Out of the Mountains (17 page)

I just used the term “garrison community” in reference to Mogadishu. This expression is widely used in the Caribbean, on the other side of the world from Somalia, to describe the informal systems of security and order that have emerged in marginalized urban settlements in Jamaica. One district of Kingston—the coastal slum known as Tivoli Gardens—exemplifies the threats and challenges of yet another part of the spectrum that will affect the urbanized, coastal, connected environment of the future.

III. Kingston: Garrison Communities and Nested Networks

6:32 p.m., Monday May 24, 2010

U.S. Embassy, Kingston, Jamaica

As the sun set on a long day, Isaiah Parnell, chargé d'affaires at the U.S. embassy in Kingston, sent an Immediate cable to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington, D.C., with copies to the Central Intelligence Agency, Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Justice, Special Operations Command, Southern Command, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and U.S. embassies in Ottawa and London. His cable read, in part:

At midday on May 24 the Jamaican Defence Force (JDF) launched an all-out assault on the heavily-defended Tivoli Gardens “Garrison” stronghold controlled by Christopher “Dudas” Coke, the alleged overlord of the “Shower Posse” international crime syndicate who is wanted to face extradition to the USA on drugs and weapons trafficking charges. . . . The JDF fired mortars and then used bulldozers to break through heavy barricades which Coke's supporters had erected to block entry to the fortified enclave. As of 6:00 p.m. May 24, heavy fighting continued in Tivoli Gardens, and a fire was burning out of control in the adjacent Coronation Market. The JDF plans to continue operations through the night. Large numbers of women and children have fled the area. . . .

Elsewhere in the metropolitan area, armed gangs attacked police stations, overturned vehicles, and erected roadblocks. The Hannah Town Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) station was destroyed by fire, and police were pinned down by gunfire at their Denham Town station. Armed gang members also surrounded and threatened to overrun the central police compound and central lock-up. In response to the escalating civil unrest, Prime Minister (PM) Bruce Golding declared a limited state of emergency, which took effect at 6:00 p.m. May 23 and is expected to last a month.
78

We've already seen how the Mumbai raiders nested within licit flows and illicit networks in the complex littoral of Karachi and Mumbai, and how Somali militias nested in the maze of a feral city, using adaptive swarming tactics to confront an American force that had confidently ignored the spatial and temporal flow of Mogadishu. A different example of this nested-network phenomenon—and one that illuminates another part of the urban threat spectrum we have been describing—is the pattern of criminal control within marginalized urban settlements such as Tivoli Gardens. Local nonstate armed groups may gain control of these districts and use their broader affiliations—both with offshore networks and with leaders at the city or national level—to nest within larger networks for protection.

As Parnell's Emergency Action Committee was meeting at the embassy on the night of May
24
, Kingston's waterfront was burning. Dozens of small groups of fighters from Coke's Shower Posse and from neighboring allied groups were swarming toward the scene of the action—establishing barricades, ambushing police and military vehicles, and creating blocking positions to deny the government advance. Flatbed trucks belonging to Coke's construction company (whose business was built on government contracts gained through his relationships with city politicians) had hauled in building materials to construct the barricades and fortified positions that were now under attack by the government's own forces. Police stations, cars, and houses were burning, and a heavy firefight between police, army troops, and gang members with military-grade weapons (including AK-
47
assault rifles, machine guns, and .
50
-caliber heavy sniper rifles) was raging throughout Tivoli Gardens and the surrounding settlements. Coke's supporters had taken over the Kingston Public Hospital, violence had spilled into half a dozen districts across the city, and roads and airports were closed, cutting Kingston off from the outside world. Schools and businesses were shuttered and would stay closed for weeks. Kingston's hospitals were treating dozens of injured civilians, many of whom would later die from gunshot wounds. The Jamaican government was mortaring, bulldozing, and assaulting its own capital, and the city was pushing back.

