Jamaica in 2016: Record Murders, a Change of Government, and Brexit’s Shadow Over the Diaspora

Jamaica Five-Year Review | Published: 3 July 2026 | Analysis period: 2012–2016

The year 2016 is one of the most politically turbulent in Jamaica’s recent history, defined by a general election result that ends four years of PNP government, a murder rate that represents a sustained public security emergency, a tourism sector growing rapidly enough to generate record foreign exchange earnings, and two seismic international political events — the UK’s Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in the United States — whose combined implications for the Jamaican diaspora, for remittance flows, and for the broader geopolitical environment in which Jamaica operates will take years to fully assess.

Murder Rate: A Structural Emergency

Jamaica records approximately 1,350 murders in 2016, producing a rate of around 47 per 100,000 population. This follows years of high violence: 2005 saw 1,674 murders; 2009 saw 1,680 at the height of the Coke era; the post-Tivoli dip of 2011–2012 (around 1,100 per year) had proved temporary. The 2016 figure represents the return of violence to the levels that characterised the most dangerous period of the 2000s, and arrives in a context where the newly elected Holness government has made crime reduction one of its signature commitments. The state of emergency strategy that the Holness government will deploy in 2018 — particularly in St James — is being developed against the background of 2016’s alarming numbers.

The specific geography of the 2016 murder rate points to the persistence of the garrison community system in Kingston and St Andrew, the escalation of gang warfare in Montego Bay’s tourist belt parishes, and the spreading influence of deportee-linked gang networks whose members were returned to Jamaica from the United States and the United Kingdom carrying organisational skills and transnational connections that local criminal networks rapidly absorbed. The United States’ accelerated deportation programme under the Obama administration, which returned thousands of Jamaican nationals with criminal convictions and, critically, individuals who had been in the US since childhood and had no meaningful ties to Jamaica, is identified by Jamaican security analysts as a significant driver of the violence that characterises the 2012–2016 period.

Tourism: Growth Against the Grain

Jamaica receives approximately 2.18 million stopover visitors in 2016, generating total visitor expenditure of approximately US$2.4 billion — record figures for the island and the product of a decade of sustained investment in tourism infrastructure, airlift development, and destination marketing. The Jamaica Tourist Board’s rebranding campaign — emphasising experiential tourism, authentic Jamaican culture, and culinary tourism alongside the traditional beach resort offer — has successfully attracted new visitor demographics, including younger American travellers and European independent travellers who prefer more immersive experiences.

The contradiction between the tourism growth story and the murder rate story is managed, rather than resolved, by a combination of spatial separation (most tourists remain within resort corridors that are effectively insulated from the violence that affects local communities) and selective international media coverage management. The industry’s success in 2016 is real and should not be minimised: tourism provides employment, foreign exchange, and economic opportunity at a scale that no other sector approaches. But the industry’s spatial isolation from the communities in which violence is concentrated means that growth in visitor numbers does not automatically translate into reduced violence in the communities most affected.

The February 2016 Election: Holness Returns

Jamaica’s general election of 25 February 2016 produces one of the closest results in the island’s electoral history: the Jamaica Labour Party under Andrew Holness wins 32 seats against the People’s National Party’s 31, defeating the incumbent Portia Simpson Miller government by the narrowest possible margin. Holness, who had previously served briefly as Prime Minister in 2011–2012 before losing to Simpson Miller, enters office with a mandate for economic reform and crime reduction but with a parliamentary majority of a single seat — a parliamentary arithmetic that will constrain his government’s room for manoeuvre on major legislation.

Geopolitical Factors: Brexit, Trump, and the Diaspora’s Anxiety

The UK’s Brexit referendum of 23 June 2016 — which produces a 52-48 Leave majority — is an event of profound concern to the Jamaican diaspora in Britain and to the Jamaican government. The approximately 300,000 Jamaican-born and Jamaican-heritage residents of the United Kingdom have, over decades, built lives in Britain on the basis of rights and freedoms — of movement, of residence, of access to public services — that are bound up with the UK’s EU membership in complex ways. Brexit does not automatically alter the citizenship rights of those with settled status; but the political climate that produced Brexit — one in which immigration from outside Europe has been consistently conflated with immigration from within Europe in the public debate — has produced a social environment in which the Caribbean community’s sense of belonging in Britain is more contested than it has been for decades. The Windrush scandal, which will become public knowledge in 2018, has its roots in the hostile environment policies that the Brexit political culture both expressed and intensified.

The election of Donald Trump as US President in November 2016 introduces a further uncertainty. Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda, his hostile statements about immigration from ‘shithole countries’, and the administration’s Caribbean-sceptic foreign policy stance all create concerns for Jamaica. The island’s diplomatic relationship with the United States — its largest trading partner, the destination of its largest diaspora community, and the source of a significant proportion of its tourist arrivals — requires careful management in an environment where Washington’s reliability as a partner is less predictable than at any point since the Reagan era.

Economic Position: The Fiscal Programme Gains Traction

The IMF-backed fiscal consolidation programme that Jamaica has been implementing since 2013 under the Economic Reform Programme (ERP) and its successor is beginning, by 2016, to produce measurable results. The public debt ratio, which stood at over 140 per cent of GDP in 2012, is declining. The fiscal primary surplus — the excess of government revenues over non-interest spending — has been consistently maintained. The credit rating agencies have begun to upgrade Jamaica’s sovereign debt rating for the first time in decades. The human cost of the adjustment — public sector wage restraint, limits on social spending, depreciation of the Jamaican dollar — is real and is reflected in rising poverty rates and in the sustained emigration of skilled workers, particularly nurses and teachers, that the public sector wage freeze has accelerated.

Sources: Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN); Jamaica Constabulary Force Annual Crime Statistics; Jamaica Tourist Board; Bank of Jamaica; Electoral Commission of Jamaica; IMF Article IV Consultations; CARICOM Secretariat; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Reuters; AP; The Guardian.