The making of a desperado
GUNS, gangs and violence were a natural part of the life of Bashington “Chen Chen” Douglas during his formative years in Homestead near Spanish Town. The nation first heard of Chen Chen in 1995. He had by that time allied himself to the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP’s) street cause.
Operating in the JLP garrison of Central St Catherine, men such as Chen Chen would ‘protect’ the area from People’s National Party (PNP) marauders and make the political divisions safe for the JLP vote. But when Bruce Golding left the JLP to form the National Democratic Movement (NDM) and turned his back on the politics of division and thuggery, Chen Chen also began to see the light.
Things, however, were not going to be that easy. The JLP machinery was not about to roll over and cede the constituency to Golding and the NDM. Men from the JLP garrison of Tivoli Gardens moved on Tawes Pen and Homestead, determined to take home the vote for the JLP, in the only manner they knew how — intimidation and gunplay.
With no support from the reformed politics of Bruce Golding’s new and different image, young men like Chen Chen were on their own.
Douglas is probably just about five feet tall and one of his aliases is “Short Man”. For our meeting, he is dressed in full black, his short hair is bushy and wild as the bushes we are in. I can see a little cot inside in the shack in which he hides out.
After leaving my car, I had followed his directions by cell phone, walking up a hill until I saw a man through the thick foliage waving me towards him. After weaving my way along a narrow path I come upon Short Man and we knock fists.
He is at first introspective, then he is sounding revolutionary but cannot find the words to adequately express that spirit. He drags on the spliff again and his eyes and his mind wander off again. How did it all come to this?
In 1967, Bashington Douglas was born to poor parents in the depressed community of Homestead just off the Old Harbour Road near Spanish Town. Calvin and Dotty Douglas were poor, he, a labourer taking odd jobs, she, a seamstress working for others for small change.
In the mid-1970s when PNP member of parliament Tony Spaulding was into his political cleansing in South St Andrew, many persons allied to the JLP fled to Spanish Town and its environs. Between 1967, 1983 and 1989, the evolution of Central St Catherine from years of gerrymandering and omissions in social engineering resulted in the JLP garrison constituency that exists today.
Chen Chen tells me that from he was a child he earned that name. He is not part Chinese. Not articulate as I wish he was, he is not very sharp on dates either. “If yu ask mi mother or me sister dem know all ’bout dem ting dey.”
The fourth of seven children, three girls came before him and three after. “Me used to go Macauley school, mi nuh know if a all-age or wha.” He left school at around 14 and at that age, all his formal education ceased.
“Life used to rough fi me and mi sister dem. MI father used to work at a cane farm an mi mother get sewing work sometime.”
In 1980, when Kingston and Spanish Town erupted in an orgy of violence in the many months leading up to the general elections of October of that year, a young Chen Chen got his first taste of violence.
“One a mi sister get kick up by a man who was a gang member. She was going to school that day. Mi father who was by now living in Crawle district in Clarendon decided to take the man to court. Before the court date come up the whole gang surrounded the house and shot it up.
“The men were dressed in police gear, soldier clothes and drove a green jeep. My mother got four shots in her head. My big sister pick up one in her face and it came out through her neck. Another one of mi sister get a shot an’ it kill her. After the gang run off, a dash out into the yard an see my mother sitting under a tree holding my baby sisters. I thought they were dead too because of the blood but it was mother that get shoot up.
“I took up the babies on their feet and hold up my mother in my arms and walk to the police station. They carry us back to the house and tell us that one of my sister dead in the house, then they carry my mother to hospital.”
While he is relating this to me, he is crying unashamedly. “Mi nuh know what going happen to me now big man, but if you can just make de people know sey a nuff things mi go through with all mi family shot up and dead. Mi know sey people think sey mi a murderer but a nuh true, a nuh true, mi just a defend fi mi own. Whey you woulda do boss if dem do dem things to you?”
As he wipes his eyes with a rag, I have no easy answers for him.
