Maziki Thame | Militarisation or democracy: Where is Jamaica heading?

Militarism goes hand in hand with authoritarianism. While democratic values include popular participation in decision-making, checks on the power of government and the protection of people’s rights and freedoms, militarisation threatens democracy by expanding the power of security forces to use violence against the people and curtail their means to participate in public life and enjoy rights and freedoms. Security forces are not neutral players in the State. They represent specific interests, sometimes singularly, the expansion of their own power.

In our hemisphere, we are witnessing the rise of militarism and authoritarianism, best expressed in El Salvador. To curb crime, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, enacted a state of exception (SOE) in 2022 that limits constitutional protections and grants unlimited powers to Salvadorian armed forces to arrest suspected gang members, to target human-rights advocates, Bukele’s critics, and land and water defenders. El Salvador now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, penitentiaries running at over 300 per cent capacity, and there have been over 350 deaths in state custody since the SOEs.

We have seen Donald Trump attempt to legitimise Bukele, tied to the US disappearing migrants into El Salvador’s mega prison. Trump’s framing of gangs, immigrants, and activists as terrorists is part of his justification for creating a police state inside America and militarisation of the Americas. The history of US militarisation in the region is long. It includes occupations of Haiti, the invasion of Grenada, the blockade against Cuba, and a ”War on Drugs” that led to the mass incarceration of blacks, including Latin American and Caribbean people.

FINDS COMMONALITY

Jamaica, the US’s most “like-minded partner” in the region, finds commonality in positions on Haiti and Venezuela. When Haitians arrive in Jamaica, they are deemed criminals and quickly returned to a hostile environment. Like Trump, Holness has said it is time to launch a global war on gangs. He, the US’s “great ally”, promotes the “Bukele Model” in spite of Amnesty International’s warning that what the Salvadorian government “calls peace is a mirage that pretends to conceal a repressive system” that disregards “already invisible people”.

Faced with Trump’s heightened deportations across the region, our Government did not speak in defence of its citizens as did other leaders who insisted that they be treated with dignity. The prime minister warned that with our transformed forces, “You will either meet a judge or your maker if you come back to Jamaica and violate our laws and create havoc.” The JCF was originally set up to keep blacks in their place at the base of the social hierarchy. Where are we today?

Reminiscent of Hugh Shearer’s infamous directive to the police to shoot first and ask questions later, Minister of National Security Horace Chang has repeatedly told the police to shoot to kill when confronted with armed criminals. Are our people disposable? Do we trust that police encounter armed criminals when they shoot to kill?

Injuries from police shootings decreased by 21 per cent in 2024, with 78 people injured compared to 99 in 2023. Fatalities have been on the rise. The Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) has reported that 189 people were killed by the security forces in 2024, up from 155 in 2023, building on a five-year increase since 2019 when fatal shootings had reached their lowest point in two decades at 86. Fatalities are now at an average of one person a day, with 108 killed up to April 29.

The Government has recently been applauding police “success” in bringing down homicide rates due to more planned police operations. It has been achieved alongside or some would say due to the increase in police killings, including nine people with mental illness last year.

TERRORISTS

Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ) has implored us to reject the “defacto shoot-to-kill policy”. Minister Chang tells us that “strong rhetoric against the police, particularly regarding allegations of extrajudicial killings, could undermine officers’ morale and reverse progress in crime reduction”. The Police Federation Chairman, Arleen McBean, argued that the JFJ would be “true terrorists” if they did not defend the police at their protest carried out on April 29. That word, terrorist, is used alongside criminal by Trump and Trumpists to describe anyone his government wants to target.

Most of us do not carry arms. We do not wear masks or balaclavas in our employment as is now normalised in the everyday operations of the police. We are recognisable and identifiable. Yet we are supposed to believe that calling out police violence and demanding the wearing of body cameras threatens the police force.

The awesome power of the security forces has been made more so in recent years. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Jamaica’s military spending moved from USD133.3 million in 2016 to USD284.3 million in 2019. SIPRI’s 2019 Yearbook reported that “the three biggest relative increases in military spending between 2017 and 2018 were by Burkina Faso (52 per cent), Jamaica (40 per cent), and Armenia (33 per cent).”

The jump in military spending coincided with the introduction and perpetuation of the use of SOEs between 2018 and 2020 to buttress the force giving them what the security sinister called “double the strength”. The Government has been expanding the role of the army in policing, militarising police practices, and passing or attempting to pass draconian legislation or sentencing related to crime such as the expansion of mandatory minimum sentences, including for children.

If we have been paying attention, we would have noticed that in addition to the SOEs and ZOSOs, which brought the military into active policing, there have been high-level appointments of military figures to public office, notably Rocky Meade as permanent secretary at the OPM, after the failed attempt to push him into the post of cabinet secretary, and Antony Anderson’s appointment as police commissioner and then as Jamaica’s ambassador to Washington.

There are curfews still and people are being imprisoned, but it is not all people who face this reality. It is the black poor who must face the forces and be curtailed in their movements by the curfew.

On March 27, Salvadorians marked the third anniversary of SOEs with protests. A protester told the media that Bukele was criminalising poverty and that his collaboration with the Trump administration was xenophobic. Jamaica’s violence problem is tied to poverty and inequality. Performing violence is a route to status and power in a society where prospects for achieving them are very limited and also highly valued. Prospects are limited by a socio-economic structure where inequality is entrenched and expanding and violence is turned inward and directed from the State. Rather than criminalising poverty, we might seek to eliminate it, and our current trickle-down economics does not do that.

Jamaica may not yet have come to terms with the values of democracy, human rights, or the equality of human beings. This is part of our challenge of decolonisation, and it shows in the approach to security in the nation. In a thriving democracy, understood in terms of high value for rights and freedoms, citizens would seek to zealously curtail the authority of the State to use violence as a way to manage its people.

Dr Maziki Thame is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.