SUN, SEA AND MURDER

Here, Too, Drug-Trafficking Is To Blame

ELEVEN people, including five children, were shot dead in Guyana
last weekend when unidentified gunmen went on the rampage in the
village of Lusignan. A couple clung to their 11-year-old
grand-daughter as bullets were pumped into them; a little boy
clutched his mother's night-dress as she tried to crawl under her
bed. Furious villagers later set up barricades,
demanding protection and justice.

Police suspect it was the work of a gang acting on the orders of
Rondell "Fineman" Rawlins, Guyana's most wanted man with a $150,000
bounty on his head. He is said to blame the government for the
disappearance eight days earlier of his pregnant girlfriend, on her
way to the nearby capital of Georgetown to give birth. But racial
hatred provided the target. Like Guyana's government and half the
population, Lusignan is mostly ethnic Indian, while Rawlins and his
gang are ethnic Africans.

Many of Guyana's neighbours suffer even worse violence. Indeed, the
Caribbean, better known for its blue skies, cricket and rum punch,
is the world leader in violent crime. According to a joint UN-World
Bank study last year, it has a murder rate of 30 per 100,000
inhabitants-four times the North American figure and 15 times the
West/Central European average.

Jamaica is the world's most murderous country, followed by El
Salvador, Guatemala and Venezuela. But some smaller Caribbean
islands are catching up fast, irrespective of size or wealth. Pretty
little St Kitts, with just 40,000 inhabitants, suffered three
murders in four days last November. The prosperous Bahamas are
far more dangerous than impoverished Guyana. In Trinidad and
Tobago, the murder rate has quadrupled over the past decade, despite
a fall in unemployment from 18% in 1994 to 5% last year.

The common factor behind this violence is the illegal drugs trade,
which provides gangs with cash and weapons. But the link with
narcotics is not simple. Since the 1990s, cocaine shipments in the
Caribbean have stabilised while murder rates have soared. Suriname,
no slouch in the drugs business, has the region's safest streets.
Violence surges when gang politics are unsettled. Fights break out
over turf, bad debts or deals gone sour. Rivalries peak when
supplies run dry, and when arrests or deaths create a leadership vacuum.

More than 6m tourists visited the English-speaking Caribbean last
year. Few ran into serious trouble. Most of the bullets hit young
working-class men with the wrong networking skills, or their
families and neighbours. But armed robbery, ending sometimes
in murder, has a wider social reach. In some islands, a climate of
fear curtails everyday routines. Many Jamaicans no longer risk a
night-time drive to Kingston's airport. Catholic churches in
Trinidad have moved their Christmas midnight mass to an earlier hour.

Public reaction varies. Crime barely featured in last year's
elections in the Bahamas and Jamaica, nor is it an issue in Belize's
current campaign. But in Trinidad and Guyana, political polarisation
has brought calls for get-tough policies such as "zero tolerance",
the enforcement of the death penalty, and the imposition of a state
of emergency. The region's prisons are already crowded. Of 31
countries with more than three out of every thousand citizens behind
bars, 17 are in the Caribbean.

Trinidad, Jamaica and Barbados are now strengthening their
coastguards to choke the influx of drugs and guns-though this may
simply force the drug barons to shift their trade elsewhere. On
land, where police services are creaky and their staff sometimes
corrupt, reform is under way, but will be a long haul. Even
when arrests are made, it can be years before the culprits are
brought to trial. Removing the glamour of gangland crime for the
region's disaffected youth will take even longer.