Jamaica in the late 1970s was tearing itself apart along party lines. The ruling People's National Party, led by Michael Manley, and the opposition Jamaica Labour Party had carved Kingston into political territories as rigid as any gang boundary. Southside -- the neighborhood around Higholborn Street and Gold Street -- was JLP territory, and the men who lived there were identified accordingly. The Military Intelligence Unit, operating under directives to take "all reasonable steps" against perceived threats to the PNP government, infiltrated the Southside community. Agents made contact with a local group known as the POW Posse, led by Franklyn Allen. Fourteen men were originally targeted. The MIU operatives posed as recruiters, offering the men something that sounded legitimate -- employment, weapons for transport work. For young men in a garrison community with few options, the offer was enough.

The Green Bay artillery range sits along the coast near Port Henderson in Saint Catherine, west of Kingston. It is a military installation, isolated and controlled -- the kind of place where gunfire draws no attention. When the vehicles arrived in the early morning darkness, the men were led to a section of the range and told to wait. Other people would come, they were told, to handle the details of their new employment. Then the MIU operatives drove away. Major Ian Robinson led the sniper team concealed in the surrounding hills. His soldiers carried L8 General Purpose Machine Guns, Self Loading Rifles, and Sterling Sub-Machine Guns. The pre-arranged signal was a single pistol shot fired into the torso of Winston Hamilton. The moment the shot cracked through the darkness, the snipers opened fire from their positions above. Five men fell dead. The rest scattered into the bush surrounding the range. At least one survivor, Delroy Griffiths, plunged into the bay and was pulled from the water by a passing fishing boat.

The men killed at Green Bay were not abstractions. Norman Thompson, known as "Gutto," was twenty-seven years old and a former national footballer who had played for the Santos football team. Glenroy Richards was twenty-nine and an aspiring reggae singer. They came from Southside. They had families and neighbors who knew them by name. When word of the killings reached Kingston, those neighbors did not accept the official account -- that the men had been armed criminals killed in a legitimate operation. The people of Southside took to the streets in protest, demanding answers. Their demonstrations forced the government's hand. An official inquiry and Coroner's Inquest convened at the Spanish Town Coroner's Court, where a jury found that persons had conspired to kill the men at Green Bay and that members of the Jamaica Defence Force bore criminal responsibility for what had happened.

In July 1978, the Supreme Court issued warrants for ten members of the Jamaica Defence Force, charging them with first-degree capital murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The accused included Major Ian Robinson, Captain Karl Marsh, Lieutenants Suzanne Haik and Frederick Frazer, Sergeant LaFlamme Schooler, and five privates. The legal proceedings dragged on for years. Those charged with conspiracy were acquitted in June and July 1981 on no-case submissions -- meaning the judge found insufficient evidence to even send to a jury. Those charged with the murders themselves were acquitted on February 8, 1982, again for insufficient evidence. The Jamaica Labour Party rejected the verdicts but had no legal recourse; the accused could not be tried again. The PNP under Manley consistently disavowed knowledge of the operation, calling it a purely military decision. No one has ever been held accountable for what happened at Green Bay.

The Green Bay Massacre endures in Jamaican memory as one of the most brutal acts of political violence in the nation's history. It exposed the lethal extremes of garrison politics -- the system in which political parties armed and controlled entire communities, using them as bases of power while treating the people who lived in them as expendable. The men lured to the firing range that January night were expendable in someone's calculation: young, poor, from the wrong political territory. Their deaths did not end Jamaica's political violence -- the 1980 general election campaign would prove even bloodier -- but Green Bay became a reference point, a name that carries the weight of state-sponsored killing. The artillery range still sits along the coast near Port Henderson. The hills where the snipers waited still overlook the bay.