PAGE 4, THE BEHREND BEACON, MARCH 24, 2000 El Salvador feels agony of gringo scourge: crack by Juanita Darling Los Angeles Times March 20. 2000 SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador San Miguelito, a few blocks of ruined mansions and improvised shacks in the capital, is the nightmare that Cen tral American countries denied they would ever face. It is the reality that has made the international war on drugs their war. For years, police here have said that cocaine was a gringo white problem and that combating it was a costly struggle the United States im posed on countries where people were too poor to buy the white pow der. They have stopped saying that. Colombia's drug traffickers, always masters of marketing, have brought the price down to the consumers' level, just as they did in the United States during the 1980 s. Now, crack cocaine competes with model air plane glue or half-pints of Tic-Tac rum, selling for the change to be earned washing windshields or sweeping the floors of market stalls. Here in San Miguelito, cocaine is melted with bicarbonate of soda into smudged little crystals that look like industrial diamonds. Those crystals are worth more than gems to the spin dly children, aging men, and tired women who, for less than a dollar, can buy 20 minutes of escape from their laminated shacks built into the city's canyons, a bleak. 21st century version of cliff dwellings. The drive to buy crack unites ex guerrilla lawyer Jorge Edgardo and 14-year-old Jeremias with Yvonne, educated in the country's best paro chial schools, and Raquel, a secretary who became a prostitute after an af fair with her boss. They gather at the house that Wilfredo. a tall redhead Kuomintan by Jim Mann Los Angeles Times March 18, 2000 TAIPEI, Taiwan The devastating electoral defeat of Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, rep resents an historic turning point both for this island of 22 million people and for China. Not since the Japanese relinquished control of Taiwan at the end of World War II has anyone from outside the Kuomintang held power here. The party's rule has been part of the fabric of daily life for half a century. Even Taiwan's currency still carries the image of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who brought the Kuomintang, or KMT, here in the last days of the civil war he lost on the main land. ' Now, the KMT is turning over the presidency to a political entity, the Democratic Progressive Party, that the KMT didn't even permit to organize until 14 years ago. At the time, in 1986, the KMT be lieved that it could continue to hold on to power in Taiwan for decades -- in the fashion of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which in those days allowed other parties to participate in elections, but not to win. The Democratic Progressives arose as the political vehicle for native Tai wanese, who make up 80 percent of the island's population and who were, un til the late 1980 s, excluded from the top ranks of the KMT. In some ways, Chen's victory Satur day was comparable to the victories of Kim Dae Jung in South Korea and Corazon Aquino in the Philippines. In each case, Asian opposition movements challenged authoritarian regimes for many years until eventually, with the help of elections and political liberal ization, they came to power themselves. In other ways, however, Chen's re markable victory can't be compared to what has happened anywhere else, be cause of the huge, looming presence of China in Taiwan's political life. from a wealthy family, rents here in San Miguelito -- part drug market, part refuge, a Cannery Row of crack. These lives intersect in this once stately neighborhood that today is an experiment in what happens when a culture of postwar. post-earthquake neglect is infused with a fast-spread ing virus, and underfunded public of ficials scramble to find an antidote. The air is still crisp and the morn ing sun reflects off the thin, wooden steeple of the Don Rua, arguably the Construc tion worker Nelson Trujillo smokes crack in what's left of the house he shares with 1- ex-guerilla lawyer cn Jorge Edgardo and others. most beautiful church in El Salvador, when the cars line up on East 23rd Street. One by one, the minivans and late-model sedans pause at the side door of Our Lady of Perpetual Help School, allowing girls in navy blue jumpers and starched white blouses to scurry into the sanctuary of the school patio, under the watchful eyes of a nun. Don Rua and Our Lady of Per petual Help, nearly a century old, are reminders of the kind of place that San Miguelito used to he. "It was a pleasant residential neigh borhood," recalls David Escobar Galindo. a writer who lived in the area from the 1940 s until the 19705. "In those days, the social classes were not as clearly marked. That part of the city was shared by people of all so cial classes . ...then the middle class land above moved away." Many houses destroyed in a 1986 earthquake were never rebuilt. Refu gees fleeing the war squatted in the shells, and others built shanties around the original neighborhood. Then