Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America

by Ioan Grillo

  However, the Afro Caribbean nations grapple with many of the same problems as the Latin countries they share the hemisphere with. All are former colonies of European empires struggling to build political and judicial institutions since independence. All have big populations of dispossessed alongside corrupt European and American influenced elites. And all have become major drug trafficking routes.

  There are physical as well as comparative links between Jamaican and Latin crime families. As the U.S. piles resources on its southern border, Mexican and Colombian cartels switch back to the Caribbean to move cocaine, returning to the old pirate sea where smugglers have moved contraband for centuries. The cartels work with local crime syndicates such as the Shower Posse. It is a sad truth that gangsters are among the best entrepreneurs at crossing physical and cultural borders to take advantage of markets; Mexican and Colombian cartels are more aggressive than most legitimate businesses from their countries at tapping the potential of the Caribbean and Central America.

  In understanding the crime world, the Caribbean is especially interesting for the ties between drug traffickers and politicians. Gangsters conspire with officials across the continent. But Jamaica and other islands show extreme examples of how kingpins and politicians work together.

  One of the few thinkers to explore these connections between the Caribbean and hemispheric drug trade is Daurius Figueira, a criminologist from Trinidad and Tobago. Figueira long wrote about the traditional Caribbean issues such as race, but became interested in organized crime as he saw its daunting presence on the islands.

  “Having experienced the appearance of a drug culture, I became interested in what is the nature of the business in the Caribbean … We have always been a transit zone for Latin American transnational drug traffickers. But in the literature the requisite attention has not been paid to the Caribbean as a major illicit transition zone both to the United States and to Europe and now to West Africa.

  “You have this archipelago of small island states that provide impunity to these transnational organizations. And because of the operations of these cartels we have now developed indigenous Caribbean traffickers who wield considerable power and influence.”5

  To make sense of the new crime order in the Americas, I realize, it is crucial to travel to the ganja-and-gun-filled ghettos of the Afro Caribbean.

  CHAPTER 17

  As I figure out logistics for going to Jamaica, I wonder if my plan to talk to Shower Posse gangsters about their fallen president is too ambitious. In Mexico, I spent years covering the crime beat before I got interviews with cartel gunslingers. Now I try to figure out how I can sweep onto the island and do it.

  My first stop is a fellow Brit who spent several months in a Kingston ghetto. He’s a Londoner who used to sell ganja south of the River Thames and went to Kingston with a British-Jamaican friend to soak in the Caribbean atmosphere. When I inquire over a beer about talking to Jamaican drug traffickers he doesn’t look positive.

  “Any time I asked about how things worked in the crime world, they froze up,” he tells me. “I had a lot of trouble there. They asked me all the time what the fuck I was doing in the ghetto and why I wasn’t on the beach with the rest of the tourists. If you go there asking about criminals, you might as well be Old Bill [police]. Good luck with it.”

  It isn’t a good signal. But I ask him if at least he enjoyed the island with its famed rum and dance hall parties.

  “I was watching my back all the time. My friend could help me sometimes, but he couldn’t be with me every minute of the day. In the end, he said to me, ‘Sorry, but the guys here just don’t like you.’ They were talking about how some tourist had been kidnapped and the kidnappers got a good payoff. I left because I thought they were going to target me.”

  He makes it sound dangerous as well as difficult. But I try other avenues. Luck comes when I find a fellow journalist who made a documentary about Jamaican gangs with a Kingston film producer called Colin Smikle. The name grabs my attention as it is an anagram of the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins (almost).

  I call Colin on his Jamaican cell via an Internet line and get poor reception. He tells me he can sit me down with the Shower Posse. Or at least I think he does. The line is crackly and Colin has a strong Jamaican accent. I get my ticket to Kingston.

  When I arrive in Kingston at night, I’m apprehensive that Colin won’t deliver. These contacts often come up short. I’m even more nervy the next morning when he shows up late to the hotel and we have a long breakfast. It turns out it’s his birthday, which is November 5, the day in England when we burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, the Catholic dissenter who tried to blow up parliament in 1605. Colin tells me he identifies with our British antihero.

  “I really would love to blow up parliament here in Jamaica. Seriously, I am not just saying it, I would really do it. Politicians here are the cause of all our problems.”

  I am starting to like Colin. But I’m getting worried I’m veering off from meeting gangsters to unveiling a new gunpowder plot. However, after we finish breakfast, he puts my anxiety to rest. He drives me straight into Tivoli Gardens to meet Dudus’s family.

  Jamaican homes are known as “yards” because many are built in cordoned off sections of courtyards. I go to the yard of Dudus’s family on his mother’s side. Dudus was the illegitimate child of a renowned gangster known as Jim Brown, and he lived with his mother in Tivoli, while Jim Brown had a home outside the ghetto with his wife and other children. There is also a rumor that Dudus was not the real blood child of Jim Brown. However, this has never been proven and Dudus has the don registered as his father on his birth certificate.

