A Massacre in Jamaica
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A REPORTER AT LARGE A MASSACRE IN JAMAICA After the United States demanded the extradition of a drug lord, a bloodletting ensued. BY MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ ost cemeteries replace the illusion were preparing for war with the Jamai- told a friend who was worried about an of life’s permanence with another can state. invasion, “Tivoli is the baddest place in illusion:M the permanence of a name On Sunday, May 23rd, the Jamaican the whole wide world.” carved in stone. Not so May Pen Ceme- police asked every radio and TV station in tery, in Kingston, Jamaica, where bodies the capital to broadcast a warning that n Monday, May 24th, Hinds woke are buried on top of bodies, weeds grow said, in part, “The security forces are ap- to the sound of sporadic gunfire. over the old markers, and time humbles pealing to the law-abiding citizens of FreemanO was gone. Hinds anxiously di- even a rich man’s grave. The most for- Tivoli Gardens and Denham Town who alled his cell phone and reached him at saken burial places lie at the end of a dirt wish to leave those communities to do so.” the house of a friend named Hugh Scully, path that follows a fetid gully across two The police sent buses to the edge of the who lived nearby. Freeman was calm, and bridges and through an open meadow, neighborhood to evacuate residents to Hinds, who had not been outside for far enough south to hear the white noise temporary accommodations. But only a three days, assumed that it was safe to go coming off the harbor and the highway. few boarded, and the buses drove away and buy food. Fifty-two concrete posts are set into the nearly empty. Late in the morning, she left her flat. earth in haphazard groups of two and Marjorie Hinds, who supported her It was a clear day, and the trade winds three. Each bears a small disk of black family by selling groceries from a coming off the harbor eased the sun’s diz- metal and a stencilled number. The ma- wooden shed, was one of the residents zying heat. A white surveillance plane jority of these mark the unclaimed dead who ignored the warning. She was was circling Kingston; a blue seal on the from the last days of May, 2010, when thirty-seven years old and took pride in tail identified it as belonging to the U.S. the police and the Army assaulted the her clothes, her cooking, her manicured Department of Homeland Security. Ar- neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens, in nails, and her ironed hair. Hinds lived mored personnel carriers and soldiers from West Kingston. The rest mark the graves with her boyfriend, Radcliffe (Mickey) the Army, or Jamaica Defence Force, and of paupers. Freeman, and their two children, ele- the police, or Jamaica Constabulary Force, The trouble that led to the Tivoli ven-year-old Nikeita and eight-year-old were massing to the south and east, out- Gardens deaths began in August, 2009, Mickey, Jr. Their apartment was on the side the ring of barricades. when the United States government re- ground floor of Building Two, just At 11 A.M., gunfire erupted as the se- quested the extradition of Christopher north of Coke’s headquarters, in the curity forces breached the barricades. Ev- (Dudus) Coke. In the U.S., Coke stood area of Tivoli known as Java. Freeman eryone in the street around Building Two charged in federal court of trafficking in had been working in the U.S. when, in scrambled for cover. Many ran to the narcotics and firearms; in Jamaica, he April, Hinds asked him to return home. ground-floor flat of an elderly woman was known as the country’s most pow- Freeman had played on the same street- named Murline Campbell, Hinds’s neigh- erful “don,” a community leader who corner soccer team as Coke when they bor. (“When they come to my house, they also runs a criminal enterprise. He lived were children, but their lives followed are all family,” Campbell said later.) Sud- in Tivoli, where everyone called him very different paths. From 2007 to 2008, denly, a J.D.F. helicopter appeared over- “president,” and, since 2001, Jamaican Freeman worked on the completion of head, and Hinds was struck by an explo- police had not been able to enter the a new U.S. Embassy compound in sion. Her yellow shorts were charred black neighborhood without his permission. Kingston, a job that required his name and her hip and buttocks were severely Coke was so powerful that Prime Min- to be checked against lists of known burned. She fell in the middle of the ister Bruce Golding spent months re- criminals maintained by the Jamaican street, and blood flowed from gashes on sisting the extradition order. But in early police. Contractors in Kingston and the her legs and face. May, 2010, under