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

by Ioan Grillo

  “The request did not comply with internal laws,” Golding said in the chamber. “It is not a matter as to whether the (justice) minister is inclined to authorize the extradition. It is a question of whether the minister would be authorizing something that she knows to be in violation of the law.”2

  Opposition MPs asked whether Golding had met with Dudus about the case. This sparked a shouting match across the floor and a denial from Golding.

  As the government continued to stall into the New Year, the United States turned up the pressure. In February, a Jamaican minister arrived at Kingston airport to travel to Los Angeles, only to find his visa canceled. A week later, the U.S. State Department issued a damning report on Jamaica.

  “Delays in proceeding with the significant extradition request for a major alleged narcotics and firearms trafficker who is reported to have ties to the ruling Jamaica Labor Party, and subsequent delays in other extradition requests, have called into question Kingston’s commitment to law enforcement cooperation with the US,” it said.3

  The straw that broke the camel’s back was the so-called Manatt-Dudus scandal. The PNP bench broke the story in Parliament in March 2010. Even for a country used to political-gangster links, it was shocking.

  Golding’s government, it emerged, was not only stalling on the Dudus arrest in Jamaica; his Labor Party had hired top U.S. lobbying firm Manatt, Phelps and Phillips to petition Washington to back off on the extradition. Manatt, whose staff includes a former White House chief of staff and senior congressmen, were to charge four hundred thousand dollars for the effort. The laborites had already paid almost fifty thousand dollars.

  What’s more, there were questions over where this money came from. In a later inquiry, investigators asked Golding if Dudus himself footed the bill. Golding denied that but could not give a source of the funds.

  “The society was on the brink of becoming a narco state,” says Bunting, who was shadow security minister at the time. “The Jamaican government, or the party in power, was lobbying the U.S. administration to not enforce an extradition request for a notorious criminal kingpin. There just came a point when we couldn’t swallow that as a country.”

  As damning evidence piled up, Golding capitulated. The warrant was issued to arrest the President and Jamaica held its breath.

  CHAPTER 25

  When the 2010 Kingston unrest flared up, the BBC’s Nick Davis found himself in the resort city of Montego Bay. It was the Sunday of a long weekend and he had gone to a friend’s party; it’s the curse of journalists to have to run out of festivities to cover breaking news. He jumped on a plane to Kingston, but his flight got delayed.

  “The captain came over the speaker and said, ‘Listen. We may have to turn back as we are getting reports of a heavy-duty armament near the airport.’ It was a military grade fifty cal that was in the hands of people aligned to Tivoli Gardens. They had seen drones or aircraft flying over and decided to take potshots at them.”

  Over the following days, airlines canceled planes from the United States, Canada, and Britain to Jamaica, possibly on instructions from the Jamaican armed forces. However, Davis’s flight eventually got clearance to land, with no bullets coming their way. As Davis got a taxi and raced home to get his equipment, he ran into more trouble.

  “There was a car driving directly at us on the same side of the road. We realized that we could see police in shooting positions, and gunmen were firing across the road directly at us. As they say in America, ‘We flipped the bitch,’ or did a backward U-turn, and got the hell out of Dodge.”

  One of the gunmen confronting the police in Kingston was Kami, the veteran Shower Posse enforcer from Southside. The President ordered every gun on the street, he said. From teenage shottas to seasoned killers, all came out for the ultimate fight.

  “We gathered in Southside. There was about fifty of us from the garrison. I had a Glock. Other people had all different guns, AK-47s, Desert Eagles, Uzis.

  “All the ghettoes were arming up. Everybody was ready to fight for Dudus. But it wasn’t just about him. It was a fight against the system that has never really helped us.

  “Groups of ladies were blocking off the roads. They were like the first line of defense because the police would be more hesitant to shoot at them. We organized to take the police from behind. We did well and pinned down a bunch of officers. We thought for a moment we could actually win this thing. But that was just crazy.

  “The soldiers came out and it was a different story. The real problem was that we ran out of ammo. This wasn’t like the gunfights that we were used to. This went on for days.

  “Then they started firing mortars and shit at us. We couldn’t keep up. When they broke into Tivoli, it was big massacre. A lot of my friends died.”

  When soldiers fired these mortar rounds, they were being watched—or assisted—by a U.S. spy plane flying overhead. A local photographer caught pictures of the white P3 Orion circling Kingston. This is likely what the Shower gunmen were firing at with the fifty cal, causing the delay on the plane.

  Journalist Mattathias Schwartz of the New Yorker filed a Freedom of Information request that confirmed the spook jet was in the air that day. U.S. embassy officials reveal in e-mails that the plane had been approved at least four days before the unrest erupted.1

  On board, operators shot video with super zoom lenses of the action on the streets, Schwartz discovered. That film could reveal much about whether soldiers fired mortars into housing complexes and carried out extrajudicial executions, which residents of Tivoli claim. But the video has never been released. It lies somewhere in the annals of the U.S. security apparatus.

