Jamaica: An attempted arrest turns into a bloodbath

“It didn’t have to come to this,” said Claude Robinson in the Jamaica Observer. At least 73 people are dead in the Tivoli Gardens neighborhood of Kingston because of Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s “inexplicable handling” of the U.S. request for the extradition of gang leader Christopher “Dudus” Coke. Soldiers and police on tanks last week smashed through concrete barricades to get into Tivoli, Coke’s stronghold, only to be met by heavily armed gang members. Gun battles raged for four terrifying days, as residents cowered in their homes and helicopters buzzed overhead. In the end, dozens of civilians were dead and hundreds of alleged gang members arrested—but Dudus escaped. This bloodbath could have been avoided if Jamaica had turned the gang leader over to the U.S. last year. Instead, the prime minister wasted nine months trying to get the U.S. to drop its extradition request. When he finally decided to arrest Coke, he sabotaged the effort by prematurely announcing that the government would impose a state of emergency so the security forces could move in. Coke’s thugs were prepared for battle.

The government’s reluctance to arrest Coke is easily explained, said David Usborne and Naomi Francis in the London Independent. Every Jamaican party has a “symbiotic relationship” with its own criminal gang. The drug lords raise funds for campaigns and ensure voter turnout in their neighborhoods, or “garrisons”; in return, the politicians provide government contracts “and turn a blind eye to their drug trafficking.” Coke’s gang is closely allied with the Labor Party, Golding’s ruling party. The gang—called the Shower Posse, after its penchant for indiscriminate machine-gun fire—was started by Coke’s father, Lester Coke, with the explicit backing of Labor. Until just two weeks ago, a Labor senator was actually acting as Coke’s personal lawyer. Some say the 42-year-old drug don, popularly known as “the president,” is the most powerful man in the country. No wonder the Labor government tipped Coke off about the impending arrest.

But the people of Tivoli would have fought for Coke in any event, said Chris McGreal in the London Guardian. They see the quiet, reclusive vegetarian as “some kind of messiah.” Tivoli is Coke’s personal fiefdom, and its residents depend on the Shower Posse for everything: jobs, housing, health care, even schools. Coke gives generously, and demands only loyalty in return. So when the soldiers came, residents massed in the streets, ready to fight the government forces. Some of them carried signs reading, “Jesus died for us, and we will die for Dudus.” Of course, “if the charges against him are to be believed,” there’s another side to Coke. U.S. prosecutors say he manages a huge organized-crime network that controls much of the drug trade in New York City. And certainly, most of the people who were actually firing on soldiers were not just Tivoli residents, they were armed members of the Shower Posse.

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There’s one good thing to come out of this violence, said the Jamaica Gleaner in an editorial. The sight of the Shower Posse fighting the police and army “concentrated minds,” demonstrating beyond doubt that the garrison system is a “threat to the Jamaican state.” Now there’s a swelling of public support for dismantling the garrisons and fighting the criminal gangs. If Golding can use “his remaining political capital to take on the criminal elements,” we have a real chance to “eliminate the stranglehold that gangs have on national life.”