MONTEGO BAY — Prime Minister P J Patterson yesterday rejected claims, often made by the Opposition and some academics, that Jamaica’s high level of violent crime is driven by poverty, insisting that the people who ran criminal enterprises were not poor.

Instead, Patterson seemed to suggest that major crimes in the country were linked to the international narcotics trade, in which Jamaica is considered a major transshipment centre for cocaine heading to North America and Europe from Colombia.

But he agreed that crime and violence represented the “biggest deterrent to economic progress” in Jamaica and that the criminal elements had to be brought “under control”.

“I know there’s going to be a lot of dispute about what I am about to say,” Patterson told guests at the formal opening of an Air Jamaica Vacations customer terminal near Montego Bay’s Sangster international airport.

“I hear from time to time people say that the levels of criminal behaviour are due to poverty. I do not accept that. The people engaged in the drug trade are not poor, they are not. And the people engaged in criminal enterprise are not poor.”

At 1,138, murders were up in Jamaica last year by 26 per cent and with a ratio of 41.5 murders per 100,000 population, the island is on the upper rungs of the league table of countries with high murder rates. Police homicides, which have hovered at about 145 a year, also give the country one of the highest levels of police killings for a nation not at war.

The problem of violence in Jamaica, and its causes, have, for years, been major issues of debate in the island.

The political Opposition has argued that the problem is largely the result of years of economic stagnation, which has left young men, mainly in Kingston’s inner-city communities, bereft of hope and driving them to lives of crime and gangs.

The island has per capita gross domestic product of about US$2,640 a year and official unemployment of around 16 per cent. Critics say that a significant percentage of the population is under-employed.

Some analysts who agree, say that economic privation contributes substantially to Jamaican crime and also argue that it is only one ingredient in a deadly cocktail that includes drugs, the residue of political violence of the 1970s and early 1980s, and the failing of the state.

Last November, finally bowing to public pressure for the sacking of K D Knight, the long-standing security minister, Patterson transferred him to the foreign ministry and gave the job to the highly respected Dr Peter Phillips, the former transport and works minister.

Phillips has won plaudits for the anti-crime initiative he unveiled in mid-January that will focus on going after drug dealers and the urban gangs which he argued that the drug trade has spawned to protect its interest.

Patterson, in yesterday’s remarks, did not provide a deep analysis for the problem, but said that with peace and good order “there is no limit to what our economy can achieve, led by tourism, agriculture and the exports of legitimate items of production in our country”.

Added the prime minister: “Jamaica has the potential to be such a desired destination…

“Critical to all that is restoring calm, restoring order, restoring law. Somebody said to me on a property in Negril, ‘bring the gunmen under control and once you do that, everything will be honkey dorey’. We have to bring the criminal element under control.”