A slum that nags site of Americas summit
by Frank Bajak

The Associated Press    Translate This Article
17 April 2009

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad (AP) - A newly finished brick wall mostly obscures from the view of leaders arriving at the Summit of the Americas a slum that embodies their biggest challenges: drug-related violence and an economic crisis that threatens to erase gains against poverty.

The people of Beetham Estate, which flanks the main highway entering Port of Spain from the east, call it 'the wall of shame,' though community activist Sherma Wilson says it was built to shield them from the highway, not vice versa.

Beetham is home to some 5,000 people, about a tenth of them squatters. A block-wide slice of simple dwellings that runs most of a mile and is wedged between motorways, it is a place outsiders shun for the danger.

A coconut-processing plant spews milky waste into a scum-coated pond that intersects the neighborhood, emptying into a malodorous mangrove swamp. After heavy rains, crud overflows into many of the one-story brick and mortar homes.

'They don't give a damn about us here,' said Wilson, who has organized residents to demand everything from drainage ditches to electric and water hookups from the government.

Like most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago is just now beginning to feel the global recession's sting, and it's places like Beetham, where society's bottom feeders gather, that tend to suffer most.

Unemployed young men lounge on its main street, fixing bicycles and cursing military police who cruise the slum in jeeps and, they say, harass them for no reason.

Wars between rival gangs who peddle cocaine and marijuana claim about two young lives a day in this country of more than 1.4 million. It saw 157 murders in the first three-and-a-half months of this year, on the heels of 545 last year—the highest ever.

Wilson said Colombian and Mexican traffickers are increasingly controlling Trinidad's drug trade.

Meanwhile, the labor market is suffering from fresh layoffs in the republic's previously robust oil industry.

Keith Lynch, a 35-year-old landscaper who lives in Beetham, says he barely gets enough steady work to feed his family of four.

He laughs so heartily his dreadlocks sway when asked if he thinks the new U.S. president, Barack Obama, can do much to help the 180 million Latin American and Caribbean people living in poverty. Everyone knows Obama already has his hands full trying to mend the world's leading economy.

But Lynch turns serious when asked about the potential for worsening crime.

'If they step on the small man and he don't have nothing he's going to go take from another man's hand,' Lynch said.

Experts fear the region is losing in a matter of months what it took years to gain. Between 2002-2006, regional poverty dropped 10 points to 34 percent, according to the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America.

Now, an Inter-American Development Bank study estimates some 15 million people in the region will fall into poverty if its economy shrinks 1 percent this year.

Analysts say the leaders of the 34 democracies gathering in Port of Spain this weekend can only hope to sketch the beginnings of a strategy to respond to the crisis.

As democratically elected officials, they've got a lot on the line.

Mauricio Cardenas, a Colombian economist with the Brookings Institution, predicts voters will punish governments on the right and the left alike in elections across much of Latin America in the coming two years.

That could not only provoke more state intervention in economies, at the expense of the free market, it could also breed social instability.

'A crisis lasting more than a year, with an important economic contraction, could cause considerable social trouble, including an increase in crime,' said Costa Rican political scientist Kevin Casas-Zamora.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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