Social conditions
The healthcare in Jamaica is mainly run by the public sector. Visit AbbreviationFinder to see the definitions of JAM and acronym for Jamaica. In 1993, there were 18 hospitals, about 300 health centers, about 400 doctors and about 11,000 nurses. During the 1990s, about 7% of the state expenditure was allocated to health care. Unemployment was around 25% in the mid-1990s.
Drugs are a major social problem in Jamaica. Apart from the abuse among the youth, the desire, especially in the poor parts of Kingston, has increased. In rural areas, poor farmers have started growing marijuana to squeeze out their income. The increase in organized and armed gang fights is alarming. During the 1990s, several hundred deaths were claimed annually in drug-related violence. The violence is also based on low incomes and unemployment.
In October 1995, a wing broke out of the Labor Party and formed the National Democratic Movement. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Patterson continued to liberalize the economy and his transformation of the financial sector made it one of the country’s most thriving.
In 1997, a committee formed by the political parties, religious representatives and residents groups was formed to find solutions to the extensive violence in the country. The pressure from this committee made Jamaica the first country to run from the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, restricting the use of the death penalty. Check to see Jamaica population.
The widespread violence during the election campaign up to the election of December 18, 1997 led to many candidates retiring. In the election, the PNP captured 50 of Parliament’s seats while the remaining 10 went to the Labor Party.
Jamaica withdrew from the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1998 because of its opposition to the death penalty – a practice used in both Jamaica and many other Caribbean countries. Along with the other former British colonies, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad, in June 98 Jamaica decided to cut off relations with the Supreme Court in London and form a joint Caribbean Supreme Court.
Following his appointment as chairman of the G15 group – a group of 15 developing countries – Prime Minister Patterson declared at a meeting of the Kingston group in February 1999 that a new lender organization was needed for difficult situations. In his view, the IMF is unable to fulfill this role.
That same year, the military was dispatched on the street to bring the riots under control as a result of large price increases. For example. gasoline increased by 30%. The country remains one of the highest murder rates in the world. In 2001, crime increased by 30% and the number of murders reached 1,100.
History. – In the first decade of the 21st century, among the major problems of Jamaica continued to include those of crime and drug trafficking, which made the country one of the most violent in the world. In the 2007 elections, the People’s national party (PNP) – the progressive party that had been the prime minister for over fifteen years – was beaten by the conservative Jamaica labor party (JLP): Bruce Golding, also supported by the leaders of some criminal organizations and of drug traffickers, such as Christopher “Dudus” Coke, replaced as prime minister Portia Simpson-Miller, the president of the PNP in office since 2006. In August 2009, the United States asked for Dudus’s extradition to try him, but Golding refused to grant it. After a phase of frost between the two countries, which delayed the timeframe for the granting of some fundamental aid from the IMF, an arrest warrant was issued in May 2010 against Dudus, but the residents of the suburbs of Kingston, who considered him a benefactor, objected. In the clashes that followed, over 70 civilians died; Dudus was arrested in June and immediately extradited to the United States.
In 2011, the government approved a new Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, which however was criticized by human rights organizations for its too limited scope. In the new general elections (December 2011), the PNP reasserted itself and Simpson-Miller returned to being prime minister. The huge public debt forced his government to enact austerity policies and to ask again for the intervention of the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. In the following years, Jamaica continued to present important socio-economic problems, such as high unemployment, corruption, a weak administrative and judicial structure, inflation.
On the level of international relations, Jamaica, traditionally ‘isolationist’, continued to be strictly dependent on the USA, to which it was linked by commercial, tourist and migratory relations.