  The family home includes a series of bungalows in a fenced-off area. Dudus’s mother passed away after he was imprisoned. However, the yard is full of various family members, including Dudus’s twin aunts and several cousins. Two dozen goats wander round the yard and on the roofs of the houses. Many residents of the Kingston ghettos, I find out, keep goats in their homes, using them for milk and meat. They let them wander alone down to the market to eat the remains of vegetables, and they somehow know how to wander back. Stealing another man’s goat while they wander is as big a sin as anyone can commit here, and has been the motive for murders.

  I sit in a plastic chair in the open yard and Colin introduces me. He seems incredibly at ease with Coke’s family as he explains I want to “reason” with them (the Jamaican word for talking), saying that I want to hear the truth about Dudus.

  The twin aunts are in their fifties but look older, the victims of a degenerative medical condition that runs in the family. The most talkative is called Twinny. Aunt Twinny eyes me suspiciously. Dudus’s cousins in their late teens and twenties are more relaxed. All want to explain that Dudus was a benefactor, a Robin Hood, a man of God. They call him “Mikey” with affection.

  “Mikey a loving person. He a peaceful man,” Aunt Twinny says. “The politician not look out for people but Mikey look out for people. He do nuff [enough] good things here. He get treats for kids: pizza, ice cream, school uniform, shoes, Reebok, Nike.”

  A young female cousin called Keriesha chips in: “The politician run the country. But man here cyan [can’t] go to no politician. So them go to Mikey. Anyone with a problem them go to Mikey. Him a caretaker for the community.”

  I ask what they think about him being in a U.S. prison for trafficking drugs, and U.S. agents testifying that he and his enforcers carried out wanton murder. Aunt Twinny screws up her face and shakes her head.

  “Dem lies. Him a peaceful man, him always reading Bible. When him here you in peace, you can sleep with your door open. Now everyone on their own. You cyan sleep in peace.”

  The meeting with Dudus’s family is the entrance to a surreal trip into the Kingston ghettos and Shower Posse that Colin takes me on. He introduces me to hired guns, smugglers, corner dealers, crack cooks, and pimps. He is a force of nature. Every ghetto we drive into, he pulls up and immediately asks for the local
enforcers by name. He seems to know everybody and everybody seems to respect and like him. He has a phenomenal memory for names, connections, and stories.

  Colin grew up on these streets, moving around as a kid to know many different ghettos. He also has a sprawling family, which connects him in all directions. One of his cousins, he reveals, was a Shower Posse hit man, a brutal murderer who once beat a man to death with his bare hands. (The cousin was later himself murdered. He who lives by the gun …)

  In contrast, Colin was an athlete, which took him out of the slum to know the better parts of Kingston. It has kept him in good shape into middle age. He later got into working as a location producer on films and TV in Jamaica’s small but creative industry. His specialty is as a point man for filming in the ghetto.

  Like myself, Colin loves to talk, and we ramble on for long hours about the history of Jamaican violence, what drives it, how the communities have been scarred. Colin sympathizes with the ideas of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican who became a father of black nationalism in the United States and across the Americas in the 1920s. Garvey is a hero in Jamaica, his face on coins, name on streets, and statue shading parks.

  However, Colin is cynical about Jamaica’s current politicians of all stripes. He puts the blame squarely on these politicos for using ghetto gunmen as pawns in their power games and turning the streets into killing zones. The political parties divided the ghettos up, he explains, by creating what were called garrison communities.

  I had heard Jamaica’s ghettos described as garrisons before but hadn’t given the name much thought. But Colin explains what it means: They are literally fortified communities. Many of the entrances are permanently blocked with barricades so there is only one way in and one way out, and the gangs watch clearly who passes through it. Other streets are jammed by temporary obstructions of garbage cans and metal posts that gangsters use to run impromptu checkpoints. Colin points to children practicing putting up street blockades with tires, rocks, or whatever they can find.

  The garrison, he explains, is a political creation forged following Jamaica’s independence. Back in the 1960s, the young nation’s politicians worked with ghetto strongmen to bring in the ballots. They created the garrisons as turfs where they could control the voting and stop the opposing side coming to canvass.

  As a result, the parties secure ridiculously high votes in garrisons—98 percent in some areas. In return, politicians hand out building contracts and other benefits to their loyal communities, often channeling that money through the dons.

  Within this structure, the dons become a link between politicians and their ghetto constituents. Like Dudus’s cousin said, the residents can’t get to see their Member of Parliament, but they might get to see a don like Dudus.

  All the garrisons and dons are clearly aligned to one of Jamaica’s two main parties. The People’s National Party, or PNP, is considered more left wing, and its followers are often referred to as socialists. The Jamaican Labor Party, or JLP, is considered more conservative, despite its name. Its followers are referred to as laborites. Tivoli Gardens is a hard-core laborite area. Garrisons known as Spangler and Tel Aviv are PNP areas.

  The laborites use green as their color while the PNP uses orange. This creates the bizarre comparison with Northern Ireland, which is split between green Catholics and orange Protestants. In Jamaica, they take this color-coding to extremes. Laborite garrison loyalists will drink Heineken beer in its green cans while PNP fanatics will never touch it and prefer Red Stripe. It sounds hilarious. But in some places, slurping on the wrong beer can get you shot.

