“It may not be right,” the off-duty police officer said, “but it does make my job easier.”
We were sitting in a small, rustic bar in Craig Town, one of Kingston’s “garrisons.” It was a hot night and rivulets of condensation ran down the ice-cold bottle of beer I was toying with at the counter. Music from the stereo above my head collided with the thumping of boomboxes in the street. People strolled in and interrupted our conversation, while in the market opposite, young men crowded around domino and ludo tables and laughed boisterously. “In the ghetto,” someone here once told me, “the street is your living room.” In the narrow, potholed lanes that threaded between zinc shacks and breeze-block walls, where children played in their underwear and residents traded gossip and argued loudly, that much was clear.
This was Platinum Corner, so-named for the jewelry favored by the young men who congregated here and lived off the transatlantic drug trade. My host typified the ambiguities that characterize life for most garrison-dwellers: A decent man who loved police work, he had a son in the drug trade, and could not but cooperate with the drug gangs that controlled the community.
Craig Town had a long history, the police station up the road having been built by the British in 1911. But its contemporary identity had been crafted in the 1970s. In that turbulent decade, Jamaica was embroiled in an ideological war over the nation’s young soul. Michael Manley’s People’s National Party (PNP) had come to power in 1972 on a platform of social change and quickly drifted towards socialism. In response, the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP), led by Edward Seaga, embraced the free market and resisted what it saw as a menacing revolution.
The 1970s casts a shadow over the island’s subsequent history like that of a family secret. Much is unsaid, while many of the decade’s key players remain tight-lipped. In consequence, rumor and speculation have plugged the gaps: Socialists (PNP activists) say Seaga was a CIA stooge while Laborites say Manley was a naive puppet manipulated by a Cuban-backed clique.
Equally frustrating are efforts to construct a genealogy of the garrisons. The garrisons get their name from the fact that all residents must, at least outwardly, support the party to which the garrison belongs. Any who commit the sin of supporting the other party on election day are expelled from the community. Determining who instigated garrison politics is difficult, as the answer depends on the party affiliation of the person asked. But what is clearer is the general pattern of the garrisons’ development, along with their subsequent history.
In the 1970s, the two parties carved out a few safe seats for themselves by creating the garrisons, thereby boosting their vote in any given constituency. Heavily concentrated in the working-class quarter of southwest Kingston, far removed from the spacious gardens of the city’s middle-class neighborhoods, the garrisons cover perhaps a fifth of the city and account for about a tenth of the country’s constituencies. Although bit-players in the nation’s politics, they have nonetheless had a profound impact on the city’s geography and culture. Once a party secured a garrison, it flushed out supporters of the rival party. To do so, the parties built alliances with criminal elements on the ground. “Area leaders” in the euphemistic jargon, “dons” in the ghetto vernacular, these enforcers would maintain networks of gunmen, reputedly armed by the parties themselves. But the dons also moved into legitimate business, obtaining public-works contracts—especially construction and road-building jobs—from their political patrons to ensure not only their own fealty but that of their communities.
The party thus retained its constituents’ loyalty by delivering resources—jobs, schools, cash—through a patronage system that rewarded its supporters. Consequently, since elections determined which party would hold the cash cow over the next few years, elections were hotly contested. In the 1980 election, which arguably capped the peak of garrison politics, over 800 people died in campaign violence.
If it looked senseless from the outside, the violence had a cold logic to it. By terrorizing supporters of the rival party with seemingly indiscriminate acts of violence, gunmen from one party would try to send them fleeing and thereby erode the enemy’s electoral base. I once met a young man in a PNP community whose mother, charged with befriending Labor activists trying to penetrate the community, was shot 59 times and left to die alongside her baby daughter while he watched, hidden in a pile of laundry. Such brutality obviously invites reprisals from the other community, something intensified by the tendency for garrison residents to form almost tribal loyalties to their parties. Anthony Harriott, a political scientist at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies and Jamaica’s leading specialist on crime, has compared garrison communities to such social groupings as Albanian clans in their almost amoral loyalty to the community.
Loyalty, however, comes at a price. When the price tag rose, or when the purchasing power of the client—in this case, the political directorate—declined, the politics of the garrisons had to change.
One evening, strolling through Jones Town, which is adjacent to Craig Town and belongs to the same political party, I came across a parked car whose engine was running. The night air was still and the portly man reclining in the driver’s seat had forsaken his stifling little house for the cool comfort of the car.
Jones Town, which stretches across a large chunk of West Kingston’s real estate, from Admiral Town and Craig Town, past Arnett Gardens—another garrison known to the locals simply as “Jungle”—and up to Trench Town, whose most famous native was Bob Marley, is run by a triumvirate of dons. One is the overlord, one is the enforcer and one, the occupant of the car, is the “politician,” not an actual official but an articulate man skilled at resolving feuds and running meetings.
