Pubdate: Sun, 24 Jul 2005
Source: Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
Copyright: 2005 Sun-Sentinel Company
Contact:  http://www.sun-sentinel.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/159
Author: Matthew Hay Brown, Orlando Sentinel

FEUDS AMONG DRUG GANGS TURN DEADLIER EVERY YEAR

LAS PIEDRAS, Puerto Rico  -- The men pulled up at about 8:30 that
night, stopped outside Building A-6 of the La Ribera public housing
project and opened fire.

Nine AK-47 rounds ripped into 5-year-old Paola Nicole Ortega Santiago.
She died instantly -- another innocent bystander in a feud between
rival drug gangs.

The May bloodbath, in which five others were wounded, was another
battle in a decades-long drug war that has pushed the homicide rate in
this self-governing Caribbean U.S. commonwealth of 3.9 million to more
than three times the national average.

Through Saturday, 439 people had been killed in Puerto Rico since the
start of the year. That's 16 behind the pace set last year, when
authorities counted an eight-year high of 793 murders.

"The crime rate is the No. 1 problem for Puerto Ricans," said Gov.
Anibal Acevedo Vila, who took office in January. "It's been the No. 1
concern for the last 30 years."

It is the misfortune of this Spanish-speaking land to lie both
geographically and culturally between the cocaine- and
heroin-producing countries of South America and the vast and lucrative
market for illegal narcotics in the United States. Of the hundreds of
tons of drugs that reach this Connecticut-size island each year,
authorities say, up to 20 percent stays here.

"We are a natural way station, a stopping point for smugglers," said
Roberto Medina, until recently the special agent in charge of U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement for Puerto Rico and the U.S.
Virgin Islands. "Once they are here, it's much easier to transit to
the U.S. mainland."

The struggle for control of the local narcotics market fuels the
bloody turf battles that account for more than 60 percent of the
killings here, including the May attack at the La Ribera housing project.

Police say the gunmen had been targeting Hector Nieves Martinez, 18, a
drug dealer at the project. When Nieves Martinez saw them coming,
police say, he ran to an apartment full of children, thinking his
assailants would not fire.

He was wrong.

Nieves Martinez was wounded in the attack, as was Paola's mother,
Denise Santiago Vargas, 29; a half-brother, 3-year-old Alexis Gonzalez
Santiago; Danny Soto Agosto, 16; and year-old Isaias Morales Fernandez.

"It's an emergency," San Juan physician Jose Vargas Vidot, founder of
one of Puerto Rico's most prominent social-services agencies, said of
the ongoing violence. "It is carrying away a generation of our people."

Violence has touched all levels of society here. In December 2004, a
nephew and two grandnieces of former Gov. Carlos Romero Barcelo were
shot to death while their car idled at a traffic light outside the San
Patricio shopping mall in suburban Guaynabo.

The previous December, two men gunned down former Major League
Baseball all-star Ivan Calderon at a bar in the north-coast town of
Loiza. That impoverished community has suffered so much violence some
parents have taken out life insurance policies on their teenaged sons.

Government officials are confronting the drug trade on three main
fronts: public-education programs that focus largely on the young;
treatment for those who are addicted; and prosecution of traffickers
and dealers.

The last of the three gets the most attention -- and the most money.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, law-enforcement officials say, island and
federal agencies have enjoyed budget increases, improved coordination
and taken advantage of new investigative powers.

The results, they say, have been positive.

In the unending task of stanching the flow of drugs, federal agents,
working with foreign governments, have dismantled several South
American trafficking organizations.

The U.S. Coast Guard seized a record haul of illegal narcotics last
year, almost doubling the amount of cocaine and marijuana confiscated
in the Caribbean.

"All this is economics-driven," said Jerome Harris, the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration's special agent in charge of the Caribbean.
"The bottom line is, if we can't give people a job, how are you going
to effect some change?"

The roots of the problem run deep. Annual per-capita income is $16,543
- - - less than half that of the United States. More than 40 percent of
public-school students drop out before graduating from high school.
Unemployment has risen to 11.2 percent.

Given such conditions, gangs have little difficulty recruiting
members.

"There is an absence of correct models for the youth," Vargas Vidot
said. "It's a climate of consumerism, individualism, an addiction to
consumption, a syndrome of instant gratification."

The violence has helped power the continuing exodus of Puerto Ricans
to the mainland -- a brain drain with serious implications for the
island's development.

The impact of violence on tourism in Puerto Rico is unclear. Nelly
Cruz, a spokeswoman for the Puerto Rico Tourism Co., says no tourist
has been a victim of violent crime since she joined the government
agency at the beginning of 2003, and she knows of no earlier incident.

But the loss of productivity to addiction, criminal activity and
violence carry other costs.

