Letter of the Day | Coopers Pen: Where was the prevention?

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The demolition of approximately 20 homes in Coopers Pen, Trelawny, should trouble the conscience of every Jamaican.

Reports indicate that residents were awakened around 3 a.m. as demolition crews moved in and began destroying their homes. By daylight, houses that families had spent years building had been reduced to rubble, leaving about 20 families displaced.

My heart goes out to the residents of Coopers Pen. Whatever the legal circumstances surrounding the land, it is difficult to look at families standing beside the ruins of their homes and remain unmoved.

This tragedy also forces us to ask a difficult question: How was a situation like this allowed to develop for so many years?

Let me be clear. This is not an argument that private property rights should be ignored. They should not. If a court has determined that people have no legal right to remain on someone else’s property, that decision must be respected.

However, property rights should not end the conversation.

If people began settling on privately owned land without permission, what happened when the first house was built? What steps were taken to secure the property, prevent further occupation, and pursue timely legal remedies?

Where was the prevention?

If a landowner allows people to build homes on private property for years, the eventual removal becomes far more complicated. A settlement becomes a community. Children grow up there, and families invest their savings, labour, and hopes in creating homes and building lives.

Then, years later, an excavator arrives.

That cannot be considered a satisfactory way to manage a land dispute.

If this legal battle has been ongoing since 2009, why was there not a comprehensive plan long before the bulldozers arrived? Why were families not given adequate time to prepare? Why was there no coordinated effort to identify vulnerable residents and ensure that they were not left without shelter?

Most importantly, who is accountable for allowing the situation to reach this point?

Coopers Pen should become more than another news story. It should prompt a national examination of how Jamaica manages long-running land disputes and informal settlements.

We can uphold property rights without abandoning compassion. We can enforce court decisions without treating people’s lives as disposable. The question is not only who owns the land but why the problem was allowed to persist for so long and who will answer for the human cost.

Chelly-Ann Jones-Segree