  Bunting, who later became the Minister of Public Security, was watching the action with his fellow politicians. He describes how shocked they were when gunmen went on the offensive against police stations. It was a final wake-up call to how dangerous the don situation had got, he tells me.

  “It is like they were challenging the state. They were trying to signal, ‘Look if you think this is bad, try and attack Tivoli and see what is going to happen.’”

  The military reaction has been fiercely debated since. Soldiers used artillery and fired thousands of rounds leading to the seventy-three deaths. Many Jamaican politicians from both political parties defend the troops, saying the challenge justified the force. Bunting is among them.

  “The military have confirmed they fired mortar rounds into an open field, primarily as a kind of shock and awe tactic. A large quantity of gunmen fled because they had never encountered this type of weaponry.”

  I ask him if soldiers messed up when they broke through the barricades and got inside Tivoli. Only one soldier died alongside seventy-three civilians, I point out. He still defends their actions.

  “It was really a nightmare scenario. They had to storm a residential area with up to four hundred armed men but they probably made the best of it. As well as the soldier who died, nineteen soldiers were shot and injured. They got rushed away by CASEVACS (casualty evacuation), which saved their lives.

  “And they are a highly trained force. This will be our elite, the equivalent of our special forces. Because of the body armor, you don’t expect the same level of casualties as you expect against an irregular army that is not going to be as well trained, not going to be as disciplined, not going have the same backup.”

  On the other side, Tivoli residents describe a hell on earth as soldiers swept through. Any man or boy was a target, they say. Many of the victims were not Shower gunmen but laborers, janitors, students. The soldiers marched victims into corridors of the tower blocks and executed them in cold blood, they say. The army fired the mortars directly into residential areas.

  Public Defender Earl Witter, an independent commissioner appointed by the Jamaican parliament, visited Tivoli shortly after the firing stopped and also described a scene of carnage.

  Tivoli Gardens bore classic features of a war zone. There were burnt-out houses and apartments and unmistakable
signs of the explosion of incendiary devices, described by residents as “bombs.” There were many blood-spattered interior concrete walls and floors and aluminum windows shot out or riddled with bullet holes indicating inward heavy weapon fire. Exterior walls of buildings also bore physical indicia of high-powered weapon fire. Frightened and traumatized residents (children, women and aging men but mainly women) cowered in fear.2

  Parliament assigned the Public Defender to write an extensive report, which was finally released in April 2013. It said the evidence suggested “that there was indeed excessive or undue resort to lethal force by those (security) forces.” It also hiked the death toll to seventy-six civilians, with a further five missing. The report noted accusations of extrajudicial executions in forty-three of the cases.

  Witter called for an inquiry similar to that conducted by the British government over its “Bloody Sunday” massacre in Northern Ireland, which led to a public apology for soldiers killing civilians. Witter’s report finishes with an “epilogue” talking about the wider problems around the Tivoli siege. Citing Bob Marley, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, it uses poetic language, surprising for a parliamentary report, if fascinating.

  Love bespeaks respect—the great yearning of the hapless horde of Black urban poor. It is they who bore the brunt of atrocities said to have been committed during the State of Emergency; they who, in their unrequited yearnings, turned to “Dudus” as “godfather.” They need purposeful and legitimate help to help themselves; to be empowered to help others and thereby help to secure the nation’s future.

  The alleged perpetrators—rank and file police and foot soldiers—spring from the same ethnic and social class. They have been recruited from that class for over one hundred years. The deviants amongst those Forces are not, (because they do not consider themselves) restrained by the Constitution, the law or rules of engagement. They constitute another minority whose elements continually embarrass and shame their conscientious colleagues by their misconduct. They are a minority who need to be reined in. They need to be converted to the transformative call of One Love.3

  The Tivoli massacre exemplifies dilemmas at the heart of the crime wars. In theory, the security forces stormed the garrison to search for a suspect. But they clearly saw their mission as regaining territory that had fallen outside the control of the state. All residents became enemy combatants to the marauding troops.

  The evidence suggests that many innocent people were killed on those days. But does the blame lie with individual soldiers or the government who ordered them to storm a crowded ghetto? Looking back, it seems inevitable that sending in troops, knowing their history, would lead to a bloodbath. Yet, the Shower Posse represented an extraordinary criminal threat that clearly challenged the state and that society could not ignore.

  Dudus’s political racketeering also illustrates a central feature of organized crime power in the Americas. The political connections of the Shower in Jamaica are relatively transparent. But gangs and governments across the hemisphere nurture exactly the same type of relations, albeit in a more hidden way. An area to watch closely is the practice of controlling voting bases as done in Jamaica. There is evidence that gangsters are doing the same thing in parts of Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Brazil. Selling votes could be a significant racket in the years to come. It creates the specter of more governments beholden to the dark interests of those that place them in power.

  At Dudus’s trial in New York, his lawyers fought hard to disqualify the phone taps and protected witnesses.

  “I don’t know these witnesses,” Dudus told the court. “They seem to know more about me than I know about me.”