"The other impact is the possibility of attracting investment," said
Salvador Santiago Negron, chairman of a government-appointed
commission on violence and president of Carlos Albizu University in
San Juan. "If we are a corporation, will we invest here, where we have
close to 20 homicides per 100,000 people, or will we invest in Costa
Rica where there are only two homicides per 100,000?"

Nestor Mu=F1iz's daughter, Nicole, a college-bound honors student at
the Academia San Jose in San Juan, once wrote about helping to end the
violence. "I want to make a difference in this life, a positive
difference," she wrote in one high school assignment.

Disdain For Authority

Nicole was driving past the Villa Esperanza public-housing project in
San Juan one night in August 2003 when she was struck by a stray
bullet thought to have been fired by a sniper defending drug turf.

Her car slammed into a bridge abutment, killing her. She was
16.

Now Nicole smiles down from anti-violence billboards in the capital.
Her father has taken up her campaign -- serving on Santiago's
commission, leading marches of survivors, speaking at anti-violence
conferences and planning a Casa Nicole after-school program for
at-risk young people.

"We need a return to family," Mu=F1iz said. "There is a lack of
respect for authority. Fifteen years ago, parents were more conscious
of their responsibility to raise their children. Many people now are
afraid of their children."

Mu=F1iz and others are advocating for new approaches to the
drug-fueled violence here -- ideas that range from earlier closing
hours for bars and curfews for youth to improvements in public education.

"We have a minimum unemployment of 10 percent," Santiago said. "In
some communities it's 40 percent. So there is a factor: The
underground economy pays off. Then you look at the profile of the
typical person arrested. He's a male, under 25, with only a
ninth-grade education, unemployed, no bona-fide marketable skills.
That's the profile of a failed school system."

Troubled public education and sluggish economic growth are decades-old
problems here. Seeking to address them, Acevedo, the Puerto Rico
governor, campaigned last year on what he called the "Triangle of
Success" -- better schools, more jobs and safer streets.

But perhaps his boldest move so far has been crossing political lines
to appoint Pedro Toledo as superintendent of the Puerto Rico Police
Department. The former FBI supervisor returns to the position he held
from 1993 to 2001 under then-Gov. Pedro Rossello, Acevedo's main
opponent in last year's bitterly fought election campaign.

High-Tech Tactics

His appointment recalls the tough-on-crime approach of the 1990s, when
Rossello called in the Puerto Rico National Guard to occupy high-crime
areas.

Since his return, Toledo has supported proposals to close bars
earlier, establish a curfew for youth and install security cameras in
public places. He wants to bring criminal databases and DNA analysis
fully online.

"We have to do preventive work, investigative work to identify not
only the drug dealers, but the people that finance them -- the higher
levels," Toledo said. "Of course, those people are very well
protected, isolated, and that's why we need the federal government to
be able to do wiretaps and go into the bank accounts."

Chronic violence makes Puerto Rico more dangerous for law-enforcement
officers than any U.S. state. Forty were killed here from 1994 to 2003
- - - more than in Florida and New York combined, and the highest number
per capita in the United States, according to the FBI.

Vast Police Corruption

Protecting his officers is just one challenge confronting Toledo, who
takes over a department tainted by scandal.

Commanders have fired hundreds of officers in recent years, including
dozens charged with aiding drug smugglers.

More than 60 officers were charged in a pair of operations in 2001 and
2002, accused of protecting drug shipments, selling guns and drugs,
returning seized cocaine and heroin to dealers and helping to hide
dealers during sting operations.

Getting less attention are efforts to reduce the demand for
drugs.

The central government estimates 75,000 islanders are addicted to
heroin, cocaine or other illegal drugs. The only treatment it offers
is methadone for heroin addicts, through a network of clinics and
mobile units currently running at capacity with 9,155 patients.
Municipal and private programs do not make up the difference.

While the drug trade fuels gang violence, drug dependency brings its
own problems.

"What strikes us and affects us is the consequences of addiction, in
terms of crime, and health and disturbed families because of all the
legal implications, the criminality," said Pedro Morales, assistant
administrator of the governmental Administration of Mental Health and
Addiction Services.

Nestor Mu=F1iz, the father of Nicole, says Puerto Ricans have grown
scared.

"We live behind locked doors," he said. "We have to be talking about a
curfew to protect our kids. We are afraid even to let them go to the
movies."

Mu=F1iz has two older daughters. One lives in Pensacola with his first
grandchild. She has spoken of returning to the island. He says he has
tried to discourage her.

"With a pain in my heart, I have to tell her that Puerto Rico is not a
good place to raise kids," he said. "Many people are leaving."

For himself, he says, he plans to stay and fight. He expects a long
struggle.

"People believe it's overnight," Mu=F1iz said. "People have to know
it's going to be a long struggle. I'm not going to see an end to it. I
hope to see some changes for my daughters and my grandchildren. I want
to leave them a culture of peace in Puerto Rico."
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin