Jamaica-Roots of Electoral Violence

...and bogus voting is rampant since intimidated polling scrutineers fail to show up on election day...

...Destabilization In its attempt to dictate the voting outcome in certain keenly contested communities, the violence that marred the 1976 election recalled the earlier experience of 1966...

...The PNP and JLP are forced to seek electoral support among the poor who constitute the most numerous voting population...

...Andrew...

...Whatever Happened to the Working Class...

...Why the barricades...

...But neither predator nor prey in this urban warfare is drawn at random...

...By the mid-70s then, political victimization in the contiguous constituencies of Western Kingston and South St...

...The politicians' successful use of the ghetto man in achieving their own opportunist ends is testimony to the desperate conditions of the sufferers...

...In keeping with recent tradition, the escalation of violence in the spring and summer of 1980 occurred in preparation for elections to be held this fall...

...Rows of shacks -some scarred by fire-lined the sidewalks, and, as all over Kingston and urban St...

...Also unprecedented are the nightly shootings at Kingston Public Hospital that have frightened off its staff and greatly limited accessibility and service...

...These lumpenproletarians and the working poor, who hold regular but quite tenuous employment, comprise Jamaica's ubiquitous sufferer population.* In the ghetto constituencies of the working poor and lumpen, the spoils of electoral war have proven an extremely effective political tool...

...There did exist an historical precedent for this move: at the time of its formation in 1938, the PNP had committed itself to the principles of democratic socialism-a programmatic derivative of Fabian socialism, i.e...

...But it also expresses - and reinforces - the sufferers' limited consciousness of the economic forces responsible for those conditions...

...But the greatly extended scale of violence and of direct party involvement in its planning, and the inclusion among its targets of individuals outside the community gang structures-"socialist" youth, that is, PNP Youth Organization members, were a new mark-suggested that political violence had assumed another function: it was widely suspected, and publicly asserted by the Prime Minister, that violence had become part of a well-orchestrated "destabilization" campaign to discredit Michael Manley's democratic-socialist administration...

...Once that decision was taken, the government moved to establish the island's first Independent Electoral Commission...

...Andrew...

...Andrew, another PNP constituency, political gunmen murdered three women, aged 55, 70 and 75...

...The targeting for extermination of the elderly and young children, almost unfathomable in a culture that reveres its old and shields its young at all costs, and of women, previously excluded from the sphere of violence, marked a critical break with past political warfare, primarily a top-ranking affair...

...Democratic socialism was the trump card played by the PNP in 1974 to consolidate its popular support before the looming economic decline had become too severe...

...The cue to renewed violence in 1976 was the start of voter registration in preparation for the pending election...

...British social democracy...

...opportunities to increase personal wealth and extend control...

...The Jamaican working class has lingered on the sidelines, assuming only the most peripheral role in the furious ideological struggle of the current period...

...The two major trade unions-the National Workers Union (NWU) and the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU), affiliated to the PNP and JLP respectively--have not even bothered to decry the recent violence...

...In 1966 and again in 1976-when armed gangs of unemployed youths raided opposing political ghetto strongholds-violence was only contained by the declaration of a State of Emergency and the temporary imprisonment of gang leaders...

...Here, the walls gave testimony for the People's National Party (PNP): "Vote PNP...

...Not infrequently, political violence was a simple extension' of pre-political gang warfare...

...However, in 1952, during the heyday of anticommunism, the Party purged its left wing, and there was no more talk of "socialism" until 1974 when a new generation of reformist politicians deemed it appropriate for public consumption...

...the project was completed and colonized by the PNP...

...Political Victimization Sufferer political violence originated in the practice of what is known in Jamaica as "political victimization": the party that controls the state apparatus distributes favors exclusively to party loyalists and regularly victimizes supporters of the opposition...

...The money behind the guns, the financial backers of efficient murder, have yet to be exposed...

...it is at core a process of sufferer fratricide...

...Close links with politicians *Currently, 31.1% of Jamaica's labor force is unemployed...

...And close links with top-ranking permit bourgeois politicians to foment an ever-more ferocious intra-class struggle that leaves un40 challenged the system that continually reproduces poverty...

...Attacks on country buses carrying rural higglers* to the urban center, and shootings in the Market vicinity itself, compelled the diversion of produce to outlying markets...

...The following morning in Jones Town, South St...

...The continuing pivotal role of sufferer violence constitutes a strong indictment of the PNP's democratic socialism...

...This process has its most systematic, and most vicious, application in the sufferer communities of the Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA), i.e...

