In response to these crackdowns, smugglers have switched their tactics again. These days, mules are more likely to be British, Dutch or Spanish residents who get paid for the loan of their stomach and get a free holiday in the Caribbean to boot.17 The authorities are reluctant to admit it, but their airport interception efforts are also hampered by local corruption, as Humberto told me when we met to talk about his time as an anti-drugs police officer in Bogotá. ‘We infiltrated a group of eight guys who were trafficking cocaine out of the airport in Bogotá. I’d filmed the whole thing, and one day my boss asked to look at the tapes. I thought he was straight, so I handed them over, but he erased everything I’d shot, so when we went to the public prosecutor with the case, we found that we had no evidence. Then the smugglers started sending funeral wreaths to my house. Who had the address of my house? I ended up working up the case by myself. In the end their operation was busted, and the traffickers were charged with smuggling 360 kilos of cocaine through the airport. My boss, who’d protected their operation right the way through, got a medal. I just got more funeral wreaths.’
In 2007, the Jamaicans declared ‘yet another significant victory in the war against drugs’ when the British Navy seized twelve bales of cocaine, said to be worth almost £50 million.18 In June 2008, a headline in the Daily Telegraph ran: ‘Prince William set for showdown with drugs baron on Royal Navy patrol in Caribbean’.19 Despite these flourishes of bombast, in reality cocaine shipments heading north across the Caribbean have been diverted, rather than diminished, by law enforcement. Traffickers have learnt to evade interception by leap-frogging from island to island. Puerto Rican authorities seized a record 10 tons of cocaine in 1998; Jamaica seized a record 3.7 tons in 2002; the following year it was the turn of the Dutch Antilles, where the authorities seized a record 9 tons, and the Bahamas, which seized a record 4.3 tons.20 The Dominican Republic has become a command, control and communications centre for cocaine movement through the Caribbean, used to store cocaine before onward shipment to Puerto Rico and the United States.21 Much of the construction business in the Dominican capital Santo Domingo is believed to be financed by drug money as a way of laundering revenue.22 Nearly all of the cocaine entering the Dominican Republic comes over the mountains from Haiti, its neighbour to the west.23 The Haitian anti-drugs police have only forty members.24
The focus on supply-side interception is not only ineffectual; it is also destructive. As the North American market for cocaine took off in the early 1980s, Colombian traffickers cast around for a base in the Caribbean through which they could move their product. Jamaica quickly became one of the main transhipment points for cocaine between Colombia and the United States. The island lies 550 miles north of the Colombian coast and 550 miles south-west of Miami. Consignments could be flown from clandestine airstrips on the north coast of Colombia to Jamaica, where the planes were refuelled for the second leg up to Miami. With the help of their British counterparts, the Jamaican authorities responded by building a radar station to track aircraft coming into Jamaican airspace. So the traffickers switched from air to sea. Kingston wharf is the biggest transhipment port in the Caribbean, full of ships bound for ports all over the world. The Americans have installed container-scanning equipment at great cost, but the cocaine trade is driven by poverty and a disdain for legal niceties that no amount of machinery can entirely quash. The port has plenty of low-paid dockhands and security guards keen to supplement their wages by smuggling cocaine on to the container ships.
Colombian traffickers also began to move their product in ‘go-fast’ boats that they stole from Caribbean and Latin American ports. ‘Big Colombian speed fucking boats,’ Jah Runnings told me, gesturing from the bright blue sea to the little coastal village of Bluefields where he lives. ‘It usually come in at Crab Pond Point up there, two times a month. Big raas clot engine, you understand me? They’re very fast—they let off and they go. The coastguard is in Montego Bay and Negril, but they’re not in their channel. Sometimes they intercept, but not all the while. In 2000, a Jamaica Defence Force helicopter intercepted one of the boats, but they didn’t find any cocaine. They’d thrown it overboard, stashed it down the road. They’ve been doing it for years.’ The go-fast boats are typically stripped of all but their cargo and fuel tanks, run red at 60 knots an hour and are abandoned once they make land. Jamaica’s 600 miles of coastline has plentiful mangrove swamps to hide boats in and see few patrols by the authorities. The Jamaican government recently bought three new go-fasts, at a cost of £750,000 a piece. Until 2005, Jamaica’s Marine Unit was completely dependent on the six or seven worn-out boats that they were able to recover from cocaine smugglers every year, which they then refitted as police boats. The new boats provide a visual deterrent, but in private officials admit that the entire Jamaican police force would have to be put to sea for the authorities to stand any chance of stopping the go-fasts from getting through.
