Jamaican Meddling

While many of us were distressed at the choices, or lack of them, facing us in our presidential election, another election held just four days before our own put at stake very real issues concerning the well-being of the poor and the distribution of the world's power and resources. In the Jamaican parliamentary election, democratic socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley's People's National Party (PNP) was defeated by the conservative Jamaica Labor Party led by Edward Seaga. An analysis of the Jamaican election can tell us more about the U.S. and its role in the world than all the attempts to read the entrails of our own electoral process.

Manley came to power in 1972 as a result of the poor majority's frustration with the growing disparities between poverty and privilege on their island. He tried to address these problems by raising the levy on bauxite (the ore used to make aluminum) taken out of the country, using the money to fund literacy programs, health care, jobs, and land reform measures. He also started to deal with the structural causes of Jamaica's poverty by having the government buy controlling interest in some of the largest mining companies and initiating the International Bauxite Association, modeled on OPEC, to give Jamaica and other producing countries more leverage in setting the prices for their ore.

These programs achieved some remarkable successes. Land reform doubled the percentage of land held by small farmers, the literacy program taught 200,000 adults to read and write, and for the first time, free education was available to all the children of Jamaica.

As important as these material gains were, the Manley government's greatest and most lasting achievement was that it gave Jamaicans, who had known more than 400 years of slavery and colonialism, pride in themselves and their nation. Manley followed a doggedly independent foreign policy that, combined with his personal charisma, made Jamaica a leading nation in the non-aligned movement. Within Jamaican society, Manley's government gave the poor a new sense of themselves. As Manley said in a recent interview, "In eight years we have altered class relations in Jamaica. The poor masses used to ask, 'Do I have rights?' Now they know they have them."

Yet these same poor masses voted Manley out of office this year. U.S. press reports blamed Manley's defeat on his mismanagement of the economy and his supposed communist leanings. The real reasons have more to do with the international economic order and U.S. foreign policy than with Manley's inefficiency or his ties with Castro.

In the mid-70s, when oil and grain prices went through the ceiling, Jamaica, like most Third World countries, was unable to keep up. Jamaica's balance of payments deficit grew larger and larger until finally Manley was forced to ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bail out his economy. The IMF board, on which the U.S. casts 20 per cent of the votes, agreed to do so but imposed conditions on the loan. These included requirements that Jamaica lift price controls, impose wage controls, and drastically cut government spending for social programs. The restrictions increased unemployment, lowered the standard of living of the poor, and undermined Manley's social reforms. Such developments don't help one's political popularity.

In 1979, when the IMF tried to impose even more severe conditions in a new loan agreement, Manley broke off negotiations and began formulating an alternative plan. Unfortunately this plan didn't have time to take effect before the elections this fall.

At the same time that the IMF was wrecking Jamaica's economy, the Carter administration was taking a new, more hostile attitude towards Manley's regime.

U.S. officials, frightened by the 1979 revolutions in Nicaragua and the island nation of Grenada, interpreted Jamaica's independent path regarding multinational corporations and the IMF and Manley's friendly relations with Cuba as another sign that Castro was exporting revolution and that Soviet influence was expanding. According to a confidential State Department document, a special task force was established made up of representatives from AID, the Defense Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, and others, "with a view to undertaking measures to preserve democratic institutions and shoring up the deteriorating economic situation."

What these measures were is not known, but a commission of concerned U.S. citizens, made up of two lawyers, an economist, and a theologian, went to Jamaica this year to investigate events around the election campaign. It issued a report containing strong circumstantial evidence that the activities of the U.S. task force included a destabilization program similar to the one carried out in the early 1970s against Allende in Chile.

The evidence included a series of meetings this past spring between a U.S. military attaché and several Jamaican army officers who were involved in an attempted coup in June; a reported increase in the number of CIA personnel assigned to the U.S. embassy in Kingston; and the fact that a U.S. airline with ties to the CIA began weekly flights to Montego Bay in June of this year. The citizens' commission has called for a congressional investigation of U.S. covert action in Jamaica.

The lessons the Left in Jamaica and elsewhere will draw from Manley's experience are not hard to imagine. Already some Marxist analysts are saying that Manley failed because he didn't suppress the opposition newspapers or develop an armed people's militia. During the next few years in Jamaica, it will probably become clear again that an international economic order based on injustice, and a U.S. foreign policy that subverts attempts at peaceful and democratic change, make violence and totalitarianism inevitable in the Third World.

Like many oppressed people around the world, the poor of Jamaica draw a great deal of comfort and hope from the biblical stories of the Babylonian exile and the Exodus. The People's National Party slogan for this year's election was "Stepping Out of Babylon," a reference to the break with the IMF. Manley's followers in the PNP nicknamed him "Joshua" because they hoped he would lead them to the promised land of justice and freedom. Manley tried to provide the kind of leadership his people were hoping for but he found that, as Kim Dae Jung and Nelson Mandela can attest from their prison cells and Salvador Allende and Steve Biko from their graves, that kind of leadership is not highly valued by the rulers of this world. Jamaica is back in the hands of Babylon.

Danny Collum was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.