COST OF CARIBBEAN CRIME GROWS

Drug Trafficking Exacts Social, Economic Toll, World Bank Reports

KINGSTON, Jamaica -- Economists investigating the impact of crime in
the developing world are yielding some harsh findings.

The social and economic costs are growing and are compounded with
each generation, feeding further cycles of violence.

And America's closest neighbors have it worst, the World Bank says. A
report to be released by the bank today says Jamaica is emerging as
the murder capital of the Americas, while the Caribbean region now
ranks as the world's most crime-ridden area, excluding places torn by
civil war. Hijacking, burglary, kidnapping and rape are also on the
rise, as a result of the region's role in the global drug trade.

According to a voluntary survey cited in the report, 48% of Caribbean
adolescent girls surveyed described their own "sexual initiation" as forced.

The economic consequences of the crime surge have been dire for
Caribbean nations, which depend on their images as tropical paradises
to attract tourists. Jamaica's tourism minister recently warned that
the crime level threatens to derail the industry.

Crime has other costs, too. In Jamaica, security costs, totaling as
much as 3.7% of annual gross domestic product, are deterring
investment. Four of 10 Jamaican business managers say crime prevents
their investing as much as they otherwise would.

United Nations data released yesterday show direct foreign investment
dropping as much as 9% in the islands last year, to $621 million from
$682 million in Jamaica, and to $883 million from $940 million in
Trinidad and Tobago.

Fear of crime is also driving educated Caribbean natives to leave
their home countries. The seven countries with the highest emigration
rates for college graduates are in the Caribbean, the bank estimates,
with Guyana the world's leader at 89%.

Some graduates do return, and adapt.

Before Joanna Banks leaves her Pan Caribbean Financial Services
office in Kingston, she calls a security company and orders a car to
trail her to her gated community in the hills overlooking the
financial district.

Her armed guards check inside her home and, radioing an "all clear"
to their command post, escort her through the front door. "The only
worry I have is on the way to meet the guards' car," says the
22-year-old securities analyst, a University of Pennsylvania
graduate. "The new trick is someone slashes your tires while you're
at work. Then they pounce when you stop to change them."

The World Bank lays blame for the rise in crime on rampant narcotics
trafficking through sea lanes connecting the U.S. to Latin America.
An influx of firearms is adding to the problem. "Wedged between the
world's source of cocaine to the south and its primary consumer
market to the north, the Caribbean is the transit point for a torrent
of narcotics, with a street value that exceeds the value of the
entire legal economy," the study concludes. At 30 murders a year per
100,000 residents, the Caribbean tops the murder rate in Colombia and
South Africa, which had the highest rates of homicide during the
1980s and 1990s. Jamaica and Haiti lead the region, with more than 33
murders per 100,000 citizens annually, but other places are quickly
deteriorating. Trinidad and Tobago doubled its rate of murder in
three years to 7.5 murders per 100,000 residents in 2005. The murder
rate in the U.S. was 5.9 per 100,000 in 2004.

According to researchers, about 10 tons of cocaine transited Jamaica
in 2005, the most recent year for which data are available.

At least twice that volume passed through Haiti and the Dominican
Republic. Local law enforcement has been overwhelmed, spending scarce
resources on patrolling rural areas and coastlines for traffickers.
Narcotics wealth, the report says, is "undermining and corrupting
societal institutions." The growing lawlessness is frightening many
Jamaican expatriates from returning home to work or retire.

Some 40,000 Jamaicans returned from Great Britain in the 1990s, but
that reverse migration has almost stopped, with many retirees
choosing to settle in the U.S. if they can obtain visas. "Fort
Lauderdale, Miami and places like that have captured a lot of our
people who would have settled here," says Percival La Touche,
president of the Association for the Resettlement of Returning
Residents in Kingston. Many, he says, become demoralized not only by
the poverty they encounter, but also by the inability of
law-enforcement agencies to protect elderly Jamaicans.