Quotes of the Day

At the height of his criminal reign, Christopher "Dudus" Coke was more than a violent drug lord whose powerful street gang helped turn Jamaica into a murder capital. The President, as Coke was called, was the political don and de facto ruler of a chunk of inner-city Kingston, Jamaica's capital. When the government finally moved to arrest him and extradite him to the U.S. in 2010 on drug-trafficking charges, 76 people died in clashes between security forces and his army of supporters.

Coke was sentenced in June to 23 years in a U.S. federal prison — and most Jamaicans are hailing his downfall as their Caribbean island nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of its independence on Aug. 6. But they're also hoping new Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller — Jamaica's first female leader and the first to hail from the kind of gritty Kingston enclave that Coke once dominated — can help make the next half-century even better by reducing violent crime and the poverty that spawns it.

Simpson Miller, 66, is aware of the epochal expectations created by her landslide election at the end of 2011. In an interview with me in her office at Jamaica House in Kingston's historic Uptown district, the only time she dropped her calm, maternal demeanor was when I mentioned Coke. "I've spent my political life fighting all those who bill themselves as 'dons,'" she said in a stern tone. "If we empower people in their communities and get them jobs, no one like Dudus Coke can capture their hearts and minds and hold them hostage."

Jamaica, if not the rest of the troubled Caribbean basin that includes Central America and the South American coast, is juggling jubilation and angst this summer. The first and largest of 10 Caribbean islands to win independence from Britain, Jamaica (pop. 3 million) has a lot to celebrate besides its beaches. It's kept up a working democracy — no mean feat for any former colony. "We've proven a strong, determined people in our first 50 years," says Simpson Miller. Institutions like the University of the West Indies (UWI) have earned international respect. And from reggae music to Rastafarian chic, few small developing nations have ever branded themselves as well as Jamaica has — a point likely to be driven home at the London Olympics, where a juggernaut of Jamaican runners led by world-record holder Usain "Lightning" Bolt and Yohan "the Beast" Blake may sweep the sprints in the same week exuberant Jamaican street festivals mark the nation's break from British rule.

But gold medals can't hide the crises Jamaica and the Caribbean face. Murder is down in Jamaica since Coke's arrest, but the U.N. warns that the Caribbean basin as a whole — especially Central American nations like Honduras, which has the world's highest murder rate at 86 killings per 100,000 people — still accounts for an inordinate share of global homicide and large-scale drug trafficking. Foreign debt is another albatross. Five of the world's 13 most indebted nations, as a share of gross domestic product, are Caribbean islands — including Jamaica, whose debt is 129% of its $15 billion GDP, and St. Kitts and Nevis, whose crushing 180% debt-to-GDP ratio is even higher than Greece's 165%.

The threat of a euro collapse has the world focused on Greece. But for five centuries, everyone from English pirates (as evidenced by all the Spanish galleons lying on the bottom of the Caribbean Sea) to Soviet Premiers (think Cuban missile crisis) to international drug lords (impoverished islands like Haiti are among their favorite cocaine transit sites) have demonstrated that the Caribbean, the Western Hemisphere's nexus region, is vulnerable — and that it matters. "The powerful countries should pay more attention to the Caribbean if only because of our strategic location," Simpson Miller argues. "If we don't have the ability to deal with our problems, it can prove a problem for them."

The Fearless Sister P
That's why Simpson Miller — who at her January inauguration called for a referendum on ditching the British monarch as Jamaica's head of state (the Prime Minister is head of government) and making the Commonwealth nation a republic — is pushing a resurgence of the Caribbean Community (Caricom), the seldom-used 39-year-old regional-integration organization. "By ourselves I don't think [Caribbean countries] can achieve as much, like debt renegotiation with multilaterals, as we can if we speak with one, more powerful voice," she said. She also wants Jamaica to set a regional example for reform, from anti-organized-crime task forces that go after the finances of mafiosi like Coke, to improved civil rights for homosexuals, which many consider a particularly courageous stance amid the severe homophobia that exists in Jamaica and the Caribbean — a product of the region's conservative Christianity and the strict heterosexual morality of Jamaica's syncretic Rastafarian sect.

Simpson Miller is still proving herself as a Prime Minister. She first occupied Jamaica House after longtime PM P.J. Patterson resigned in 2006. But after 15 years of rule by her liberal People's National Party (PNP), voters wanted change, and the PNP lost the 2007 elections to the center-right Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Still, she opened doors for other women in the Caribbean. Trinidad and Tobago, the basin's second most populous former British colony, which also marks 50 years of independence this year, elected Kamla Persad-Bissessar its first female PM in 2010. "More women in leadership is pushing governments forward around the world," says Simpson Miller, a tall, striking woman known for her bobbed hair and the nickname Sister P, who can be as fierce on the stump — "I don't 'fraid a no man, no gyal, nowhere!" she has roared in Jamaican patois — as she is amiable in conversation.

