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can anyone tell me what it was like 40 years ago in jamaica

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  1. My mom was 5 years old, 40 years ago. Oh we had gotten indepence from England a few years before that.


  2. Forty years ago Jamaica poliitical warfare became endemic in 1966-67 with political violence escalating between gangs supporting PNP vs. those supported by JLP. (To raise the tension level, associated trade unions stood behind their own parties, and on their behalf, supported a wave of strikes). In the run-up to the 1967 elections, violence escalated to the point of a State of Emergency.

    In August 1966 the newspaper of record (The Gleaner) reported that PNP men were unpacking revolvers. Ed Seaga, an MP from the JLP, responded in a radio broadcast saying that this should be dealt with “with a surgeon’s knife”. A series of local shootings in west Kingston neighborhoods followed (by mid-September, there were thirty-nine separate cases, with four dying of gunshot wounds), and in September both JLP and PNP headquarters were attacked. In October, Rudolph Lewis, the lead JLP gunman was shot dead. His alleged attacker was murdered two days later, and on that day there was a bomb attack inside a theatre, and this escalated into other incidents injuring twenty that night elsewhere in west Kingston. At that point, the JLP government declared a state of emergency in Western Kingston, with a curfew, and the army given right to special search and arrest. Police investigations found arms caches in the headquarters of both parties. The state of emergency was lifted in early November, and a series of killings to settle scores followed, leading up to shots being fired into the motorcade of Norman Manley on February 13, 1967, a week before the election.

    The gang brawls turned against the security forces of the state in anticipation of the election. After the election, the political violence diminished, but was replaced by general criminal violence, not directed against the other party, but against new targets.

    In 1968 the “Rodney riots” or “October Revolution” undermined the tenuous military stalemate. These riots were incited by the government’s denial of entry to Jamaica of Walter Rodney, a radical lecturer who had a position in the UWI. He was without cause sent “back” to his Guyana homeland. The ensuing violence was the first post-independence political violence that was not associated with one of the two competing parties. The incidents began as student protests, but this was picked up by urban lumpenproletariat in Kingston, whose riots caused immense property damage, and involved much looting. These demonstrations showed the deep antagonism against the government held within the urban ghettoes. But this movement had no legs as the alliance of privileged students and street gangs was short-lived.

  3. jamaicans didnt care much about american, minimal corruption, dollar was stronger etc.
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