, Moscow-trained intelligence agent Julian Torres Rizo, and his ex-Weatherman wife, Gail Reed, ran off to Cuba after the invasion, safe and sound.Seventeen NJM leaders were charged with the murder of Bishop, Jacqueline Creft, and others, though most of them were nowhere near the incident, could not have participated, like the commander of the fort who was locked in a basement Fort Rupert cell.The plan, in general, was to magnify national economic development by expanding existing forms of production (agriculture, small industries, tourism, etc.)
Thirty-five years ago, in late October, 1983, U.S. troops under the direction of Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada, an island off Venezuela with a population less than Kalamazoo’s.
Defendants were not allowed to present key witnesses whose testimony would have undermined the testimony of the sole prosecution witness, Cletus St. Paul, one of Bishop’s bodyguards, who claimed he overheard Coard and others ordering Bishop’s liquidation. When I interviewed Gairy in 1996, he told me he was immortal, God. But the Soviet news agency, Tass, branded the attack as “terrorism.” Serious mistakes were made by the New Jewel leadership. 0. In 1983, the whole party voted overwhelmingly to reduce Bishop’s role and elevate Coard to an equal spot, though the entire party, and Coard, knew he would never be as popular as the charismatic Bishop, and could probably never rule without him.The NJM leadership were socialists, though their socialism was eclectic-hardly the doctrinaire image the U.S. later created.
Phyllis Coard was released in 2000 for cancer treatments. The exacting Brandeis-educated Bernard Coard, leading the financial sector, was recognized throughout the Caribbean as a rare, honest, economist.# Mitchell, Andy – released 2 December 2006However, there is a mystery that remains. (A “Grenada Documents” does exist, edited by a CIA asset.