Between Self-Determination and Dependency: Jamaica's Foreign Relations, 1972-1989

After the PNP's IMFdébâcle the JLP won the October 1980 election with an overwhelming majority. The party's populist campaign slogans, which promised to make "money jingle in your pockets" and generally emphasized "deliverance", were as successful as the PNP's "Better must come" campaign in 1972. As usual during this highly partisan period of Jamaica's history, the election was followed by a purgative atmosphere in which the new ruling party persecuted members and supporters of the opposite party, in order to further widen its leverage against the opposition. In this purgative phase of the early 1980s, criticism and even public debate about Jamaica's foreign relations was extremely limited. There was no way that one could have compared this political atmosphere with the intensity of public and internal party debates of the 1970s.

Similarly, the relations between the new government and Daily Gleaner were clearly much better throughout the 1980s. Thus, there were no negative commentaries or any sustained public campaigns to be found, whenever government members verbally attacked this newspaper, which happened several times ( DG 29/ 10/ 1988, 1; DG 23/ 4/ 1988, 3). Nor were any protests heard when one of its reporters was abused at a JLP function, which in the 1970s would have been branded as a sacrilege against the freedom of the press ( DG 24/ 11/ 1988, 1).

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