SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia – The shocking video, taken from a security camera, showed the killer in a backward baseball cap and dark glasses, stalking his terrified prey in broad daylight on a city street. His victim seemed to plead for his life and tried to stumble away before the killer, gripping the pistol in two hands, shot the man dead beside a parked car.
Played over and over on television here, the video has crystallized public outrage over a wave of killings in this city of 1.6 million, Bolivia’s most populous and a center of the country’s growing drug trade. It has become a stark example of increasing violent crime in a country that has long been safer than many of its neighbors.
The government response was blunt.
“Since they are so coldblooded when it comes to killing, I want them brought in immediately, dead or alive,” Carlos Romero, one of the top ministers in the cabinet of President Evo Morales, said in the days after the slaying, feeding a common perception that the man was killed by a hired assassin, perhaps because of a drug dispute. “We will not allow hired killers to become established in Bolivia.”
Rubén Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz Department, which includes the city of the same name, even warned that the wave of killings risked turning Santa Cruz into another Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city infamous for a level of drug violence many times worse than what residents are facing here.
Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in South America, yet it has a single-digit homicide rate that is closer to those of the continent’s more developed countries, like Chile and Argentina.
But the rate appears to be rising. Bolivia had 8.9 homicides per 100,000 people in 2010, up from 6.5 in 2005, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Still, the country is far safer than neighbors like Brazil, with 21 murders per 100,000, or Venezuela, with 45, according to the United Nations figures.
But Bolivia has been grappling with a rising drug trade and increasing drug use at home. It is the world’s third-largest producer of coca, the plant used to make cocaine, and it has a long and largely uncontrolled border with Brazil, which is considered one of the world’s fastest-growing drug markets. Large quantities of drugs also move through from neighboring Peru.
And because Santa Cruz sits on the border with Brazil, it finds itself at the center of the drug trade.
“Today, what we are seeing is this: organized crime, mafias, drug trafficking, dirty money, weapons, and this undoubtedly is going to rapidly increase the levels of criminality,” said Vladimir Peña, secretary of the interior for Santa Cruz Department. “We are seeing an increase in the number of homicides on the one hand and, second, what we are seeing is the level of cruelty.”
The crime wave also plays to longstanding complaints here that Santa Cruz, a stronghold of opposition to Mr. Morales, gets short shrift from the national government in La Paz, which controls the police.
The two sides cannot even agree on how many officers are deployed here. Mr. Peña says that 4,500 police officers are assigned to the Santa Cruz Department, the country’s largest in terms of area, and that many of them hold desk jobs that keep them off the streets. Mr. Romero, by contrast, says that there are more than 6,000, and that an additional 340 were being assigned in response to the wave of killings.
The day after the killing captured in the video, Mr. Romero said, the government formed an emergency plan to crack down on violent crime in Santa Cruz. That includes increased operations aimed at small-scale drug dealers and sweeps of bordellos aimed at finding foreigners who are in the country illegally and potentially connected to drug gangs.
On one late-night sweep last week, officers checked a grimy club called La Rose while indifferent prostitutes watched an American police show on a small television. Wilted flowers decorated a makeshift altar to St. George, known here as a patron saint of those on the wrong side of the law. Eduardo Cabrera, a police lieutenant colonel who leads a small community policing effort, said that there were only about 1,000 officers regularly assigned to street patrols and investigations in the city of Santa Cruz.
“It’s not enough,” Colonel Cabrera said.
0
Video of Killing Crystallizes Bolivian Anger Over Crime
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia – The shocking video, taken from a security camera, showed the killer in a backward baseball cap and dark glasses, stalking his terrified prey in broad daylight on a city street. His victim seemed to plead for his life and t