According to Jah Runnings, the main suppliers of the cocaine that came through Jamaica were Colombian paramilitaries formerly affiliated to the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia), but he was understandably hazy about the details. ‘Colombians mostly stay up in Montego Bay, Ocho Rios. They’re so sceptic, they live indoors, so you don’t know them. Those guys are real mafia, they’re hard to study, you know? You can’t mess with those guys. They’ll kill you. The big Jamaican dons work along with the Colombian dons, but the Colombians are the more don because they have the merchandise.’ Jah Runnings explained that Colombian suppliers employ locals to unload the boats, stockpile the drugs and send them out again from the north coast of the island, usually bound for the Bahamas. ‘My friend used to work with the Colombians, unloading the boats on to big trucks. He got 750,000 Jamaican [about £5,300] for taking 1,500 kilos from Colombia to here. A two-day run. It’s small money, man. They’d have a couple of guys drive along with them to clear the way up to Montego Bay. From there it leaves to America and England, or sometimes to Cayman Islands, and link from there. Then one time, the boat come in, but intercept by the coastguard, so they take off the drugs and come hide it up in the bush. A bale of cocaine went missing, so they come back and killed my friend. Shoot him three times in his head.’
Before going to Kingston, I had read that 64 per cent of Jamaicans believe crime to be the most pressing problem facing the country.25 I wanted to find out what impact the cocaine trade had had on the island and to what extent it was responsible for Jamaica’s notoriously high crime rate. Things had got so bad that in 2004, Jamaica’s Minister of Tourism warned that violent crime threatened to derail the island’s tourism industry.26 In 2005, the Minister of National Security, Peter Phillips, spoke of ‘a criminal elite whose activities are centred on the illegal trade in drugs, which constitute the tap root of violent crime in Jamaica’. Five years previously, Phillips had put the soaring crime rate down to ‘narco-terrorism’. The Minister had requested assistance from ‘friendly countries with experience in fighting urban terrorism’, and ordered in armoured cars of the type the British pioneered for use on the streets of Belfast.27
Jamaican gangs have become notorious for their role in smuggling and selling cocaine and crack cocaine in the United States and the United Kingdom. I wanted to find out how they had become so successful and why crime seemed so resistant to law enforcement. It is not enough to point to the poverty of Jamaica’s garrison communities, or the expatriate Jamaican populations in both countries. It seemed more significant that Colombian traffickers had found local criminal networks already in place thanks to the ganja-smuggling business, and that the island was accustomed to the high levels of violence that the cocaine trade requires to perpetuate itself. Wills O. Isaacs, one of the founders of the People’s National Party (PNP), asked the presiding judge at the trial in which he stood accused of incitement to riot in 1949, ‘what are a few broken bones in the birth of a nation?’ Jamaican politicians have been fomenting gang violence for a long time. The gangs’ lineage go
es back to the war over West Kingston fought between the PNP and their rivals in the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), which began in 1966 when the Back O’Wall slum was demolished by the JLP MP for West Kingston, Edward Seaga. As new tenement houses went up, JLP supporters got the construction jobs, and when the work was done, they got the tenancies too. PNP supporters were driven into the dungles. PNP leader Dudley ‘Burning Spear’ Thompson led the fightback, carving niches for his party’s supporters in other West Kingston neighbourhoods, and setting up the ‘Fighting 69’ to defend PNP meetings from attack by JLP supporters.
