As it turns out, 2010 wasn’t the first time police had brought in bulldozers to demolish dwellings or fought a pitched gun battle for control over this area. Indeed, that was exactly how Tivoli Gardens was created in the first place. In October 1963, only fourteen months after Jamaica gained its independence from the United Kingdom, the newly elected JLP government brought in JCF officers and bulldozers to forcibly evict squatters and PNP gunmen from a poverty-stricken, strategically located, PNP-dominated slum known at that time as Back o’ Wall. Against significant armed opposition and public unrest, the JLP demolished the slum, expelled its residents, then proceeded to build modern housing on the site and install its own supporters (who were given free accommodation and government benefits), creating a bastion that allowed the JLP to mobilize the community and dominate the area thereafter. The government called the new district, built on the ruins of the old Back o’ Wall slum, Tivoli Gardens.85
The struggle between the two political parties, along with the armed gangs of enforcers they sponsored and the government benefits and public goods they channeled to their supporters among the marginalized poor, shaped the urban landscape of Kingston over subsequent decades. When in office, each party reinforced its power by giving its supporters free housing and social services, and in the process creating residential bastions on strategic pieces of urban terrain. Each party used evictions, forced residential cleansing, denial of public services, government-sponsored gang violence, intimidation by a politicized police force, and outright demolition of entire garrisons to punish the other party’s supporters. Elections, by the 1970s, had become violent turf battles in which whole neighborhoods voted en bloc and fought each other with rifles in the streets. They were fighting quite literally for survival, since the losers’ districts might be physically demolished. This pattern empowered nonstate armed groups. By 1972, Tivoli Gardens had in effect been subjected to military conquest by the JLP: it was a JLP-only district, purged of PNP supporters and run by a local system in which JLP politicians distributed state largesse in return for votes at election time, residents had become a dependent and captive constituency, and local gangs—led by Christopher Coke’s father, among others—kept the peace and enforced the rules.86 Tivoli was the first of the garrison districts.
The symbiotic relationship between political leaders and their armed partisans—each influencing the other, each limiting the other’s options, and each demanding support from the other—literally created the city’s physical landscape. In essence, the two political parties were playing an extreme urban-planning version of tic-tac-toe, each party placing strategic garrison communities in key locations when it could, to dominate populations and block the other’s access, and each erasing the other’s garrisons when feasible. This process created and destroyed whole settlements, determined the location of major infrastructure projects such as markets, highways, and the airport, and shaped the flow of Kingston’s urban metabolism. As in Mogadishu, the political struggle, expressed in competition for residential space and urban services, defined the very landscape of the city. It transformed poor neighborhoods, creating a mosaic of politically homogenous, gang-controlled, party-sponsored garrisons, each competing for government resources and criminal income, each beholden to (and making demands on) a political patron, and all engaged in a perpetual violent struggle for political and economic advantage. If Mogadishu was a feral city—in Nuruddin Farah’s phrase, “a city broken into segments, each of them ruthlessly controlled by an alliance of militias”—then Kingston had evolved into something that could scarcely be called a city at all: from a distance, it might look like a single contiguous stretch of urban terrain, but in fact it was a balkanized patchwork of entrenched strongholds perpetually at war with each other.
Within each stronghold the formal institutions of the Jamaican state were almost entirely absent, but nonstate armed groups (initially licensed by the dominant political party, but increasingly independent over time) exercised informal governance responsibilities, including law and order. The gang leader in each area, known as a “don,” maintained a group of armed followers or “shooters” who acted as enforcers, kept down petty crime, and enforced a strict normative system of punishment and reward upon the population. The don acted as a mediator and resolver of disputes, liaised with police and city authorities to manage violence and crime, and became an intermediary for the distribution of government handouts—jobs, housing, welfare benefits, contracts—to the population.