“When I go to Crawle district to tell my father, he fainted on the ground. He came back to Homestead, fix up the place, clean up the blood and things like that. The police catch two of the men. Before the court start, a car load of gunmen came to the house and decide to carry my father away to kill him. One of the men came out of the car and said, ‘No, this man save my life already’. While them talking, my father escape and the car drive away.”
According to Chen Chen, the first time he took up the gun was in 1988. “Mi all hearing say that them going kill off my father, the rest a my sister dem and me. Whe mi fi do?” he asks. “Whe mi fi do?”
He pulls hard on the spliff and exhales slowly. “Sometime mi feel like mi would kill myself. Dem kill mi woman. Mi and she a come from 1989, long time. Mi did have the work down the gold mine, mi did have mi woman, everything did nice, me not troubling nobody.” Then the tears again.
During the election campaign leading up to the February 1989 elections, violence visited him again. “One day a politician… come into the Homestead area where I live… He came to the area with a whole heap of bad men and start to campaign.”
He had a run-in with the politician and told him not to come back in the area and “him say you will see”. He tells me that shortly after the run-in with the politician, the PNP saw him as the enemy while JLP people in the area started to look up to him as a protector.
“One day a coming home at around 2:00 am when I heard gunshots. My house was surrounded by gunmen who were shooting up the place while they set it on fire. They ran after they thought the police were coming. Eighteen people, mostly children, were in the house and it was only luck that no one died.”
After that incident, he said, the same gang members shot and killed a man known as “Cowboy”. The witness to the killings was also killed. Eventually they were picked up by the police and while out on bail they killed three more men. Some time after, the police caught them and shot them dead.
In 1995 to the early part of 1996, the JLP turned a blind eye to the importation of gunmen into the Central St Catherine constituency. One particularly vicious one was known as “Jackman”, working with another individual called “Pretty Boy”.
Chen Chen’s father used to work as a road sweeper on the Old Harbour to Spanish Town road. In those troubled political times it was the norm for these jobs to go along political lines. If PNP was in power, PNP ate and JLP starved. If JLP was in power, JLP got fat while PNP died of hunger.
“Many times my father get threat, from the thing years ago and because I don’t stand up to foolishness but also because them see me as a threat.”
Bruce Golding seemed to corroborate this claim. “At one stage motorists travelling along the Old Harbour Road near to Homestead were being held up during floods when the road was difficult to traverse. Money and jewellery would be taken. It was Chen Chen who recovered the jewellery then he got his girlfriend, Angela Richards, to call the police and hand over the stolen items to them.”
According to Golding, “in 1995 or thereabouts, I gather that Chen Chen was wanted for murder and I was asked to use my influence to get him to turn in himself. I got a lawyer to look at the evidence. If my memory serves me right, there was only one statement collected with nothing else to corroborate it. I pointed this out to the police and they suggested that I ask him to hand himself in. I told him this but he wanted a guarantee that the police would not kill him. Of course, I could offer no such guarantee and he said that he would take his chances as a fugitive.”
Chen Chen continues. “In 1996, my father was working as a watchman. He was seated in the guardroom by the gate when a car load of men drove up and began spraying the place with shots. The gunman who killed my father and about eight other persons was eventually caught by Reneto Adams and shot dead.”
Chen Chen in one breath seems full of admiration for Adams but in another he condemns Adams for what he sees as an assault on his life.
“From my father dead, the police start to terrorise me and from that time I have to be in hiding, living like rat. The police catch Pretty Boy in Pennants recently but release him. When I in town I get message from Adams that I must stay in country or else.”
He wants society to understand his predicament.
I am at pains to point out to Chen Chen that our society is not that much concerned with him, what with his violent past. I tell him that the dollar is heading down a perilous path and economic concern is now our number one problem. “Why should we care about you when we never took up guns, never used them?” I ask him.
“How you know yu wouldn’t have to do it big man, if dem just a kill off yu family?”
— Mark Wignall