...arms obtained through party connections were used to settle old vendettas...

...The Top-Ranking The conduit for the dispensation of party patronage is the community's top-ranking, its most notable and feared gangsters...

...The violent activity of the topranking and their underlings first assumed a political character in 1966 when both JLP and PNP candidates in Western Kingston recruited street gangs to establish and defend Party turf...

...The JLP response to the PNP's renewed ideological thrust was consistent with its long tradition of vulgar red-baiting...

...voter registration in hostile communities is hampered...

...Ten years later, the socio-economic relations that structure the ghetto community once again found expression in sufferer warfare...

...This violence constitutes a broad organized effort to undermine the Manley government...

...Kingston and urban St...

...Socialism is love...

...Andrew...

...Hence, political victimization flourishes...

...During its 10-year reign, 1962-72, the JLP succeeded in creating safe seats in the KMA -traditionally a PNP strongholdthrough its ambitious low-income housing schemes...

...In the seeming pointlessness of its new barbarism, the political violence of 1980 is carrying out a far more ambitious project than that of prior wars...

...Thus, for the first time since its emergence in 1966, political violence has been directly wedded to economic sabotage...

...Both, in fact, are quite distinctly located-in the sufferer communities composed of the working poor and the vast numbers of unemployed who hustle a precarious NACLA Reportupdate update*update update livelihood...

...The psychological impact of the Emergency was damaging to the JLP, which became identified with conspiratorial political violence...

...But the consequent demands from below confronting the victor far outstrip government spoils available for distribution to the masses...

...Invoked in October, the Emergency was hurriedly lifted in November for fear that it would jeopardize the fragile tourist industry...

...To obstruct the after-dark invasions by gunmen-among them mere boys of age 12 and 13 -from nearby communities with opposing political loyalties...

...But bipartisan appeals by Seaga and Manley for an end to the violence were an unconvincing response to the question of party complicity...

...In Western Kingston, controlled by Seaga since 1962, and South St...

...The Tivoli Gardens housing project was constructed in Western Kingston and Wilton Gardens ("Rema") in South St...

...Andrew, a PNP yeat, five gunmen invaded a four-apartment tenement, killing four women and three men...

...Ironically, it was the creation of the Commission and its commencement of enumeration (voter registration) in April that catalyzed the 1980 campaign of violence in the ghetto constituencies of Kingston and St...

...But capital accumulation has remained too limited to absorb the burgeoning urban labor force...

...Although an election is not constitutionally required until late 1981, Manley was under enormous pressure to call an early match...

...In these communities, violence only adds devastation to the already pervasive poverty...

...On July 13, in a pre-dawn attack on Greenwich Town in Southwest St...

...But as such, it is a process grafted onto, and sometimes indistinguishable from the continuing urban warfare precipitated and structured by the PNP and JLP scramble for control of particular sufferer constituencies...

...Set in motion for the first time in May 1966, it engendered a night-time guerrilla war of rival topranking and their supporters in Western Kingston that culminated in the country's first declaration of a State of Emergency...

...The 1980 locus of warring communities reflects in part, the pattern of control established in past battles...

...39update update update update "PNP enter on their own risk" afford the top-ranking access to work contracts and other party favors, i.e...

...In the upcoming contest, Edward Seaga's opposition Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) is seeking to oust Prime Minister Michael Manley's PNP-the governing party for the last eight years and the founder and custodian of Jamaica's democratic socialist experiment...

...In the summer of 1975, after Manley visited Cuba and professed admiration for some of its social experimentation, the JLP once again took up the cross...

...Even before the politicization of gangs, an explosive sub-culture of street violence had crystallized in the mushrooming sufferer communities and leading rude boys quickly assumed local positions of power...

...In the first seven months of this year, such attacks claimed the lives of more than 350 people...

...The widespread view of Seaga, who had assumed leadership of the Party in 1974, as a ruthless, power-hungry politician further SeptlOct undermined the JLP's standing, and, in December 1976, the electorate voted overwhelmingly to return the incumbent Prime Minister and the PNP to power...

...Despite its hybrid nature, political violence in 1980, as in 1966 and 1976, is a war conducted on the edges of the working class...

...Andrew, where armed gangs from "Rema," propped up by Tivoli Gardens shock troops, fought pitched battles against "Jungle" rivals...

...Nevertheless, crucial political advantages accrue to the party NACLA Reportupdate update update update that controls the streets...

...Bipartisan discussion of the project had occurred since 1977, provoked by JLP charges of rampant fraud in SeptlOct the 1976 PNP election victory...

