LatAm cities are awakening to the nightmare of drugs

By James Craig

SAO PAULO, Brazil, May 11 (Reuter) From gluesniffing street kids in Lima
to warring drug gangs in Rio de Janeiro, Latin America's cities are awakening
to a nightmare that was once dismissed as a problem of rich countries, city
officials said on Sunday.

``Before, when we used to talk about drugs, we used to say 'It's a gringo
problem','' Fernando Andrade Carmona, mayor of Lima's Miraflores district,
said.

``Today, it is knocking on our door. It's in our neighbourhoods and on our
streets,'' he said.

Faced with an onslaught of drugrelated problems similar to those that struck
the United States and Europe more than a decade ago, Latin American cities
vowed on Sunday to take a tough stand against drugs.

Representatives of 37 cities and towns, from Managua, Nicaragua, to Sao
Paulo, Brazil, signed a declaration promising to oppose legalisation of
illegal drugs and promote drug prevention and enforcement efforts across the
continent.

In a region traditionally considered a drug producer but where abuse was
relatively rare, Latin Americans are now scrambling to check a rising tide of
drug problems that have begun to tear at their societies.

``In the past, there was not a good understanding of the real problem. We are
beginning to learn,'' said Laura Baldivieso, a Bolivian and a coordinator of
the First Latin American Cities Against Drugs Conference (ECLAD).

Other organisers of the threeday conference, held this weekend in Sao Paulo,
said Latin Americans can draw from antidrug successes in Europe and the
United States as well as learn from its mistakes.

In a grim reminder of the issue's urgency for Brazil, nine people including a
family of five were executed late on Friday in drug gang warfare in Rio de
Janeiro, known today as much for its crime rate as its famous beaches.

``Society is being threatened by drugs and needs to react,'' Sao Paulo Mayor
Celso Pitta told the closing session of the threeday conference attended by
250 people.

Drugproducing countries like Bolivia, Colombia and Peru now face rising drug
addiction and crime in their own cities.

Rony Pedro Colanzi, a councilman in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, said the problem now
threatened the future development of his city because it affected children
the most.

He stressed the need for poor countries to ``invest more in education rather
than (infrastructure) projects.''

Small towns also are now facing the drug scourge for the first time.

Jose Angel Oceguera, mayor of Tamazula, Mexico, said his town produced
marijuana for years, mostly for export to the United States, but drug abuse
among its residents was rare until recently.

``People started to come back from the United States with these habits,'' he
said. ``Now, we have a problem. It's very little (drug abuse) but its
growing.''

While the explosion in problems from family disintegration and violence to
crack babies and AIDS has caught Latin America by surprise, it also has
provoked a fast response, something experts say may help the region avoid
pitfalls encountered by Europe and the United States.

``In the U.S. in the 1970s, we were soft on drugs,'' said Stephanie Haynes, a
Texan and conference coordinator. ``We had soft penalties, soft attitudes,
soft laws. We're paying for that."