15th
waiting in vain
It’s been more than a month since the Dudus saga started, and the man himself is still nowhere to be found. The breaking-news stories of violence and turmoil in West Kingston have petered out into ridiculous news remnants, bordering on the bizarre: reports of dildos found in a well-known gunman’s house, alligators being tested for human remains. Efforts to locate Dudus have been wholly ineffective, and the news reports were rife for a while with stories of botched raids in uptown communities - one man - an accountant - was shot 20 times when the security forces invaded his house in the middle of the night. (one does wonder, however, whether there’s not more to this particular story that the general public doesn’t know…) Other targets for searches included what seem like purely political targets, including the Mayor of Kingston, and PNP loyalists who claim to have never even met the man. But by now, there aren’t any more reports of raids, and it seems that the search for Dudus is reduced to news stories calling him a “puss” for having fled Tivoli - in a thinly-veiled attempt to bait him out of hiding?
Life, it seems, is pretty much back to normal - save for in Tivoli itself, where ongoing wholesale detentions have basically indexed every man of a certain age, and investigations have uncovered some gruesome realities of self-governance. Evidence of torture chambers and assassinations have been sensationalized and circulated in the media. And yet there is still no proposal to fill the power void in Tivoli and beyond. The government seemingly fails to recognize that cutting off the head of the monster is not enough - that someone needs to step in and provide the social services that Dudus was providing, or else the cycle will just begin anew…