heavy international United States knew him to be a hard- A neighbor ran to Scully’s house, political pressure, Golding authorized working carpenter and a family man. where Freeman was tending to a young Coke’s arrest. In response, Coke con- That day in May, Hinds thought man who had been injured in an explo- verted Tivoli and nearby Denham about leaving Tivoli, but she told herself sion nearby. “Marjorie dead!” he cried. Town into a personal fortress. Barri- that anyone who fled would have to live Freeman found Hinds lying unconscious cades of rubble and barbed wire sprang with the shame of having abandoned the where she had fallen. He picked her up up across major intersections. Armed community. Neighbors might label her an and rushed to Campbell’s apartment, sentries took up posts around Tivoli’s informer. She also didn’t think that the where his daughter was hiding under perimeter. It looked as though Coke security forces would actually enter. Hinds Campbell’s bed. Freeman laid Hinds BY OWEN SMITH ILLUSTRATIONS 62 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 12, 2011 TNY—2011_12_12—PAGE 62—133SC. Marjorie Hinds was out buying food in Tivoli Gardens on the morning of May 24, 2010, when the security forces moved in. TNY—2011_12_12—PAGE 63—133SC.—LIVE ART R21584—#2 PAGE—REALIGNED CAPTION WITH ILLUSTRATION down on the floor with her head resting ten or more times, according to a Jamai- DVDs are sold on rows of tarps among in his lap. She came to for a moment and can doctor familiar with the postmortem. knotted plastic bags of peanuts, curry, and asked for water, and Campbell brought No fewer than seventy-four people seasoned salt. Early in the morning, the some. The men sat silently in chairs. The were killed in the operation to arrest Chris- sound of creaking wood fills the air as the women cracked open the windows and topher Coke and extradite him to the pushcart men guide their barrows to the peeked out into the street. The gunfire United States—one soldier and seventy- market. To the west is the highway lead- seemed to be getting closer. three civilians. Among the dead were at ing to the city’s main port, where cranes Four or five hours later, Campbell’s least three women and one United States are forever assembling and dismantling door was kicked down and about ten sol- citizen. Three more residents of Tivoli walls of steel shipping containers. In diers burst into the apartment. They carried Gardens, including a sixteen-year-old boy, Tivoli, blue fifty-five-gallon shipping bar- M-16 assault rifles and wore the camou- are missing and presumed dead. The Ja- rels, with addresses that indicate they once flage uniforms of the Army. They had yel- maican security forces say that many of the travelled from London or Miami, are low “Police Line” tape tied around their dead were armed gunmen allied with repurposed as hampers, barbecues, rented arms. The soldiers carried Hinds out to a Coke, but they recovered only six guns storage units, and garbage cans. In May of jeep, which took her to Kingston Public during the assault. According to extensive 2010, some were filled with sand to make Hospital. interviews with Tivoli Gardens residents the foundations of the barricades. At around four o’clock, the soldiers led and Jamaican officials, the resistance that Tivoli was designed in the early nine- the rest of the apartment’s occupants to a the security forces encountered in Tivoli teen-sixties, after an American-born, shaded area between the building and the was quickly overpowered. Coke and most Harvard-educated sociologist named Ed- street. On a normal day, young men of the gunmen are believed to have fled ward Seaga visited Back-o-Wall, a stretch would gather there to sit in high wooden when the raid began, escaping through a of wasteland beside the Kingston harbor. chairs, play dice, and smoke marijuana. network of gullies and sewers. The rest of The houses there were made of old match- One soldier walked around with a plastic the battle was not a firefight so much as a boards, sacking, and mud. Some had bag, collecting cell phones. Campbell’s police operation. The security forces floors of pressed dung. There was no daughter, Ayoni, remembers the soldiers rounded up residents and conducted plumbing in Back-o-Wall, no electricity, punching and kicking the men and older searches from house to house. Unarmed and little work. boys. Nikeita began to cry. “What kind of men of fighting age were interrogated on Seaga, a shy, cerebral man with the work you do, man?” one soldier asked the spot, and more than a thousand were aristocratic airs and light skin favored by Freeman, whose shirt was stained with sent to detention centers, from which they the Jamaican electorate, ran for office as a Hinds’s blood.