...Rival campaign activity is virtually impossible...

...A third housing project, Arnett Gardens ("Concrete Jungle"), was under construction opposite "Rema" when the JLP suffered defeat at the polls in 1972...

...work on the construction sites, as well as the allotment of homes, was reserved for Party supporters...

...Andrew had created fiercely opposed sufferer locales in juxtaposition, each beholden to its political benefactor...

...The Plot Thickens These distinct though tangled strands of urban warfare-the scramble for control of individual communities on the one hand, and the campaign to create chaos and mass hysteria on the other-have been woven into an enormously complex and brutal 1980 scenario of violence...

...The principal arena of war was South St...

...By assigning itself spokesman for the working class and especially the sufferers, the Party successfully harnessed their anger and discontent in its own power designs...

...To stem the violent tide, the Manley government declared a State of Emergency in June, aimed chiefly at the political gunmen: all top-ranking known to the Special Branch were placed under "heavy manners" (temporarily imprisoned...

...In the KMA today, which houses almost 1/3 of Jamaica's 2.1 million people, scores of thousands-among the youth in particular-eke out a marginal existence through some combination of casual labor, family support and an ingenious array of legal and illegal hustles...

...0 During the spring and early summer, political gunmen forced the depopulation of Western Kingston's Coronation Market, the principal distribution center for food brought from the countryside...

...The island's two principal parties find themselves in a fundamental dilemma...

...Andrew, once vacant wall space was decorated with partisan political graffiti...

...Moreover, the PNP has permitted, if not pursued, a pivotal role for the sufferer in lieu of a pivotal role for the working class, that class alone whose conditions of existence in capitalist society enable it to lead the struggle for socialism...

...At a simple level, the involvement of sufferers iin a violent bid for control of urban constituencies is unbecoming a party pledged to "socialist" aims...

...It was, in fact, the many "parallels with Chile"--psychological warfare, economic sabotage and political terrorism-that raised the spectre of "destabilization" in the 1976 Jamaican elections...

...This war in which both gunman and victim are sufferers has become an integral feature of election politics in the past 15 years...

...In alliance with the private sector organizations of the national bourgeoisie, and the influential Daily Gleaner, the "Laborites" waged a vicious anticommunist crusade likened by "Socialists" to the CIA campaign in Chile that preceded the 1973 coup...

...it is a far cry from a socialist program aimed at the fundamental reorganization of state and economy to eliminate capitalist social relations...

...The emergence of this urban-industrial complex, the hub of economic expansion in Jamaica's post-war "modernization" effort, stimulated massive internal migration from the countryside in the 50s and 60s...

...Notwithstanding the traditional economism of the Jamaican trade union movement, the present political passivity of the working class reflects the absence of leadership concerned to educate and organize the class around its political objectives -and in so doing, to give working, class leadership to the sufferer communities...

...Since 1944, it has persistently charged the PNP with harboring communists...

...Having cautiously manipulated our passage between the huge mounds of garbage, we immediately came upon their reason for being: iron barricades implanted in the gutters virtually prohibited motor vehicle traffic through this PNP turf...

...In negotiations with his administration this past winter, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) insisted that such a move was crucial to economic recovery: the explosion of anti-PNP sentiment created too "uncertain" an environment for badly needed private investment...

...This disruption in the distributive system-Coronation Market was the primary source of foodstuffs for the urban poor and the chief supplier for urban higglers-vastly magnified the a!ready severe food problems stemming from Jamaica's foreign exchange shortage and the speculative machinations of corporate food distributors...

...Andrew-currently under siege...

...42 essential social services...

...The PNP's reliance on sufferer youth as the bulwark of its popular support exposes the PNP's democratic socialism as a program aimed at democratic reform of the capitalist system...

...Random" terror is aimed at both creating mass fear for life and limb and disrupting "*Market women who buy and sell food produce...

...Andrew, a PNP stronghold, internal violence is limited, But the top-ranking in these constituencies are expected to assist the invasion or defense of other constituencies-like West Central and Southwest St...

...In February, the PNP yielded, promising elections in October (although the Party was soon to abandon negotiations with the IMF...

...Having recognized the advantage in controlling the streets, party politicans sought and found, in the very structure of the ghetto, the mechanism that made control possible...

...And in Fletcher's Land in West Central Kingston young children num41update update update update bered among the dead...

...The unprecedented level of violence in the new battle zones bears witness to the incredible arsenal of automatic weapons-often more sophisticated that that readily available to the police-now servicing certain gangs...