A Mayor Sided With Squatters Over the Law: “They Should Have Gotten First Preference”

• A court ordered 500+ Little Bay residents evicted from 867 acres
• Westmoreland’s own mayor publicly disagreed with the ruling
• A letter writer traces the squatting problem back to 1834
• He argues government must choose enforcement or reselling to residents

A court ruled that more than 500 people living on an 867-acre property in Little Bay, Westmoreland, should be evicted, a ruling Westmoreland Mayor Bertel Moore publicly disagreed with despite his own office’s formal position on the rule of law. The court may have taken a decision, but personally, I don’t like the decision, he said. When you have people living on a property for 60, 70 years, I think from the outset, when they were selling the land, the citizens should have gotten the first preference to buy that property.

A Gleaner letter writer responding to Moore’s comments framed the underlying tension in starker terms than the mayor had: either our politicians and leaders should be for the laws of the country or let us all engage in anarchy and disorder. If persons do not agree, they should therefore pay for the land and resell, give or develop it for the people to stay, a direct challenge to officials who criticise enforcement without actually committing government funds to buy out the land themselves.

The writer traced Jamaica’s squatting crisis to a specific historical origin point this publication has documented elsewhere in different terms: this squatter problem began the day slavery was abolished in 1834, when an estimated 350,000 former slaves became, in effect, squatters on Crown lands, with nowhere formally titled to call their own the moment emancipation took effect, the same historical gap the Baptist free village movement, covered separately in this publication’s history of Sligoville, was built specifically to address.

A sitting mayor publicly siding with squatters over a court he had no legal power to overrule illustrates a tension local government officials face repeatedly in Jamaica: elected to represent constituents who are, in many cases, the same long-term occupants a court has just ordered off the land, while formally obligated to respect and enforce rulings their own political sympathies run directly against.

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