Jamaican Gangs Rule Streets in Urban War Zone : Caribbean: Life comes to halt in impoverished west Kingston when the ‘hot times’ killing starts.

Trevor Watson was born 40 years ago in an apartment only five blocks from his carpentry shop, but says he would be killed if he returned to the old neighborhood.

Near Watson’s birthplace, Will Smith rubbed a bandage on his throat, where a bullet grazed him a week earlier. The neighborhood belongs to his gang now, and outsiders enter at their own risk.

In impoverished west Kingston, the Belfast of the Caribbean, neighborhoods have been controlled by gangs and divided by politics for decades.

Eight-hundred people were killed in gang violence surrounding the 1980 elections. Eleven people have been slain since the shooting death of a gang leader’s son in February. Even when the violence cools, tension remains.

“We’re on the borderline,” Watson said, looking out the window of his shop in Hannah Town.

He pointed to a five-story public housing project across a gully. “Over there is JLP,” he said, using the initials of the opposition Jamaican Labor Party. “This is PNP,” the governing People’s National Party.

People choose one side or the other in west Kingston, which is far from the tourist beaches of the north and west coasts. Residents of west Kingston are protected by the many gangs, which have connections to the political parties and to Jamaican drug “posses” in the United States.

Michael Manley, who stepped down as prime minister in March, said the government should move carefully to reduce gang influence in west Kingston. P. J. Patterson, his chosen successor, promised to void the vote in any district where ballots cast exceeded the number of registered voters.

Dozens of west Kingston residents interviewed seemed pessimistic about the chances for change.

“Every day I pray to God, but nobody ever does anything,” said Andre Henry, 28. He lives half a block from Watson’s shop, near a bridge that marks the end of Hannah Town.

Behind a rusted tin sheet used as a door, Henry and other young men worked in a dirt-filled courtyard beside their shack, carving wooden statues for sale to tourists. They have no regular jobs.

Behind another tin-sheet door, Watson and two employees were finishing cabinets. Reggae music, born in these Kingston ghettos, blasted forth in both places.

Ordinary life stops when the killing starts.

“When violence comes, people are afraid to come in the community, and sometimes they wait for months to pay up,” Watson said. People can’t get to work or markets in the “hot times” and children stay home from school, he added.

“I can’t even walk down the street where I was born,” Watson said, as if in summation.

In Watson’s old neighborhood one afternoon, Smith sat on a step in an alleyway beside a tiny food stand, talking about his gang.

Its “don” had been Lester Coke, reputed head of the deadly Shower Posse drug gang in the United States.

Coke, beloved in the Oxford Street and Tivoli Gardens neighborhoods, died in a Kingston prison fire in February while fighting extradition to Florida for drug killings. Former Prime Minister Edward Seaga, leader of the Jamaica Labor Party, attended his funeral.

Smith, 22, said he was walking near Hannah Town a week before the interview when a stranger fired five shots at him.

“I took two of them,” he said, pointing to his chest and throat.

Members of Smith’s gang took him to a hospital and oversaw his treatment, said Glenroy Sinclair, a reporter for The Gleaner, a daily newspaper.

Smith still carries a bullet in his right thigh from an encounter in his teens.

A year ago, he said, gunmen burst into his house looking for him, but he was not there and “they killed my mother instead.” Sinclair verified the account.

Most gang members interviewed, unlike Smith, asked that their names not be revealed.

About a mile away, Bernard McFarquhar, 67, digs graves for gang members not as lucky as Smith. After a gang funeral in n Maypen Cemetery on a Sunday afternoon, McFarquhar said most of his graves were for men aged 18 to 25.

“More younger people are getting buried than older people now,” he said.

McFarquhar squinted at the sun and said he is grateful for the steady work, but hates the gang wars and the “gun business” that divides and kills Jamaicans.

“PNP or JLP, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “All of them end up sitting in the same ground.”