According to the U.S. embassy cable, Kingston had become a war zone in the course of enforcing a United States extradition request against a single international drug trafficker. Coke's network operated in New York, Toronto, London, and farther afield. Parnell had sent copies of his cable to the CIA and DEA because United States agencies were intimately involved in this operation: as Parnell's team was composing the message, a Department of Homeland Security surveillance aircraft was flying over Tivoli Gardens, recording live video of the attack.
79
JDF major Wayne Robinson's master's thesis, completed in
2008
at the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College at Q
 
uantico, Virginia, explored the application of American counterinsurgency tactics from Afghanistan to counter Jamaican organized crime: it became a key source for the JDF operation, which planners conceptualized as urban counterinsurgency.
80
DEA advisers, U.S. and Canadian Special Operations Forces, and U.S. surveillance drones had all helped prepare Jamaican forces for the operation or were supporting it in real time.
81

This assistance came with strong international pressure on a Jamaican government that was extremely reluctant to comply with the American extradition request. Prime Minister Golding had already delayed action for more than nine months, claiming that the evidence against Coke had been obtained illegally through unauthorized U.S. surveillance of Coke's electronic communications. Golding, leader of the center-right Jamaican Labor Party (JLP), represented Tivoli Gardens in parliament and allegedly maintained a long-standing and close relationship with Coke and, before him, with his father and brother. The Shower Posse kept the peace, regulated criminal activity, and mobilized the district's residents to support the JLP in elections, making this a supersafe JLP constituency. In turn, JLP politicians such as Golding ensured that the district received lucrative government contracts and public services.

In the event, Christopher Coke escaped arrest during the invasion of his district, known as Operation Garden Parish, but the military occupation of Tivoli Gardens, under a national state of emergency, went on for weeks. It left parts of the city in ruins, disrupted Kingston's port, railway, and airport (all located close to Tivoli Gardens and all—especially the port—influenced by Coke's network), led to more than five hundred arrests, displaced thousands of local inhabitants, killed at least seventy-three civilians and six police and military personnel, and injured many more.
82
The upheaval cost Golding his position and contributed to the JLP's landslide December
2011
election defeat at the hands of its archrival, the left-wing People's National Party (PNP). Christopher Coke was eventually captured a month after the start of Operation Garden Parish. Police found him hiding in the trunk of a car while attempting to flee the area, which had been cordoned off and subjected to weeks of strict curfews, searches, and police and military saturation patrols. Coke was extradited under heavy guard, tried in New York on weapons and drugs charges, found guilty, and on June
8
,
2012
, sentenced in federal court to twenty-three years in jail.
83

But to frame this series of events solely as a law enforcement action to arrest an international drug trafficker is entirely to misunderstand what happened in Tivoli Gardens throughout the summer of
2010
. Likewise, to characterize the Shower Posse solely as the U.S. embassy cable did—as an “international criminal syndicate”—is to describe only a small part of the group's role. The Shower Posse was (and is) both local and transnational, a nonstate armed group that nests within a marginalized and poor but tightly knit local community in Kingston, yet is connected both to the Jamaican government and to a far broader international network. It was and is as much a communitarian militia, social welfare organization, grassroots political mobilization tool, dispute resolution and mediation mechanism, and local informal justice enforcement system as it is an extortion racket or a transnational drug trafficking organization. Drug trafficking doesn't define what an organization like Coke's group
is
; it's just one of the things the group
does
. To grasp this deeper background, we first have to understand the origins of Tivoli Gardens and the other garrison districts of Kingston.

What Goes Around Comes Around

In the words of one of Coke's henchmen at his subsequent trial,
garrison district
is the Jamaican term for an urban or periurban “neighborhood whose members are armed by the leader of the community, and also a neighborhood that is loyal to and affiliated with one of the major Jamaican political parties . . . in the case of Tivoli Gardens, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).”
84
Tivoli Gardens is the oldest of Kingston's garrisons, and its history shows how Jamaican clientelism, political populism, gang violence, and international connectedness have shaped (indeed, in large measure created) the very urban landscape and flow of the city, and have in turn been influenced by that landscape.

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
1970
s, 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.