It was during these tumultuous years following independence from British rule in 1962 that the ‘rudeboys’ came to the fore, the ‘Johnny-Too-Bads’, whose frustration at the lack of change was exacerbated and then exploited by the extreme partisanship that divided the island. Having drawn young people into politics, both parties distributed guns to their supporters and created Jamaica’s first gangs. The JLP created the Phoenix gang. The PNP created the Spanglers and the Vikings (named after the rousing Kirk Douglas film of 1958). These gangs quickly colonized the rest of Kingston’s downtown neighbourhoods, chasing out all political opponents and dividing the city into a patchwork of clearly defined and ruthlessly policed garrison communities. The gangs’ leaders were charged with the task of mobilizing votes on election day, liaising between the local MP and his or her constituents and dispensing the jobs and houses that the MP brought back from meetings at Jamaica House. These leaders came to be known as ‘dons’. Through their connections to the local MP, and thereby the ruling party, the dons became providers of employment, protection, and some measure of pride in the garrison communities. Whatever ideological loyalty the JLP or PNP has ever been able to inspire has always been tempered by the simple fact that if your party is out of power, you go hungry. As a result, Jamaica’s gangs and its two political parties have dispensed terrible violence and acquired huge power. These are, in the words of the reggae singer Peter Tosh, the ‘politricks’ of the Jamaican ‘shitstem’.
The present shape of both the parties and the gangs was cast by the events of the 1970s. In the run-up to the elections of 1972, the opposition PNP was quick to address the thwarted hopes and mobilize the latent violence of the ‘sufferers’, Jamaica’s poor majority. Rastafarians, too, were at the forefront of what soon became a powerful movement for change. Bob Marley has long since been taken to the heart of the Jamaican establishment, but in the 1970s Marley and his Rastafarian brethren were despised by many members of the ‘Afro-Saxon’ mixed-race elite that had governed Jamaica since independence. Locals had to go to rum shops to hear reggae music because the island’s radio stations wouldn’t play it. The Rastafarians asserted an African identity, holding Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, not Queen Elizabeth II, to be their sovereign ruler. The Jamaican government showed great disdain for this challenge to its authority, well illustrated by the fact that they recognized Mormonism as an official religion of Jamaica before they afforded the same status to Rastafarianism, despite Mormonism’s roots in white supremacist thinking.
In 1970, PNP leader Michael Manley returned to the island from a visit to Ethiopia with a ceremonial staff that he had been given by Emperor Haile Selassie. Hitting the campaign trail in 1972, Manley took his ‘rod of correction’ to every parish he visited, and in the general election of that year he was vaulted into power on a wave of pride in all things African. In 1974, Manley declared the PNP to be a socialist party. The Prime Minister was quoted as saying that there were five flights a day to Miami, and that anyone who didn’t like his policies should take one. Many wealthy Jamaicans did just that, taking their families and their capital with them. Foreign investment soon dried up, and the Jamaican dollar plunged in value. Prices fell, and local merchants began hoarding goods, which led to food shortages and then riots. Jamaica was polarized between left and right, and in the face of rising violence Manley was forced to declare a state of emergency again. The Prime Minister imposed what he called ‘heavy manners’, temporarily locking up all ‘top ranking’ garrison dons in an attempt to put an end to the gun terror of the JLP gangs. Anyone found in possession of a firearm was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Against this background of economic crisis and political turmoil, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh’s One Love Peace concert of 1978 assumed special importance. When Marley had Michael Manley and Edward Seaga join hands on stage it seemed that a peaceful solution to the strife was in sight, but behind the scenes the JLP was preparing for war. The boxes carrying the lighting equipment for the One Love concert from the United States had also been laden with guns. Rumours spread that the CIA was involved in importing guns to bolster the JLP’s struggle with the Manley government, and cocaine to help fund it.28 JLP gunmen began to use cocaine as well as trade in it, and the drug was widely blamed for ‘the reign of the wall-eyed gunmen’, a fit of violence in the weeks leading up to the general election of 1980, in which more than 800 Jamaicans were killed.29 Manley lost the election to Seaga ‘in a hail of bullets and a river of blood’.