When he saw me, he got out to say hello and chat. It is a strange experience talking to a don about his work. This particular man was an affable individual whose avuncular appearance coexisted with a preparedness to kill people with his own hands—though most times he dispatched his gunmen to do the deed. We talked about local politics, the upcoming election, challenges ahead. The election, he said, was not going to be violent. The stakes were no longer so high. And therein lay a problem.
Back in the 1970s, he told me, in the era of paternalistic Third World states, the government could provide lots of patronage to its followers. Things had changed since then, though. Globalization had made the world a different place. Accordingly, the rules of inner-city politics had changed. The youths who had grown up on a diet of BET and MTV had rapidly growing appetites for economic spoils. Yet in the era of structural adjustment, the leaner state offered less. The dons were caught in the squeeze. The image of the all-powerful don has to be set against the fact that garrison constituents demand much for their loyalty and have been known to turn on dons who cannot deliver the goods. More than anyone—even more than Jesus, to whom the dons frequently pay obeisance with their visits to local churches—the dons fear their own people. Faced with their growing demands, and the diminished supply of their political masters, they had to find ways to generate additional resources.
They found them in the emergent drug trade. Since Jamaica lies on the routes that connect Colombia, Latin America’s chief maritime outlet for cocaine, with the United States, by far its biggest market, Jamaican gangs found themselves uniquely positioned to exploit the burgeoning trade in transshipment. Colombian gangs who could get the goods to sea but found it harder to smuggle them into the United States found that Jamaican gangs offered a peculiar advantage. Given the large Jamaican populations in places like Miami, New York, London and Toronto, Jamaican gangs could use existing networks to penetrate security walls and move the drugs onto the streets of the world’s major markets.
The drug trade started operating in the garrisons from their very early years, but appears to have taken off in the 1980s. The dons, forced to fall back on their own ingenuity to generate the resources needed to maintain their authority, were able to partially emancipate themselves from their political masters. As the Jamaican state receded under the impact of fiscal austerity, private networks emerged to fill the breach. The drug gangs did not wish to eliminate the state, but did want to put checks on its power, thereby giving themselves space in which to operate. To the extent their interests could be served, though, they were willing to cooperate with the state. This included the state’s front-line agents in the inner city, the police.
Early on in the Clinton administration, Washington loaned some small helicopters to the Jamaican government to prosecute the war on drugs. When the decision was announced, the then-commissioner of police—a professional man widely reputed as incorruptible—confided in a meeting at the university that it was irrelevant how much weaponry he got. “The war on drugs is unwinnable,” he lamented, “because in whole stretches of West Kingston, children are fed, clothed and schooled with drug money. Nobody will bite the hand that feeds them.”
Finding the criminals was not the problem. Other officers have since echoed this sentiment to me: They know who all the dons and gunmen are, know where to find them, indeed they could easily round them all up and throw them in jail. The problem for the police, of course, is that Jamaica remains a democracy. Criminals, like everyone else, enjoy legal rights. When they are brought before judges to answer charges, no witnesses appear. Those who could provide convicting testimony are either loyal to the don, or are simply too terrified of him and his henchmen to openly defy him.
The dons, in short, have carved out small fiefdoms for themselves where they can operate pretty much with impunity. As such, they pose a more severe challenge to the sovereignty of the Jamaican state than any foreign power ever did. The problem for the police is not that law and order have broken down in the garrisons, quite the contrary. It is that they are trying to reclaim a role for their law, and to restore or preserve what they can of their relevance.
Far from being anarchic frontier towns ruled by the law of the jungle, as middle-class Jamaicans commonly see them, the garrisons are arguably among the safest communities in the country. The dons have an obvious interest in maintaining order, as security is one of the most important services their constituents seek. Moreover, they are not bound by the legal restrictions that rein in the police. Crimes reported to the don are punished swiftly. The don acts as judge and jury, while his gunmen are usually left the task of executioner. Depending on the crime, the punishment can range anywhere from a beating to death. Ghetto justice is swift, though not always impartial: The dons reserve to themselves the right to violate the same laws they uphold for others. There is still a feudal whiff to the law of the garrison, as lese majesty—“dissing the don”—remains one of its most serious offenses.
Given the effectiveness of the dons at maintaining order, many garrison residents prefer to deal with their don than the police when reporting local offenses. Rape victims, in particular, often prefer to report to the don rather than the police, as they are spared the harrowing wait and investigation of the formal legal system: There is a chicken coop in Jones Town where accused rapists are locked up while the don verifies the veracity of the victim’s claims, then rounds up the gunmen who will beat and shoot the perpetrator. (The shooting is not fatal: In a peculiar practice, the perpetrator gets to choose where in his body the shot is fired.) It was to this my policeman-friend referred when he said the dons made his job easier. The dons support this state-within-a-state through a crude method of taxation, skimming revenue from the drug trade and drawing protection-money from the businesses—mostly small shops and bars—in the area.