Christopher Charles and Orville Beckford of the University of the West Indies did field research on informal governance systems in the garrison districts in 2010 and 2011. They found that the dons and their shooters enforced an informal but highly structured system of governance: “Society abhors a governance vacuum. People will replicate police when the police are inadequate. Governments have reduced public spending in the inner city [while] criminal dons have replaced the state as the major patrons of residents and replicated state services including an informal justice system.”87 Charles and Beckford observed the dons trying cases and resolving disputes, while the shooters meted out punishment to shore up the don’s authority and maintain order. In one incident, a man was shot in the leg for kicking a pregnant woman. In other cases, the don issued a public warning to two women who created a public disturbance by fighting each other. People who assaulted others or abused their spouses were beaten by the shooters. The harshest punishment—death—was reserved for police informers, renegade shooters, and people who refused to repay money they had borrowed from the don. An older woman acted as a political enforcer, ensuring strict party allegiance to the JLP—those suspected of switching party allegiance were expelled from the community.88 All these cases tended to cement the authority of the local strongman, who in turn maintained close ties with a member of the Jamaican political establishment.
While some people in these communities accepted the system only through fear of violence, most did so willingly “because of the perception that this is swift justice, because of conformity pressures, and because of the influence of group solidarity and communal identity.”89 The don of each garrison district enforced this system (which was, in fact, locally known as “the System”).90 It applied not only to the ordinary population but also—indeed, especially—to shooters, members of the nonstate armed group that enforced the system. This was crucial, because it created predictability and order by demonstrating that nobody was above the rules and by establishing criteria for fairness that were beyond the don’s personal whims.
Charles and Beckford give one striking example of this internal justice system, associated with the extortion racketeering that is the dons’ main source of income. In Eastern St. Andrew district, one shooter tried to shake down a popular and respected shopkeeper who had helped many people in the community with loans and other assistance. The shopkeeper refused to pay protection money, counting on his popularity and the local don’s policy that gangs don’t target entrepreneurs who help the community. The shopkeeper’s refusal to pay infuriated the shooter, who killed him. As soon as the don heard of the killing, he sent the rest of his posse to find the renegade shooter—they chased him through the streets, shot him dead, and burned down a relative’s house. As Charles and Beckford point out, maintenance of the system demands public and impartial enforcement of the rules, while the don needs to keep his own people in line because of the armed threat they pose to his own authority: “Renegade shooters have to be dealt with not only swiftly but also severely. Lesser action would signal that the don is ‘soft’ and that his informal authority can be successfully challenged. The shooters, as the line staff in the security structure of the garrison, have to be closely monitored and controlled, because they have the firepower to act in concert to oust the don.”91
This element of nonstate control of population groups is not unique to Kingston. Indeed, in Chapter 3 I’m going to argue that the Kingston garrison constituencies represent just one
example of an extremely widespread mechanism that I call “competitive control.” But for now, it’s enough to note that the garrison districts, while lying outside formal government control, are far from ungoverned or anarchic. On the contrary: just as we’ve seen in the case of Mogadishu (and as leading Africa analyst Ken Menkhaus noted in a 2007 article), these districts are intensively governed—just not by the government.92
Long-Duration Patterns
As in Mogadishu and Mumbai, longer-term processes of population growth, urbanization, and coastal migration lay beneath Kingston’s surface problems. As the capital of the British colony of Jamaica, Kingston exercised a magnetic pull on the island’s population that intensified as the city’s economy developed and the rural population grew in the early twentieth century. By the Second World War, Kingston was experiencing rapid population growth and urbanization, as displaced rural poor and immigrants in search of a better life crowded into coastal slums—often places of extreme squalor—in Kingston’s urban core, while better-off Jamaicans moved to the city’s suburbs. As noted earlier, marginalization, economic inequality, and exclusion of the population in these areas rendered them periurban, in the sense that they were on the periphery of the city’s politico-economic core, even though their physical location was close to the city’s center. Middle-class enclaves emerged in the northern and eastern parts of Kingston, while newer, poorer districts, “teeming with rural migrants, unemployed workers and destitute itinerants,” clustered in the city’s western areas.93 By the early 1940s, residential segregation was a fact of urban life in Kingston.94
In urban systems terms, Kingston’s carrying capacity—the ability of the urban organism to absorb, transform, and disperse the by-products of this massive influx of people—was simply inadequate to the demand. There was neither the urban infrastructure, the social or government services, nor the economic basis to absorb the flow of population or to support the rapid growth in size and spatial sprawl of the port city. As Jamaica’s political and economic hub, and as the location of its main seaport and (initially) its only international airport, Kingston was the country’s gateway to the outside world. Immediately after independence, the creation of the garrison communities cemented the dependent position of the marginalized urban poor and redrew the city’s landscape into a patchwork of competing fiefdoms. This blocked the city’s flow and made it next to impossible for successive Jamaican governments or city administrators to develop urban systems able to handle ongoing population growth, rapid urbanization, and increasing international connectedness. This international connectedness was a key element of the problem and the ultimate trigger for the Tivoli Gardens fighting of 2010.
