Dudus. This week's events in Kingston, Jamaica illustrate perfectly the corrosive nature of the trade in illegal drugs. Dudus had wealth to spare. He filled the vacuum that the Jamaican Government ignored: the provision of basic social services to a few (impossible to know) who live in the township that surround his homebase. This benefaction bought Christopher "Dudus" Coke champion status amongst a community of Tivoli Gardens.
The violence since the attempt to detain Dudus is directed at the state because it is his drug money that has injected some respite into this desperate and ignored place. A local police stations burn, Jamaicans island wide live in fear of more widespread turmoil. But how and why can the actions of one man whom lives outside the system pose such a profound threat to the most powerful state in the Caribbean?
Dudus follows Escobar. These drug lords are the beggar princes, the Robin Hoods of today. They rob - or sell coke - to the rich and give - a little, to a few - of the poor. In cold terms, his purchasing power in Tivoli Gardens outweighed that of the Golding government. He lives outside the law and the influence he bought and directs over his community threatens because it is meaningful to the many for whom the state doesn't provide protection, education or dignity.
Dudus is wanted for drugs and weapons smuggling. Perversely his ascent has been enabled by the boundless profitability of the drugs trade: a product (coke) in high demand in a rich marketplace subject to highly restricted supply through narrowly limited channels. Every channel to the USA is fought over fiercely and Jamaica has long been an entrepot in the cocaine trade. As under Manley and Seago in the 70s, when Jamaica was rocked by a heady mix of political and trade violence at the dawn of this generation long cocaine boom, the narcodollars seem again to have blurred the boundaries between political and criminal control of territories. One uses their money and muscle to take control of communities, the other provides the security from prosecution and thus the conditions in which the cash can flood in. And, evidently, the deal has gone sour.
The real problem is not in Jamaica or Mexico or Colombia. It is an American problem - at least as far as Jamaica is concerned. The drugs flow one way in the Americas and the Caribbean: north. The USA’s failure to solve its addiction to coke is ripping deeper and deeper wounds into its neighbours. California may tinker with legislation prohibiting cannabis but similar action on coke is unthinkable. While most agree that both supply and demand must be addressed if cocaine use is going to disappear in the USA , it’s the criminality of the supply end that is so disrupting her neighbours. Will the threats to America’s trade and social interests posed by the seething instability in her backyard prompt Obama to scale back overseas intervention against the traffickers in favour of a vigorous crackdown at home?
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