Of course, the drug trade has its own set of rules governing contracts, turf, payments and partnerships. Contract enforcement obviously must bypass the official legal system, which cannot possibly recognize agreements regulating a criminal activity. As a rule, the trade falls back on violence to enforce contracts; the challenges of globalization make this violence sometimes quite extreme. For instance, it is all but impossible to settle scores with a drug mule—a smuggler, usually a young woman, who carries drug shipments abroad, the preferred method being to ingest condoms filled with cocaine—who absconds with a shipment upon reaching her destination. Thereby has emerged the practice of killing family members, often small children, in order to terrify potential contract violators from this course of action. Thus, the police are not lying when they repeatedly remind people that Jamaica’s crime statistics are misleading, since those who avoid the drug trade are unlikely to become victims of violence—although domestic violence remains a separate, and serious, problem. And, besides periods of turf warfare, life for most garrison residents is refreshingly crime-free. The streets in the garrisons bustle 24 hours a day, as life carries on in the “living room” of its streets well into the night.
Consequently, the challenge for the police is not to restore order to communities in which it has broken down. Rather, it is to remind people that these small “states” still exist, appearances notwithstanding, within an overarching state.
Seen through postmodern lenses, the competition between the state and the drug gangs is a struggle between rival political elites. Fortunately for the Jamaican state, the gangs do not seek to smash the sovereignty of the nationalist elite that led the country to independence and embarked on an ambitious program of nation-building. There is no effort, as in other Third World countries (particularly in Africa), to contest the loyalty of citizens to the Jamaican state. But there is an insistence that the Jamaican state will impose itself in the dons’ communities only with their consent. Put differently, whereas the Jamaican state was once able to impose its sovereignty, now it must negotiate it.
Much of this negotiation is left to the police. A sort of tacit agreement seems to have emerged in most communities between the police and the dons. Provided the dons preserve order within the community, the police will turn a blind eye to the drug trade that is their lifeblood. However, the police reserve to themselves the right to take matters into their own hands should the dons fail to keep their end of the bargain. Should, for instance, a particularly egregious violation occur, the police will employ force majeure to discipline a wayward don. I once heard someone put it aptly when he said that at the end of the day, the country’s biggest gang belongs to the government. There are armed squads in the Jamaica Constabulary Force known for their harsh tactics and fearlessness that can be sent into communities to flush out and intimidate the gangsters. And, of course, when worse comes to worst, the disciplined army can be used to back them up. The dons diss the government at their own risk.
But, of course, there are many dons to contend with. The government can impose itself on any one community and restore order when need be. However, it cannot do it in all communities simultaneously. This means that if order is to be preserved everywhere and at all times, the full weight of the Jamaican state must be kept in reserve, as a last resort, a sort of bad cop waiting to step in when the good cop—the local officer like my friend who relies on diplomacy and give-and-take over rum with the local don—throws up his arms and says he has lost control of the situation.
For some within the police establishment, this will not do. There are elements in the security forces who would like to crush the gangs. Their tactics are crude. Given that the police obtain pretty good intelligence in the communities in which they operate, they know where to find their arch-villains. And if they cannot bring them to justice in the courts, then they will do it on the streets. One can always concoct an explanation for why a prominent don or gunman was shot in the open. Resisting arrest, engaging the police in a gun-battle, provided there are no witnesses—the police can usually get away with their own version of summary justice.
However, Jamaica remains a constitutional democracy. Those who want to smash the drug gangs arguably have an imperfect attachment to democracy and the liberal principles that underpin its operation. The limits of the tolerance for this approach were revealed in the spring of 2003 when the Jamaican police commissioner removed the state’s leading “enforcer” from front-line duties and placed him at a desk job. Reneto Adams, who had become something of a folk figure in Jamaica, commanded a squad that had been hunting down criminals and killing them in gunfights. By reputation, he showed little mercy and took no prisoners. In one particularly shocking case, Mr. Adams and his men shot several known gunmen he surprised in a house in a Kingston suburb; that the victims were hardened criminals was beyond dispute, but what upset people were reports that at least one victim was on his knees begging for his life when he was shot. Mr. Adams’ activities eventually became too much to bear for a political elite which, while eager to preserve its dominance, does not want to see democracy eroded in the process. Human rights activists, mostly from the middle and upper classes, stridently demanded his dismissal, to which the police commissioner finally acceded.
So, for the foreseeable future, the police in the inner city will continue to negotiate with the dons, persuading them to accede to the state and cooperate with the police. It may not be right, as my friend told me that night. But, he added, until Americans stop consuming the vast quantities of drugs that they do, the dons will continue to have a secure power base. There were many things he could do over beer and a game of dominoes, but there was nothing he could do about that.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Rapley teaches in the department of Government at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies. He is a regular columnist for the Jamaican newspaper, The Gleaner, and has published widely on Jamaican politics and neoliberal development.
