On a normal day, young men would gather there to sit in high wooden chairs, play dice, and smoke marijuana. Armored personnel carriers and soldiers from the Army, or Jamaica Defence Force, and the police, or Jamaica Constabulary Force, were massing to the south and east, outside the ring of barricades.Īt around four o’clock, the soldiers led the rest of the apartment’s occupants to a shaded area between the building and the street. A white surveillance plane was circling Kingston a blue seal on the tail identified it as belonging to the U.S. It was a clear day, and the trade winds coming off the harbor eased the sun’s dizzying heat. Freeman was calm, and Hinds, who had not been outside for three days, assumed that it was safe to go and buy food. Hinds anxiously dialled his cell phone and reached him at the house of a friend named Hugh Scully, who lived nearby. On Monday, May 24th, Hinds woke to the sound of sporadic gunfire. Hinds told a friend who was worried about an invasion, “Tivoli is the baddest place in the whole wide world.” She also didn’t think that the security forces would actually enter. That day in May, Hinds thought about leaving Tivoli, but she told herself that anyone who fled would have to live with the shame of having abandoned the community. Contractors in Kingston and the United States knew him to be a hardworking carpenter and a family man. Embassy compound in Kingston, a job that required his name to be checked against lists of known criminals maintained by the Jamaican police. From 2007 to 2008, Freeman worked on the completion of a new U.S. Freeman had played on the same street-corner soccer team as Coke when they were children, but their lives followed very different paths. when, in April, Hinds asked him to return home. Their apartment was on the ground floor of Building Two, just north of Coke’s headquarters, in the area of Tivoli known as Java. Hinds lived with her boyfriend, Radcliffe (Mickey) Freeman, and their two children, eleven-year-old Nikeita and eight-year-old Mickey, Jr.
She was thirty-seven years old and took pride in her clothes, her cooking, her manicured nails, and her ironed hair. Marjorie Hinds, who supported her family by selling groceries from a wooden shed, was one of the residents who ignored the warning. But only a few boarded, and the buses drove away nearly empty.
#KIDNAPPED MAN IN JAMAICA NY TV#
On Sunday, May 23rd, the Jamaican police asked every radio and TV station in the capital to broadcast a warning that said, in part, “The security forces are appealing to the law-abiding citizens of Tivoli Gardens and Denham Town who wish to leave those communities to do so.” The police sent buses to the edge of the neighborhood to evacuate residents to temporary accommodations. It looked as though Coke were preparing for war with the Jamaican state.
Armed sentries took up posts around Tivoli’s perimeter. Barricades of rubble and barbed wire sprang up across major intersections. In response, Coke converted Tivoli and nearby Denham Town into a personal fortress. But in early May, 2010, under heavy international political pressure, Golding authorized Coke’s arrest. Coke was so powerful that Prime Minister Bruce Golding spent months resisting the extradition order.
He lived in Tivoli, where everyone called him “president,” and, since 2001, Jamaican police had not been able to enter the neighborhood without his permission. In the U.S., Coke stood charged in federal court of trafficking in narcotics and firearms in Jamaica, he was known as the country’s most powerful “don,” a community leader who also runs a criminal enterprise. The trouble that led to the Tivoli Gardens deaths began in August, 2009, when the United States government requested the extradition of Christopher (Dudus) Coke. The majority of these mark the unclaimed dead from the last days of May, 2010, when the police and the Army assaulted the neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens, in West Kingston. Each bears a small disk of black metal and a stencilled number. Fifty-two concrete posts are set into the earth in haphazard groups of two and three. The most forsaken burial places lie at the end of a dirt path that follows a fetid gully across two bridges and through an open meadow, far enough south to hear the white noise coming off the harbor and the highway. Not so May Pen Cemetery, in Kingston, Jamaica, where bodies are buried on top of bodies, weeds grow over the old markers, and time humbles even a rich man’s grave. Most cemeteries replace the illusion of life’s permanence with another illusion: the permanence of a name carved in stone. Marjorie Hinds was out buying food in Tivoli Gardens on the morning of May 24, 2010, when the security forces moved in.
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