Michael Manley was returned to power in 1989, but by then the man who had tried to plot an independent course for his country was resigned to an uneasy accommodation with the island’s elite. He flew to Washington to tell George Bush Sr that socialism was dead and that the PNP was ‘ready to do business’. Whatever political differences might once have justified the violence between the PNP and the JLP were now gone. As the demand for cocaine in the United States grew, increasing quantities of the drug passed through Jamaica, however. Jamaica’s dons and politicians grew accustomed to laundering the profits they amassed from the cocaine business by sponsoring dancehall music productions. Reggae music seemed to lose its crusading message too, as it was eclipsed by dancehall music. In 1999, reggae singer Dennis Brown died of respiratory failure caused by his long-running cocaine addiction.
Under Michael Manley’s prime ministership Jamaica’s economy had shrunk by a quarter. Exports of marijuana had played a big part in keeping the economy afloat, and the businessmen who ran the ganja business were among the first to get involved in the cocaine business. Much of the antagonism between criminal and legitimate enterprises in Jamaica today is between young and old, as young ‘soldiers’ know that many members of the business community, and even some government ministers, made their money from the ganja trade before graduating to the legislature or the island’s chamber of commerce.30
‘Ganja’ is a Hindi word that entered the Jamaican language shortly after the first indentured Indian labourers landed in Jamaica aboard the Blundell in 1845. The Indians came to work in the sugar cane fields after the abolition of slavery had deprived their owners of cheap labour. Before long, the British colonial authorities were growing cannabis for their plantation workers, in the then-prevalent belief that it made them work harder. Hemp was also used to make rope, an industry vital to the maintenance of Britain’s naval pre-eminence. A Royal Commission of 1901 had concluded that smoking cannabis was relatively harmless and not worth banning, but in the first two decades of the twentieth century, intoxication by cannabis, or anything else for that matter, was increasingly frowned upon by Americans and Europeans.31
By then it had become a firm favourite in Jamaica, but the authorities were not moved by its popularity. Rumours went around Jamaica House that people used ganja to prepare themselves for killing their wives. Until the 1960s, a Jamaican found in possession of ganja could expect to be sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour. In time, the mandatory sentences were repealed and discretion was restored to the judiciary, but as late as the 1970s, Peter Tosh was one of many Rastafarian singers to spend time in prison for smoking ganja. The politicians had always said that strict sentences were needed to protect the tourists, but as Rastafarianism and reggae music started to draw people to holiday in Jamaica in the 1980s, the criminalization of cannabis smokers came to look ever more outdated. Nonetheless, under Edward Seaga’s government, dreadlocks and black pride were shuffled
off-stage, and love of the United States and all things white, including the DEA’s ganja eradication programmes, came to the fore. This had unintended consequences in Jamaica, just as it had in New York City. When ganja traders suddenly found themselves bereft of a livelihood, many of them moved into cocaine smuggling.
The cocaine business thrives on the poverty, not just of individuals and communities, but of governments. Jamaica was close to bankruptcy when Edward Seaga became prime minister in 1980. By 1984, Jamaica’s debt per head of population was the highest in the world. When the Colombian cartels started smuggling cocaine through Kingston harbour, they soon found that they would have to deal with the JLP-affiliated trade union that controlled the wharf. But since the new government was in no position to quibble over the provenance of foreign earnings, the island’s banks were told to accept any deposits, regardless of provenance, and the government simply imposed a tax on anyone unable to prove where their money came from. The Americans were glad to see the back of Michael Manley, and, initially at least, were not overly concerned by the flow of cocaine through the island.
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