crack arrived, and with u users who support their habit by begging, stealing, and prostitution. San Miguelito became no more than an obstacle for the students of Our Lady of Perpetual Help to cross on their way to classes. The few who walk to school are g loss to Progressives marks historic Taiwan turning point The election of an opposition candi date ruptures. at least for the time be ing. nearly eight decades of on-again, off-again ties between the Chinese Communist Party and the KNIT. Those ties in \ olve so much conflict, manipu lation, and intimacy that a psychologist might diagnose the tvio groups as codependent. In the early decades of the 20th cen tury, the men who led the K MT and tlie Chinese Communist Party knew One another well. Many of them went to school with one another at the Huangpu Military Academy in southern China. When Chiang ruled mainland China, the Communists occasionally It rmed "united fronts - with the KMT --- that is, coalitions of convenience, designed sometimes to tight the Japanese hut also to give both sides time to regroup and regain strength in their continuing civil Eventually, the "united front" cam paigns would break down, and the two sets of antagonists would go back to killing one another. When the KMT fled to Taiwan, its rivalry with the Communists continued for decades. In Taiwan, pictures of such Communist leaders as Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai were regularly stamped with the word 'bandits." And yet, despite the enmity, China's Communists also for years counted on the KMT as its best hope for reunify ing Taiwan with the mainland. China's logic was simple: many of the KMT leaders had fled to Taiwan from the mainland, and eventually, Beijing hoped, the KMT would want to make a deal enabling them to return home. But this calculation began to erode in the mid-1980s. Oddly enough, the chain of events that culminated with Saturday's Democratic Progressive vic tory began with a Communist Party tri umph: in 1979, the United States fi nally granted diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China and cut off ties with the Nationalists' Republic of China on Taiwan. In the early 'Bos, Taiwan thus found WORLD NEWS firmly clasped by the hands of their nannies or mothers as they pass the corner where Raquel, in a worn black velvet jacket, black teddy, and shut green satin skirt, whistles to pass ersby. "I'm up early because I need some breakfast," she says, shaking her curly ponytail with an almost com pulsive flirtatiousness. At this mo ment, she wants money for food, but she admits, "Most of us out on the street are crack addicts." She is the daughter of evangelical Christians who sent her to secretarial school. After an affair with her first boss, she was fired and kicked out of her parents' home. She got a job in an exclusive brothel, where she dis covered cocaine. That was 12 years ago. Nowadays, at age 34, unbathed and her face drawn by drug abuse, she will accept a client for as little as the 50 cents that a rock of crack costs. No religion or social status provides protection from crack. Just a decade ago, Yvonne was one of those blue-jumpered school girls, chauffeured here from better neigh borhoods. She never expected to end up living in San Miguelito. In high school, she transferred to the San Jose Day School, a Jesuit in stitution considered the strictest and most academically demanding paro chial school in the country. She was a second-year law student at the pres tigious Matias Delgado University when she first tried crack. That was three years ago. "I don't know what happened," she says, shrugging. "Crack gets to you." Today, Yvonne is an emaciated, dark-haired beauty who walks with a limp that she says she got in a heat ing, maybe by police, maybe by someone with a sadistic streak who saw her sleeping in the gutter. Since she was kicked out of Wilfredo's crack house for some infraction that she does not want to discuss, Yvonne cannot always find a place to sleep. She hangs around outside or in one of the brothels across the street, beg ging for money. When she has gath ered the equivalent of 50 cents. she approaches Wilfredo's barred door, shows her coins, and is ushered in side. Yvonne walks past two guards holding rifles, through a living room with peeling paint on the walls and mismatched furniture and into a small room with a bare lightbulb that illu minates a huge wooden desk that be- itself out in the cold. In the United States it had little public support, be cause the KMT was repressive and un democratic. Taiwanese intelligence officials were caught and eventually convicted of murdering a Taiwanese opposition writer on American soil. Finally, in 1986, President Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek's son, de cided to open up Taiwan's political life. I e permitted the Democratic Progressives to take part in elections. At the same time, he also groomed a native Taiwanese leader, Lee Teng-hui, to he his successor. Both actions served to revive Taiwan's flagging support in the United States. After the 1989 Tiananmen Sgare crackdown in