  When the judge ruled they would be allowed to stand, the President pleaded guilty. Still, he appealed for leniency, citing how he handed out schoolbooks and took care of the elderly.

  “I’m not going to stand in this court and tell you I’m a saint, that I’ve never done anything wrong in my life,” Dudus told the judge before sentencing. “But these negative things that they are talking about me does not describe the true person that I really am … I’m a good person. I’ve done a lot of good deeds to help a lot of persons in my community.”

  Judge Patterson conceded the President had done some worthy charity work. But he said it didn’t make up for his crimes. He gave Dudus twenty-three years, the maximum for the trafficking charges.

  While he was in prison, Dudus’s mother became sick, losing a leg and going blind. Sitting in his cell, the President penned a letter to her, which he wrote on a pink card, sprinkled with glitter and accented by a ribbon.

  I need you to keep on staying strong and to continue to pray for me, I’m staying strong for you and the rest of the family and I’m also praying for all of you. I don’t want you to worry yourself too much about me, just keep on praying and the Almighty God will take care of us and grant us the desires of our hearts and the requests of our lips …

  I know how much you love and care for me and that you miss me very much and that you are really hurting because of what I am going through, but with the help of the Almighty God, everything is going to be all right soon. We cannot change the past but we have to look for a brighter future …

  For the care that you give me from the day I was born until now, by letting you know that I love you world without end. I love you, ma, and miss you very much, you are so special, precious and dear to my heart, and you are always in my … thoughts. Love you ma, forever, non-stop.4

  The letter arrived in Kingston the day after Dudus’s mother passed away.

  Prime Minister Golding held on to power until November 2011. Just before a new election, he resigned, conceding the Dudus affair had taken its toll. The PNP won a landslide victory against Golding’s laborites.

  Kami said that many Shower affiliates refused to vote. They saw the Tivoli siege as a betrayal. But they couldn’t bear to vote for the hated PNP, so they boycotted the election.

  Bunting became security minister under the new PNP. When I interviewed him, he said he hoped the Dudus affair would finally break the relation between politicians and gangsters. “Now, they have to understand the political cost of this alliance is greater than the benefits,” he said.

  Following the Tivoli incursion, police charged over a hundred Shower members. Bunting says that it was their prosecution that led to the most significant drop in homicides in Jamaica in recent years. The number of murders on the island fell from 1,682 in 2009—when Dudus and his posse were at large—to 1,133 in 2011—when they were behind bars, a reduction of almost a third.

  However, in 2013, the murder rate swung up again, with over twelve hundred homicides. Bunting says violence rebounded after new cliques formed in Tivoli and fought among themselves for control of the Shower empire.

  I talk to shottas from one of these factions when I sit in the Tivoli apartments hearing the raindrops beat on the roof and watching the gangsters flash their pistols. They moan that without the President’s firm hand, the violence could spiral out of control. Simon, the lieutenant, says that “bad men” are raping and killing without being disciplined.

  “Tings cyan [Things can’t] go on like this.” Simon sighs. “Normality, it have to return.”

  Normality for Simon is having one strong gangster warlord running the area, a state of affairs he has known almost his entire life.

  PART IV

  He Who Holds the Word:

  Northern Triangle

  Purging his shame for being born,

  OD’d, was stabbed and shot,

  wanting to believe he was bad.

  It was better than falling into darkness

  where nothing existed but more darkness.

  He wanted to exist even as dirt, no good dirt.

  —JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA, “EL GATO”

  CHAPTER 26

  In the summer of 2014, as President Obama wrestled with the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East and the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, he got slapped by a crisis on
his doorstep. On the United States’ southern border, agents were detaining unaccompanied children without papers in skyrocketing numbers. Border patrol officers threw the kids into immigration centers to be processed. But the sheer volume of children soon overwhelmed the facilities, especially in the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the largest number surged over the river. In response, Homeland Security bused them to 150 centers across the United States, from New York to small towns in Ohio. It also opened a temporary shelter in the Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio.

  When reporters turned up at Lackland, guards wouldn’t let them inside to see how the thousand or so children were living. But a worker leaked a cell phone photo of boys piled on top of each other on a concrete floor, many teenagers, some mere infants, their eyes staring calmly, revealing faces of struggle, resilience. Pasted across the net and flashing up on TV bulletins, it became an iconic image of U.S. border history, like those of Ellis Island in 1890 or the Mariel boatlift from Cuba in 1980.

  By the end of the 2014 fiscal year, agents had detained a record 67,339 “unaccompanied alien children.” It was a quadrupling of the number since 2011. The highest number came from Honduras, with 18,244 children, a rise of eighteen times in three years.1 Guatemala and El Salvador followed.

  Obama finally released a memorandum conceding there was “an urgent humanitarian situation requiring a unified and coordinated federal response.” However, congressmen erupted into heated discussion about what that response should be. Immigration control advocates clamored to change the law to make it easier to kick the kids out. Border agents could send a Mexican child home right away because he was from a neighboring country. But a 2008 law ruled that Central Americans had to be handed to social services and their cases processed through court. With so many arriving, these cases could take years.