As Professor Desmond Arias has pointed out in a series of well-argued articles on criminal governance in Jamaica, gangs in the garrison neighborhoods were initially creatures of the political parties.95 But they also maintained extensive criminal activities, focused on cocaine and marijuana trafficking, extortion, and weapons smuggling. As people emigrated from Jamaica to the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, gangs in their home districts would force them to remit some of their earnings to the local don, threatening to hurt family members still in Jamaica if they didn’t pay protection.96 As conditions in the garrisons became even more dangerous and bleak, prompting a surge in Jamaican emigration in the 1970s and 1980s, these forced remittance networks grew and became a source of funding for the gangs that was independent of their political patrons. The dons’ connectedness to the Jamaican diaspora—and to the transnational protection racket it enabled them to run—began to free them from dependence on local politicians, changing the power balance in ways that increased the garrison districts’ autonomy and empowered the gangs that ran them.97
In the 1980s, the booming international cocaine trade dramatically empowered the gangs, whose existing networks allowed them to take advantage of Jamaica’s strategic position as a staging point for Colombian cocaine trafficking into the United States and Canada. Christopher Coke’s father, Lester, benefited from this influx of cash and influence, which, like the transnational extortion racket that preceded it, was ideally suited to exploit the gangs’ connectivity to the Jamaican diaspora. The diaspora networks, already closely connected to garrison district gangs in Jamaica, became a ready-made channel for drug trafficking and for the enforcement and expansion of the networks’ turf. This process bolstered the new status of garrison posses: they had evolved from being tools of the political parties, dependent on patronage, into semiautonomous transnational nonstate actors. Their international networks also allowed them to bring in heavy weaponry, further freeing them from dependence on local politicians.98
This crowded, urban, coastal, connected environment was the world in which Christopher Coke ascended to the powerful position of don in Tivoli Gardens after his father’s death in 1992. A witness at Coke’s trial described his role as head of the Shower Posse:
Posse members who relocated to the United States from Jamaica were obligated to contribute a portion of their illegal gains back to Jamaica to support the gang. Contributions could be made in the form of cash, goods such as clothing or appliances, or firearms. Relatives of these US based Shower Posse members who remained in Jamaica were at risk of physical harm by members of the gang if these contributions were not forthcoming. . . . As the area leader, Coke, like his father and brother, provided certain services to the community. For example, he assigned paid work to members of the community arising out of government contracts that he obtained—such as contracts to clean streets, fix roads or engage in other construction projects. For these projects, Coke would deduct from the salaries paid a portion of funds as a contribution to the “System”—essentially a required payment to the gang, which the witness said was used to purchase guns and ammunition and also to provide assistance to the members of the community. Coke also provided funds to individuals on an as needed basis—generally for food, medical care, school supplies or other necessities. He also held what was known as “treats,” which are community events where various artistes would perform for the community, for free, and at which necessities would be handed out to community members, such as school supplies, packages of food and holiday gifts. During the time that Coke was in control of Tivoli Gardens, he, like [his father], imposed a strict code of conduct upon members of the community, which he personally enforced. Residents of Tivoli Gardens and surrounding areas such Denham Town did not report crimes or acts of violence to the Jamaican Constabulary Force. Instead, residents of Tivoli Gardens reported such incidents to Coke directly, the witness said. Coke would listen to both parties and make a determination about who was right and who was wrong, then directing the Shooters or other senior members of the gang to impose a penalty.99
When the United States government began to push for Coke’s extradition on narcotics and firearms charges, the scene was set for the confrontation of May and June 2010, which, as described already, turned parts of the city into a war zone. Indeed, given the fragmentation of Jamaican sovereignty—the fact that the gang enclaves operated as autonomous mini-states, outside government control, and beyond the reach of the Jamaican judiciary—the operation to clear Tivoli Gardens and capture Coke had a lot more in common with warfare than with ordinary law enforcement. The distinction between war and crime, and between domestic and international affairs, had effectively disappeared in Kingston, just as it had in Mumbai.