Sister P came of age politically during the 1970s, when violent cold-war disputes between PNP and JLP backers led to links between criminal dons and the two parties. That brand of dirty, so-called garrison politics has plagued Jamaica ever since. Former PM Bruce Golding resigned in 2011 under criticism of his JLP's alleged financial ties to and protection of Coke, which the party denies. A major reason for Simpson Miller's landslide election victory last December, say supporters, is her distaste for gang-party bonds. "She's a woman capable of taking Jamaican politics by the scruff of the neck and moving it in a new direction," says Jamaican-American attorney David Rowe, an adjunct law professor at the University of Miami.

Cutting the Killings
Reform of the police and judiciary is urgently needed across Latin America and the Caribbean, but especially so in Jamaica. Simpson Miller has instituted a Major Organized Crime and Anti-Corruption Task Force and introduced legislation to make prosecutors and judges more responsive. (Given a murder rate that reached 60 per 100,000 residents in 2010 before easing to 41 per 100,000 last year, Jamaica's minuscule 5% murder conviction rate is embarrassing.) The new laws would also let authorities seize money-laundering assets from alleged criminals. "When you look at resource-strapped countries like ours, where investigators have heavy caseloads, the best way to bring down the kingpins is to get at their money," says National Security Minister Peter Bunting.

Bunting is targeting a homicide rate of 12 per 100,000 by 2017, when Simpson Miller is required to call new elections. That's prodding islands like Trinidad, whose murder rate is 27 per 100,000, to follow suit. Still, while U.S.-aided interdiction over the past decade has reduced drug trafficking throughout the Caribbean islands — though the bad news is that it has simply moved west to Central America — Caribbean security chiefs like Bunting say they're already seeing a new uptick in the narcotrade. And it could worsen this decade if the region can't generate more economic opportunity in places like Jamaica, where nearly half the population is poor.

Hence the Caribbean conundrum: "Violence in the region imposes constraints on economic growth, which in turn further fuels crime and violence," says Mark Feierstein, Latin America and Caribbean assistant administrator for USAID, the U.S. State Department's development agency. "It's a vicious cycle." Caricom itself estimates that gang-related crime costs the region as much as 4% of its GDP, including lost tourism and foreign investment. Jamaica, whose unemployment rate is 14%, may be losing $520 million a year.

Island of the Future
Debt service is an added drag. Simpson Miller is trying to balance the fiscal prudence the International Monetary Fund wants with an $80 million infrastructure-improvement program that aims to create 40,000 jobs. On the streets, the government's Peace Management Initiative (PMI) tries to defuse turf disputes and steer Jamaicans from gangs with names like Rat Bat into legitimate work. With PMI help, Odain Tennant, 24, now a community activist, runs a small but thriving urban pig farm in St. Andrew South West, Simpson Miller's parliamentary constituency. "You get my drift, mon," says Tennant. "More income for youth here mean less ghetto conflict." Notes PMI Programs Manager Damian Hutchinson: "Portia's challenge is to use her credibility on these streets to fill the void left behind by dons like Dudus."

But Jamaica and the Caribbean have to evolve beyond a dependence on low-wage tourism, especially self-contained, all-inclusive resorts that generate scant commerce for local businesses. Simpson Miller thinks value-added investment in indigenous products like Jamaica's distinctive chocolate is one solution. Either way, regional Caribbean growth, despite Trinidad's prodigious oil and natural gas exports, was just half the 4.2% expansion Latin America as a whole had in 2011. "The debt crisis marks a turning point," says Jamaican social-science researcher Horace Levy of the UWI, author of The African-Caribbean Worldview and the Making of Caribbean Society. "Our inequality has to be dealt with — and we must become more entrepreneurial and produce things."

Levy hopes Simpson Miller will challenge Jamaica in that regard, just as she's urged the country — 90% of whose population is black — to become a republic. "The Queen is a wonderful person," Simpson Miller says. "But independence for us is a long journey, from slavery and then from colonialism, and it is now time for us to have our own form of government." She has also called on Jamaica's Parliament to reconsider an archaic law, which other Caribbean countries like Barbados have on their books, that criminalizes homosexuality. "I'm a Christian woman, but I believe in human rights," Simpson Miller tells me. "I do not go into people's bedrooms."

Dionne Jackson Miller, host of the Jamaican television news talk show All Angles, says Sister P could push the island "to punch above its weight, just like our Olympic sprinters are doing." If Jamaica in the next 50 years can channel that lightning into its politics and economy, then it don't 'fraid a no man, no gyal, nowhere.

• Tim Padgett / Kingston
• As the troubled Caribbean nation celebrates its golden anniversary, its Prime Minister prepares for the next 50 years