Tivoli Gardens Quotes

Tivoli Gardens and all—especially the port—influenced by Coke’s network), led to more than five hundred arrests, displaced thousands of local inhabitants, killed at least seventy-three civilians and six police and military personnel, and injured many more.

By 1972, Tivoli Gardens had in effect been subjected to military conquest by the JLP: it was a JLP-only district, purged of PNP supporters and run by a local system in which JLP politicians distributed state largesse in return for votes at election time, residents had become a dependent and captive constituency, and local gangs—led by Christopher Coke’s father, among others—kept the peace and enforced the rules.86 Tivoli was the first of the garrison districts.

garrison district is the Jamaican term for an urban or periurban “neighborhood whose members are armed by the leader of the community, and also a neighborhood that is loyal to and affiliated with one of the major Jamaican political parties … in the case of Tivoli Gardens, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).