A Columnist Pushes Back on the Coopers Pen Outrage: “Let’s Chronicle Reality”

• Squatters moved onto the land without the owner’s consent
• By 2007, 99 families occupied it, a real voting bloc
• A Provident Society purchase attempt failed despite HAJ’s help
• Government later declared it an “improvement area” anyway

The critical concern from the recent Coopers Pen debacle is that the rule of law is endangered by politics, columnist Gordon Robinson argued in the Gleaner, pushing back directly on a letter writer’s characterisation of the demolition as a callous denial of due process. Ya don’t say. So let’s chronicle reality, Robinson wrote, before laying out a timeline this publication had not previously covered in full.

By Robinson’s account, squatters moved onto privately owned land without notice, dialogue or dignity extended to the landowner, and built concrete structures without permission. As the community grew into a significant voting bloc, by 2007 at least 99 squatter families occupied the land. The landowner sued for possession only after years of attempted dialogue, including efforts to get squatters to actually purchase the land, facilitated with help from the Housing Agency of Jamaica, which had intervened to help form a Provident Society specifically to enable that purchase. The purchase attempt failed regardless, and, in Robinson’s framing, the land capture became institutionalised.

The legal record Robinson cites runs considerably longer than the August 2026 demolition itself: the Supreme Court ordered squatters to demolish structures and deliver possession back in 2010, and when squatters failed to obtain a stay of execution in 2012, government stepped in, declaring the area an improvement area under the Housing Act, a political intervention on the squatters’ behalf that predates by well over a decade the demolition this publication has covered extensively through the lens of the residents’ displacement, the tax delinquency, and the disputed court order’s validity.

Robinson’s column adds a genuine counterweight this publication’s earlier coverage has not fully captured: a landowner who pursued dialogue and a facilitated purchase option for years before litigation, a court order that predates the demolition by 16 years, and government intervention that, at least once, worked to slow enforcement rather than accelerate it. Whether that history justifies the specific manner of the August 2026 demolition is a separate question from whether the underlying legal claim was, as Robinson insists, entirely legitimate from the outset.

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