Janet Jagan, a daughter of a middle-class family from Chicago who became enmeshed in anticolonial politics in Guyana and rose to become the first woman to be president of that South American nation, died Saturday in Georgetown, the Guyanese capital. She was 88.

Mrs. Jagan died at a government hospital after suffering an abdominal aneurysm, Guyana’s health minister, Leslie Ramsammy, told Reuters.

Born Janet Rosenberg in 1920, she was a student nurse at Cook County Hospital in Chicago when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dentistry student at Northwestern University and the eldest of 11 children of an Indo-Guyanese family of sugar cane workers. His grandparents had arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured laborers.

They married, despite the fierce opposition of her parents, who were Jewish, and in 1943 they moved to British Guiana, where he established a dental practice and they both became involved in radical politics. In 1950, they founded the People’s Progressive Party, and in 1953, in elections under a new Constitution providing greater home rule, Dr. Jagan became chief minister. But the Jagans’ Marxist ideas aroused the suspicions of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who sent warships and troops to topple the new government. The Jagans were jailed.