Kingston: Jamaica was making headway against its murderous reputation before the strangulation of Pakistani coach Bob Woolmer further tarnished the image of the Caribbean tourist playground.

Long known for one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, the tropical island famed for Rasta and reggae has nailed some of its major crime bosses in recent times and last year finally put a dent in the murder rate.

But the mystery surrounding Woolmer’s death and recent gang trouble in Jamaica’s primary tourist haven, Montego Bay, adds to the violent image of this nation of 2.7 million. “I believe it is too early to say the country is getting safer,” said Anthony Harriott, a professor of political sociology at the University of the West Indies and a leading authority on Jamaican crime.

Recent Jamaican leaders have publicly acknowledged violent crime, which festers in pockets of poverty endemic to the region, as the island’s biggest problem.

Jamaica is the Caribbean’s biggest producer and exporter of marijuana and a major hub for transhipments of South American cocaine headed to North America and Europe.

Jamaican gangs also have exported their reputation for violence to Britain, Canada and the United States.

Through the early 2000s, Jamaica rivalled South Africa, Colombia and other violent nations in per capita killings, at one time reaching at rate of more than 60 per 100,000 people annually. But in 2006, murders dropped 20 percent to 1,340 from 1,680 in 2005, and officials thought they had started to win the war.

Woolmer’s March 18 slaying comes in a year that was off to a bloody start, however, with 316 murders through March 20. The violence, once largely contained to the Kingston slums, spread alarmingly to Montego Bay, the hub of a tourist trade that last year brought record numbers of visitors and earnings.

“This is a huge problem for Jamaica. MoBay is our tourist capital,” Harriott said. “You have the involvement of gangs and the drug trade. This is a huge problem.”

Last year tourism revenues hit $1.4 billion in the January-September period.

In October 2004, Jamaica launched Operation Kingfish, an intelligence-based unit aimed at taking out crime bosses. It scored some major successes against the rampant drug trafficking, gun-running and extortion rackets that create much of Jamaica’s violence springs.

Most notable were the killing of alleged Clansman Gang chief Donovan “Bulbie” Bennett in a police shootout and the successful prosecution of Donald “Zekes” Phipps, the diminutive don of Matthew’s Lane in tough West Kingston, for the execution killings of two men.

Amnesty International, normally critical of Jamaican justice, particularly extrajudicial killings by police, recently complimented Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller for the country’s efforts to control violence against women and girls.

Jamaica’s deputy police commissioner, Mark Shields, a former Scotland Yard detective, noted the success of Operation Kingfish and said Jamaica’s battle to tame its entrenched crime problem is going “pretty well.”

“You know we have a reputation for murder and we’re not going to hide from that fact,” he said. “But let’s put things in perspective and you’ll see that well under 1 percent of the murders that occur in this country affect tourists, business people or indeed any visitor.”

He conceded, however, that the slaying of one of Woolmer by strangulation in his hotel room at a host hotel supposedly under tight security for the Cricket World Cup marks a setback. (Reuters)