Alfred Dawes | The narco tales

The excitement generated by the recent scuttling of a deregistered small plane in Rocky Point was quickly replaced by residents’ outrage towards the authorities who were seen to be targeting one household in the community.

The placards and interviews were interesting, to say the least. They accused the authorities of failing to secure the area that was accessed by one road in and out, but instead focused their attention on one house belonging to a man they claimed has been repeatedly harassed by the police. Interestingly enough, one irate resident said the police never asked them anything and they could have given the names of the boys who put the crew in the Voxy and took them away. The landing and protests are a timely reminder of the continued presence of the narco trade in the era of the scammer.

There have always been stories told about cocaine being trans-shipped through Rocky Point and Vernamfield in Clarendon. Fishermen who found lost packages became legends because of their new-found wealth, with similar stories echoed across Jamaica. In Portland, I was regaled with stories about some area boys who found coke that washed up on a beach. Within days, all the car lots and furniture stores were emptied. The spate of accidents that followed attested to the fact that driver’s licences could just as easily be bought as cars. Outside of the frivolity of new money, the drug trade has changed the fortunes of many Jamaicans. Some friends have shared how they had their start in trafficking but were smart enough to put the money to good use. What? You say the goodly doctor has friends who were involved in drugs?!!! Well, you do too, but they don’t feel close enough to open up to you.

Spin-off Businesses

The narco trade has given birth to a wide array of businesses spanning construction, transportation, food, hospitality, retail and allegedly even the financial sector. Stories abound of businessmen turning narco dollars into businesses that are now household names.

Narco dollars provided cheap money to expand businesses and allowed one the financial cushion to take on risky endeavours. And just as the bootleggers and rum runners of old, they eventually became accepted in polite society.

The wealth of President John F. Kennedy is allegedly built on prohibition-era smuggling. Subsequent generations barely acknowledge their ancestors’ underground activities that afforded them the great distance between them and first-generation hustlers. They turn up their noses at the thought of townspeople protesting for an alleged associate or active participant in the narco game. As with everything else in Jamaica, the colour and class prejudice rears its ugly head in the acceptance of reformed. Traffickers are caricatured as area leaders who use their wealth to arm area boys to wage perpetual wars for turf. That is the old straw man that we must imprison and extradite to solve our crime problems.

One of the Robin Hood-type tales about Pablo Escobar is that he used to give out wads of cash to the people of poor neighbourhoods. This made him a paternal figure to those who became dependent on him to support their families. In tough inner-city communities, this similarly endears traffickers to the residents who will support them if they are in danger of arrest. On the flip side, the police can’t seem to catch a break in convincing residents that it’s a good thing to hand over evidence so these ‘bad men’ can be removed from their communities. In many tough communities, those who ‘go farin and buss big’ are looked upon with admiration and pride. And with the charity that befalls the community, how then can you convince them that what is legal is also what is right in their reality? The converse is true whenever those who made it move uptown where their modus operandi nouveau riche irks legacy owners and those who made it the upright way. For the invaded, nothing would be sweeter than a predawn raid to prove to their kids that crime doesn’t pay.

Geographical Blessings

The geographical blessings that make Jamaica the perfect place to become a logistics hub have been exploited from the age of exploration to this moment. That plus the complexities of the normalisation of the drug trade makes it impossible to win a war on drugs. For the most part, the drugs that pass through Jamaica hardly leave much evidence of the addictions and other consequences seen in destination countries. For that reason, some see the trade as reparations. Indeed, the economies of Jamaica and The Bahamas owe a lot to the burgeoning drug trade in the 1980s. We are not alone. By most reports, the city of Miami was built with drug money. In South America, this is even more so. The effects on the South Americans have, however, been far more sinister. Their narco gangs wage war for lucrative fields, factories and transport corridors. Wars on the state may have been undeclared or via outright civil war as in Colombia. The plane crash was more of an entertaining story rather than one that has been met with outright condemnation. Horror has been replaced with curiosity as to who they were working with locally. After all, this is different from the next generation of Caribbean pirates, the scammers, who slaughter each other without respect for the established old order and whose investments in guns and bodyguards threatens us non-participants. They, my friend, are the new straw men.

n Dr Alfred Dawes is a general, laparoscopic and weight loss surgeon, and medical director of Windsor Wellness Centre & Carivia Medical Ltd; Fellow of the American College of Surgeons; former senior medical officer of the Savanna-la-Mar Public General Hospital; former president of the Jamaica Medical Doctors Association. @dr_aldawes. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and adawes@ilapmedical.com.