The Philippines in 2015 had a murder of rate of 9.4 per 100,000, and 1.8 million of their populace were drug addicts. This represents 2.2 per cent of their population.

This was the essence of their crisis.

The country was racked with gun violence; and gang shootings that involved rivals often resulted in the death of innocent civilians. Police officers were killed in shoot-outs with gangs and there were often allegations of police involvement with the gangs.

Their Government, led by Rodrico Duterte in 2016, declared its war on drugs with a virtual ‘kill order’.

This resulted in approximately 27,000 fatal shootings of criminals, or who they say were criminals, the end result was a reduced murder rate of 4.4 per 100,000. This a reduction of over 50 per cent.

El Salvador had a rate of 103 murders per 100,000 in 2021. Why? Two gangs that originated in the United States, California to be more specific, were deported en masse to El Salvador. For thousand deported gang members multiplied and multiplied to a point where they numbered in the tens of thousands. They literally ran the country.

Therefore they ran the Government.

Sixty per cent of all youth in El Salvador were in a subjugated position to the gangs. Most of the membership became members between ages 9-15 largely as a decision to be the oppressor rather than the oppressed.

Gang control of this degree and a murder rate of 100 per 100,000 cannot even be conceptualised by most on planet earth. Not even Jamaica , the pariah of the Caribbean as it relates to murder, has ever had a homicide statistic that comes close.

The response of the El Salvador Government led by Nayib Bekele is tackling the problem in a unique, but extreme way. He has instituted a state of emergency and detained over 60,000 criminals. Well let me say I hope they’re criminals.

If Jamaica did this I could guarantee you that with great certainty it would be criminals detained. But El Salvador I don’t really know.

The result of the action of the state is a reduced murder rate of 56 per cent in 2022 vs 2021. He has detained about two percent of his population.

So let’s look on our scenario.

We don’t have a murder rate like El Salvador does, or at least did. We don’t have an addiction problem like the Phillipines, However, we do have a crisis that is in need of drastic action.

So the question is: Would I support any of the measures being utilised by the Philippines or El Salvador?

Well I don’t like final solutions that involve taking people’s lives, like what has happened in the Philippines. The potential for innocent persons to be killed is far too likely

However, my children aren’t drug addicts who are enslaved to a chemical and will do anything to satiate their need for the drug that controls them.

If I was in that position, or saw that as a likely consequence to the existence of a dominant drug culture, who knows what I would desire.

The El Salvador solution! Would I support it here?

Most certainly I am a strong believer that only mass detention of Jamaica’s gang members will result in any massive reduction of our homicide rate, but my view would change if my son was one of the detained.

I imagine mass detention wouldn’t feel as reasonable a solution at that point. There is, after all, that likely chance that an innocent could be in the lot.

The essence of what I am saying is that we cannot stand in judgement of the activities and decisions of other countries in a crisis, because we are not feeling the implications of their circumstances.

This is true also in our country. Foreign governments make decisions and have come to judge us without living our reality. They don’t have to bury their friends and family, we do.

This transcends class and colour in Jamaica. Once you live here irrespective of class you will bury a murdered friend or family member one day. This is a fact, ask the Banbury family which is planning a funeral for their recently murdered family member, Dell.

Foreigners abroad or indeed at home cannot understand our pain, or understand the measures we as a people endorse to combat our threat.

Jamaica’s problems must be solved with Jamaican solutions.

When America was attacked on the 11th of September 2001, they responded with the Homeland Security Act. They bore the consequences of the attack. They did what they felt was necessary.

When the Irish Republican Army (IRA) brought their violence to the British, the latter responded with ‘Interment’, the mass detention of perceived members of the IRA.

We can judge them all we want, but it was their train stations being blown up, not ours.

Extreme decisions come with terrible consequences.

The failure to take those decisions result in a similar effect.

Leaders are elected, they are entrusted to make decisions. If they think the El Salvador solution is the correct one they have my support. If they choose not to, they also have my support. Why?

Because they were elected to lead.

This is all that matters. The people chose them. If next year they choose another party then we must respect the decisions they take also.

We cannot stand in judgement of El Salvador and The Philippines, but we can learn from them. We can look at what they did right and what they did wrong, so that one day when our leaders can make decisions free from the influences of foreigners, we will be in a position to ventilate our opinion of what occurred when others took measures that were similar.

We can vent, we can criticise, but we must never sell ourselves and our national pride by allowing foreign influence to turn us against each other.

It would be simply tragic if the ghost of Governor Eyre could haunt us once again.

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