Jamaica in 2006: The Peak of the Violence Epidemic, Portia’s Historic Rise, and Tourism’s Gilded Facade

Jamaica Five-Year Review | Published: 3 July 2026 | Analysis period: 2002–2006

The period 2002–2006 represents the most sustained violence emergency in Jamaica’s post-independence history up to that point. The murder rates of 2004 (1,471), 2005 (1,674), and 2006 (approximately 1,340) represent the convergence of multiple structural factors: the expansion of Jamaican narcotics trafficking networks into European markets, the mass deportation of criminals from the United States, the maturation of a garrison system that had been building since the 1960s, and the failure of successive governments to invest in the economic development of communities that the political system had transformed into fortresses. Against this background, the elevation of Portia Simpson Miller to the Prime Ministership in March 2006 — as Jamaica’s first female head of government and a politician with genuine roots in working-class communities — is received by the Jamaican public with a hope that is partly an expression of exhaustion with what has preceded her.

Murder Rate: A Violence Epidemic at Its Peak

The year 2005 records 1,674 murders in Jamaica — approximately 63 per 100,000 population, a figure that represents one of the highest murder rates ever recorded anywhere in the modern world. The 2006 figure of approximately 1,340 murders (around 49 per 100,000) represents a partial reduction, though one that still places Jamaica in an extreme outlier category globally. The drivers are structural and interconnected. Jamaica’s position in the Caribbean narcotics transit route — as a transshipment point for cocaine from South America moving toward North American and European markets, and as the origin of marijuana exported to both — has created a narcoeconomy whose distributional conflicts generate killings. The deportation of Jamaican nationals with criminal records from the United States, which accelerated dramatically after the US Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, has introduced a population of experienced criminals into communities ill-equipped to absorb them.

The garrison community system — in which residential areas in Kingston and its environs are controlled by armed gang leaders (dons) who provide social services, enforce a rough local order, and derive their authority partly from their political affiliations with the JLP or PNP — is the primary organisational structure of Jamaica’s violence. The dons control the local narcotics markets, arbitrate disputes, and provide a form of protection in communities where the formal state’s presence is limited. Their killings — of rivals, of suspected informants, of individuals who transgress community rules — account for a disproportionate share of the murder count. The political parties’ dependence on the dons to mobilise votes in garrison constituencies creates a system in which both major parties have structural incentives to maintain relationships that they publicly disavow. This is the system that Christopher Coke will eventually be seen to personify.

Tourism: 1.68 Million Arrivals and the Paradox of Growth

Jamaica receives approximately 1.68 million stopover visitors in 2006, generating visitor expenditure of around US$1.9 billion. The figures represent continued growth from the post-9/11 recovery: arrivals had fallen to approximately 1.28 million in 2001 as the September 11 attacks suppressed North American travel, recovered to around 1.35 million in 2002, and have grown consistently since. The tourism sector’s ability to sustain growth through this period — despite a murder rate that makes Jamaica one of the world’s most dangerous countries by statistical measure — reflects the degree to which Jamaica’s resort corridor is effectively a separate economy from the rest of the island: spatially isolated, staffed by workers who commute in from surrounding communities but who perform their labour within an environment that tourists never leave, and marketed through a brand identity that emphasises natural beauty, music, food, and warmth rather than the social conditions of the communities adjacent to the resorts.

The economic multiplier of the all-inclusive resort model is limited. Estimates suggest that approximately 50–60 cents of every dollar spent in an all-inclusive resort remains within the resort economy rather than circulating into the broader Jamaican economy through food purchasing, transportation, local entertainment, and craft purchases. The JTB has invested in linkage programmes designed to increase local content in resort food and beverage supply, with some success in specific cases. The broader structural limitation — the spatial and economic isolation of the tourism economy from the communities where Jamaica’s violence and poverty are concentrated — is not amenable to quick policy solutions.

Portia Simpson Miller: A Historic Moment in Uncertain Times

When PJ Patterson retires as Prime Minister in March 2006 after fourteen years in office — the longest continuous premiership in Jamaica’s independent history — the succession of Portia Simpson Miller is both historically significant and politically uncertain. Simpson Miller is the first woman to lead Jamaica and one of the first women to hold a national executive leadership role in the English-speaking Caribbean. Her political base is in West Kingston and in the PNP’s trade union wing; she speaks the language of the communities most affected by the violence and the poverty that the PNP has presided over without resolving. She inherits a PNP government that has been in power since 1989, is visibly tired, and faces a resurgent JLP under the young and relatively unknown Bruce Golding.

Geopolitical Factors: Deportees, Drugs, and CARICOM Integration

US-Jamaica relations in 2006 are shaped primarily by two issues: the deportation of Jamaican nationals with US criminal records, and narcotics interdiction cooperation. The US deportation programme, which has been returning hundreds of Jamaicans annually since the late 1990s, creates a specific and documented problem: many deportees have lived in the United States since childhood and have no meaningful social networks or economic prospects in Jamaica. They arrive with criminal records, without employment, without family support, and with connections to American criminal organisations that they import into Jamaican communities. The Jamaican government’s protests about the conditions of deportation — and about the return of individuals with no genuine Jamaican ties — have produced diplomatic discussions without substantive policy change from Washington.

Within CARICOM, Jamaica is managing the implementation of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME), which entered into force for six member states in January 2006. The CSME’s promise of free movement of labour, capital, and goods within the Caribbean Community represents an important long-term framework for regional integration, though the pace of implementation and the political will to surrender national sovereignty over economic policy varies significantly among members. Jamaica’s size and relative economic weight within CARICOM — it is, alongside Trinidad and Tobago, one of the region’s two largest economies — gives it particular influence in regional negotiations, an influence that the Simpson Miller government will seek to exercise in the CARICOM-EU Economic Partnership Agreement negotiations that are also underway in this period.

Sources: Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN); Jamaica Constabulary Force Annual Crime Statistics; Jamaica Tourist Board; Bank of Jamaica; CARICOM Secretariat; US Department of Homeland Security deportation statistics; Caribbean Development Bank; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Reuters; AP; US State Department Country Reports.