Word: jamaicas
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Even some of Prime Minister Edward P.G. Seaga's closest associates were predicting that he would comfortably wait out the remaining two years of his term. After all, he enjoyed strong U.S. support, and his capitalist Jamaica Labor Party had 51 of the 60 seats in the country's Parliament. Nonetheless, Seaga last week became the first Caribbean leader to cash in on a wave of popular support for his nation's participation in the U.S.-led invasion of Grenada. After polls showed his popularity rising above 50% for the first time since he was elected, Seaga...
...People's National Party (P.N.P.), led by former Prime Minister Michael N. Manley. Charging that Seaga had broken a promise not to hold new elections until voter rolls were updated and new registration procedures, including thumbprinting and photographs, were in place, Manley declared the first election boycott in Jamaica's 21 years of independence. The vote, he said, would amount to "a rape of democracy." By refusing to participate in the elections, the P.N.P. has ensured that Seaga will control almost all of the Parliament's seats, resulting in virtual one-party rule...
Seaga defeated Manley in 1980 partly because voters had become disenchanted with Manley's growing ties to Cuba and to Jamaica's extreme left. By emphasizing the role of his country's 175 troops in the Caribbean Peace Force, Seaga did his best to exploit lingering fears of the left. Said Carl Stone, Jamaica's leading political pollster: "People see that what happened to [Grenada's assassinated Prime Minister] Maurice Bishop could have happened to Manley: a popular leader encircled, controlled and then eliminated by the radical left...
Seaga may have disposed of his parliamentary opposition for the time being, but he has not solved Jamaica's economic ills. He promised a surge in exports and a flood of foreign investments as a result of free-market policies like lowered trade barriers, but neither has materialized. The U.S. is partly to blame. Key trade concessions contained in the Reagan Administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative have been held up for almost two years in Congress, while the U.S. recession reduced demand for Jamaican exports like bauxite, which is used to produce aluminum. From 12 million tons...
...large armies are alien to the region, he explained. The largest army in the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States is 200; Grenada's was nearly 2,000. Nor does the region have a history of bloody coups or the placing of an entire population under house arrest. Jamaica and its allied democracies were reacting not to a paradigm but to an anomaly...