CSME Network News

If nothing else, the Christopher Coke affair should have taught Prime Minister Bruce Golding and his administration that the Jamaican people are in no mood to tolerate the protection, perceived or actual, of alleged criminals by politicians.

Indeed, Prime Minister Golding barely escaped being tossed out of office for his nine-month stonewalling of the Americans on Mr Coke's extradition, for sanctioning the use of lobbyists to get the Obama administration to go soft on the issue. And even as he remains in office Mr Golding must know that he has a long way to go to regain the trust of Jamaicans, if that is at all possible.

We remind Mr Golding of this against the backdrop of this week's confirmation by Arturo Valenzuela, the United States (US) assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, that Washington has lodged several new extradition requests with Kingston. Hopefully, the Government has read the signal correctly.

"There is a series of extraditions that the United States still has requested and we look forward to those being processed," Dr Valenzuela told journalists.

Good relationship

He also made the point that the US valued its good relationship with Jamaica, despite the fact that "we may have had a bump in the road with regard to some issues having to do with extradition".

"We are happy with the way in which we co-operated with Jamaica and look forward to strengthening that relationship as we go forward," Dr Valenzuela added.

A point to note is that Dr Valenzuela is the most senior US official to visit Jamaica since last January's whistle-stop in Kingston by US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on her way home from Haiti.

Second, discounting Mrs Clinton's stopover, he is the second top State Department policy official to visit Jamaica in six months. His deputy, Julissa Reynoso, was here in January, ostensibly as part of a familiarisation swing through the region.

Similarly, Dr Valenzuela's trip to Jamaica, sandwiched by stops in the Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago, is to give him a first-hand feel of some of the territories he covers, with the specific aim of advancing security initiatives between the US and the Caribbean. And that, we expect, would have been his segue into the more specific message he is likely to have brought to Prime Minister Golding when they met privately.

Street operations

Speculation is rife that leading personalities in the public and private sectors, and some who straddle both, are on the latest extradition list the Americans have sent to Kingston. The suggestion is that some of these, like Mr Coke, who operated in Tivoli Gardens, which used to be the epicentre of the ruling party's street operations, are close to the Jamaica Labour Party.

Dr Valenzuela would most likely have made it known to Mr Golding that the Obama administration would frown darkly on any repeat of the Christopher Coke episode, assuming that Mr Golding and his government had the guts for it.

That he publicly confirmed that the US has extradition requests out suggests that he wants that information in the public domain, in much the same way that Ms Reynoso made it known that Washington would not back down from the Coke extradition.

In a sense, Washington has given Prime Minister Golding fair warning. Hopefully, he has learnt his lesson and will act quickly and behave responsibly.

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