  In Jamaica, they call this divide political tribalism. In 1997, the Jamaican parliament created a National Committee on Political Tribalism to write a report on the issue. The paper lays bare the problem that plagues the island. As it states:

  Political tribalism was a type of politics known to the ancient Greeks and Romans. It is political because the tribal grouping is not ethnic but based upon politics. In a tribe, members of the group and persons within the tribal confines must obsequiously obey and observe the rules and rituals of a tribe or suffer the consequences for disobedience and dissent. Thus, political tribalism is the antithesis of our constitutional democracy, with its freedom of association and the incidental right of the citizen at will to join or support the party of choice.

  Political tribalism, the use of violence in political activities, the creation of political garrisons were not a natural outgrowth of a political process, but rather they were nurtured and nourished as strategic initiatives to secure or retain political power.1

  This war between political tribes reached its peak in the bloody 1980 election—as the Cold War turned hot in the Americas. The tribal conflict was debated in ideological terms, the PNP socialists siding with Cuba and the laborites with the United States. This was before the gangs became major international drug traffickers and battled over narco profits.

  Back in 1980, mobs with guns, clubs, and machetes from one garrison would swarm into an opposing garrison. The borders between communities became dangerous frontlines. As the violence raged, gangs attacked the homes on these frontlines with firebombs and turfed out the families to create buffer zones of deserted streets. It is easier to defend your territory if no one is living in the blocks right next to it and you can quickly identify an enemy approaching. Many of these buffer zones are now crumbled and overgrown, creating physical divisions between rival garrisons. I walk through these no-man’s-lands where trees and bushes cover the fallen remains of homes, the haunted scenes of old bloodshed. Violence shapes spaces.

  The fortification and buffer zones make the garrisons highly defined areas. In Mexico, you can often move between middle-class, lower-middle-class, and slum areas that are on top of and all over each other. But in Jamaica, you know clearly when you are entering and when you are leaving a garrison. It is a marked territory.

  Residents baptize garrisons with their own creative names. You have the Concrete Jungle, Southside, Spanglers, Rema. Others are named after tough places around the globe including Gaza, Tel Aviv, Zimbabwe, and Belfast. Often the name of the local gang and the garrison are interchangeable; the Tel Aviv gang claims dominion of the Tel Aviv garrison. It’s hard to know which one came first.

  Garrisons are embattled communities. But in a twisted way this makes them strong communities. People grow up fighting together. Everybody knows everybody else. And every young man in a garrison is a potential recruit for the don’s field army. Or as Colin puts it, “Every ghetto youth is a soldier.”

  In many ways, the entire community is criminalized. When police come in, they enter in force. The police face heavily armed ghettos, and in response they are extremely trigger-happy. This is similar to Brazil, but considering the population levels, the Jamaican police are way more homicidal. In 2014, they killed an average of one person a day in the nation of three million. Cops commit one of four homicides in Jamaica. (In the United States, it is estimated to be about one in twenty. In England, it’s about one in five hundred, and a single police killing can provoke major riots.)

  The fact that Jamaican garrisons are so tight-knit and criminalized makes it easy to connect with gangsters. In Mexican towns, the cartel is a clandestine force. But in the garrisons, the gangsters are on the streets, on the corners, in the rum shops.

  It also helps that many people are smoking weed. It’s a cliché. But it’s true. I have never seen people smoke so much. On some days, Colin and I drive round in the early morning and people are getting wasted. At night, they burn and burn. Rather than passing round joints, they smoke their individual mini spliffs. They sell it dirt cheap, a small bag for a dollar. It’s mostly a local strain called Lamb’s Bread (also referred to as Lamb’s Breath) or what they call “high grade,” more potent strains developed in Amsterdam or California.

  Amid the smoke-filled yards, the patois is thick and colorful. While I had heard it before, I didn’t appreciate how strong it could be. The language is said t
o have developed in the seventeenth century when slaves mixed West African dialects with English. As a Jamaican patois version of the Lord’s prayer says,

  Wi Faada we iina evn,

  Mek piipl av nof rispek fi yu an yu niem.2

  (Our father we in a heaven,

  Make people have enough respect for you and your name)

  People will often use a toned-down version of patois, especially when speaking to a foreigner. Another form of speech is known as Jamaican English, which uses the accent and some elements of patois but is closer to British or American English. Meanwhile, Jamaican newsreaders speak much like BBC presenters. The difference between these forms of speech is considered a continuum, with every variation in between.

  Back in my early twenties, I lived in south London and was involved in a music scene called “jungle,” a mix of electronic and reggae forged in London’s cultural melting pot. Like many British kids at those raves, we threw in Jamaican words we had picked up thirdhand from the streets of London and reggae records. We went round our friend’s yards, got mashed up and asked for big ups on the pirate radio.

  In Kingston’s garrisons, it was endearing for me to hear old people use what was cutting-edge slang in England. But then it dawned on me they invented it and we were the followers. And I realized that if you throw patois about in Jamaica as a foreigner you can sound like a patronizing son of a bitch. It’s an extremely culturally charged form of speech.