Transnational Conflict Ecosystems
Kingston represents a third major part of the threat spectrum that will confront future cities. The Mumbai example embodies the high-end threat of terrorism or state-sponsored proxy warfare, with a fully external actor disrupting and convulsing a megacity by infesting its internal flows; Mogadishu symbolizes the low-end threat of urban ferality, with fully internal actors—the populations of excluded and marginalized districts—forcing parts of a city to de-modernize and regress, collapsing the state, then fighting over what remains. Ti
voli Gardens, on the other hand, exemplifies a hybrid internal/external pattern in which governments and nonstate armed groups develop a symbiotic relationship that both creates and destroys the physical city and generates a transnational version of a traditional protection racket.
As in the other cases, an urban metabolism approach helps us interpret the violence of Tivoli Gardens, and garrison districts like it, as a side effect of the patterns of rapid coastal urbanization, population growth, and rural-to-urban migration that affected Jamaica in the run-up to independence and in the half century since—the same patterns will affect the entire globe in the next generation. The inability of Kingston’s economic, governance, and social service systems to handle the influx of population helped create marginalized periurban slums whose residents were excluded and unemployed yet politically influential. The urban organism lacked the ability to metabolize the byproducts of these inflows, and there was insufficient carrying capacity in the system for the city to handle these byproducts. As political parties competed for the allegiance of these populations, gang warfare and conflict over residential space in Kingston created and destroyed neighborhoods, changing the very landscape of the city.
What I find interesting and distinctive about Tivoli Gardens is not that it was a slum area that fell under the control of a nonstate armed group linked to political elites. There are literally dozens of examples of this kind of district, in virtually every rapidly urbanizing city on the planet. No, what’s interesting here is the way that the Shower Posse outgrew its masters, and that this happened through a sort of unconscious, unplanned, organic process of evolution. The posse built a normative system to control inhabitants in Tivoli Gardens, but in doing so, it became part of a pattern of escalating violence that traumatized Jamaica in the 1960s and 1970s. People fled this violence (taking advantage of the fact that they lived close to Kingston’s port and airport, which were next to the garrison and which connected Jamaica to the outside world) and thus contributed to a flow of Jamaican emigrants to North America and Europe. This—entirely accidentally, as far as I can tell—created a dark network of external connections between Jamaicans abroad and the Shower Posse at home, and the posse was entrepreneurial and opportunistic enough to see this network’s potential as the basis for a transnational protection racket. Once the drug economy boomed in the eighties, the posse was able to reverse the flow of its external network, so that instead of siphoning money inward from the diaspora, the network now enabled a two-way flow—drugs flowed out, money and weapons in. Shower Posse gangs (and others originating from Kingston’s garrison districts) emerged among the Jamaican diaspora in Toronto, New York, and London, thus spreading patterns of violence and crime, which had originated in Kingston’s lack of urban capacity, to cities across the world.
Out of the Mountains Page 13
