BRAZIL STRUGGLES TO CONTAIN BLOODY DRUGS TRADE

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - It is the same grisly story every week. Gunmen
enter a makeshift bar or a house in the slums that ring South
America's biggest city and start shooting.

The body count is soaring this year - 197 fatalities in 56 multiple
homicides between Jan. 1 and Aug. 21, compared with 162 dead in such
massacres in all of 1997. Few of the killers are ever caught, but
police are certain the booming trade in drugs is behind almost all of
the bloodshed. "Traffickers are more and more violent.

They shoot at random, to them it's the same thing to kill one or ten
people," San Paulo police homicide head Marco Antonio Desgualdo said.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry