Jamaica hit the international news in late May of this year. Gunmen from the Tivoli Gardens
section of the capital, Kingston, launched attacks on police stations as part
of an attempt to resist the capture of a drug fugitive, Christopher “Dudus”
Coke. When the dust had settled, 73 people lay dead.
The United States had sought to extradite Coke but this was resisted by the Government of Jamaica for
seven months. The reason: Coke was the “Don” of Tivoli, the command and control
centre of the governing Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) —a constituency represented
in parliament by none other than the prime minister himself, Bruce Golding.
This close relationship between criminal gangs and politics is by no means confined to one side. The
opposition —the People’s National Party (PNP)— arguably has even more gunmen at
its disposal. When Jamaica gained political independence in 1962, the murder
rate was 3.9 per 100,000 inhabitants —among the lowest in the world. In
the last 10 years, homicide rates averaged 55 per 100,000 inhabitants, soaring
to 62 in 2009, or the astonishing figure of 1,680 murders in a population of
just under 2.7 million. In comparison, in 2009 drug violent Mexico had a
homicide rate of 14 per 100,000 inhabitants while Brazil had one of 25 and
South Africa of 37; Canada, for its part, had a rate of 1.8.
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