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Holness calls for end of ties between gang leaders and politicians
“Unless the U.S. are going to start calling for the extradition of all the dons, it is hard to see what pressures there are within the system which are going to bring about fundamental change,” said Amanda Sives, a University of Liverpool academic who spent years doing research in Jamaica.
Some politicians representing garrison constituencies have asserted that political connections to the underworld no longer really exist, but you’d be hard pressed to find any other Jamaicans who believe that.
“Without politics, we all live good. But when elections come, the old lines separating us come back and things tense up,” said Michael “Bizzie” Murray, a 54-year-old leader of the People’s National Party-aligned Rollington Town area. Police have classified Murray as an East Kingston don.
Earlier this year, the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper ran a controversial series of editorials painting the island’s two main parties as gangs, saying “politically aligned criminal gangs are praetorian guards of the parties.” A Gleaner-commissioned poll of 1,008 islanders found that nine in every 10 Jamaicans agreed with the portrayal.
In Tivoli Gardens, Brown and other residents still express a loyalty to Coke bordering on fondness. But they also insist they will keep voting for the ruling party even though it was a Labor government that eventually extradited the slum boss.
Seaga, for one, has kept on giving to the neighborhood, she said, even personally paying her hospital bills if she asks his office for help. Just a few blocks away lies Bob Marley’s old neighborhood of Trench Town, a sprawling neighborhood allied with the People’s National Party.
Brown, who was blinded when a bullet cut her optical nerve in a police shooting, said she and her neighbors know the parties need the gangs to operate, just as much as the gangs need the politicians.
“Most of the politicians here build gangs,” said Brown, as a convoy of security forces drove by her apartment, rotating machine guns at the ready. “They don’t break gangs.”
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