Beijing, Taiwan could legitimately tell Congress that it was de mocratizing while China was certainly not. Lee came to power after the younger Chiang's death in 1988. That was, by itself, a significant change: for the first time, Taiwan's president did not come from mainland China. The old KNIT- Communist ties were beginning to fray. And indeed, over the past 12 years, Lee has given Beijing fits. Ile has car ried out a series of initiatives to estab lish Taiwan as an independent political entity, culminating in his insistence last summer that Taiwan should have "spe cial state-to-state relations" with China. On the mainland early this year, sev eral Chinese scholars and officials said they felt that any of the three leading candidates in Taiwan's election would be an improvement over their nemesis, Lee Teng-hui. Yet it turned out that the curious his torical ties between the Communists and the Kuomintang outweighed China's irritation with Lee. In the last weeks of the presidential campaign, China was all but begging Taiwanese voters to elect Lee's desig nated successor, Lien Chan, the candi date of the KMT. It was the ultimate irony. For dt cades, when the KMT ruled the main land, the Communists had portrayed it (often with good reason) as corrupt. longs to Wilfredo. With red locks falling across his forehead, widely spaced green eyes, freckles, and the band of lost boys and girls who gather around him, it is easy at first to mistake Wilfredo for a sort of Peter Pan. About a year ago, Wilfredo rented a spacious fixer-upper for $ll5 a month. It is one of more than 200 crack houses that operate in greater San Salvador, police estimate. "It's sort of a commune,"' he says. "If someone has no place to bathe or sleep, he can do it here." Customers can also smoke crack inside an important consideration, because Sal vadoran law prohibits selling drugs and consuming them in public, but not using them in private. Wilfredo built up a staff, including Juan Carlos, a crack-using lawyer, to get commune members out of jail, and Angel, a muscular ex-guerrilla who watches the door. Wilfredo was arrested five times in the first six months he ran the house, on drug or assault charges. Juan Carlos would always win his release. Then, in November, police raided the house, taking everyone into cus tody, including Wilfredo. Juan Carlos went to court the next day to post bail, and he was arrested as well. Margarita, Elizabeth and Jeremias were hardly saddened by the raid on Wilfredo's. They simply hustled for coins down the block at Tutunichapa, a labyrinth of shanties and open sew ers that sprung up in the 1980 s to house refugees from the war-torn countryside. "Five years ago, a gram of cocaine cost 800 colones, - or about $9l, he says. "It was too expensive for people to buy." That was when U.S. and Colom bian authorities were breaking up the Medellin and Cali drug cartels, which controlled the international cocaine trade. Those cartels were replaced by smaller, more flexible organizations that began to pay Central American smugglers in kind, U.S. court docu ments and government reports show. The result: an ever-increasing amount of cocaine began staying here '" instead of moving "north ) ' Police raid Tutunichapa frequently, but when they leave, the crack users drift back. Jorge Edgardo, 43, shares the shell of a house destroyed in the earth quake with several chickens and a group that includes Nelson Trujillo, This year, in Taiwan's election cam paign, the main issue Chen's forces to win used against the KMT was, once again, Now, China will have to begin a new corruption. But this time, China's Com- history with a new political force. Clinton spars with the NRA by Virginia Groark Chicago Tribune March 15, 2000 Carrying an agenda for an unfin * is hed second term and raising cam -I,,V‘ to help his vice p P re aig si n de c n as t h su W ccia him. President Clinton spent a g evening in Chicago on MoodaY. March 13 . promoting gun-c or 111 01dat1 help spur Demo crats for the fall. Clinton's vis its to Stefani's restaurant, 1418 W. Fullerton Ave.. and the Lincolnwood, home of veteran" Democratic ac tivist Michael I Cherry raised nearly MAO for the Demot, cratic National Committee., Those are "soft money" contri4 , ' butions that can' be used to help Vice President Al Gore's presi- K 44.0,4 ithY. ( 0-14 7rb. h that d p d a :i t il e go t s i . a es i weelalma; m t u , : t har C i hec to,n k ii : e s : • Democratic conviiiiohar hew-Itdvertising cam paign, But ' sAttiPcusing Clinton 'for an Wog the gun-rt is Paign gun 1 Bush, tinue his tiatud ership a construction worker; and Pati, a homemaker whose husband intro duced her to crack, then abandoned her when she became an addict. Jorge Edgardo came to the capital in 1974, looking for opportunities. He got a job at the National Univer sity of El Salvador, began to study law, and was drawn into the university's leftist movement, an im portant foundation of the Marxist guerrillas who took up arms in 1980. He visited imprisoned rebels and joined in guerrilla attacks himself before turning in his arms with the signing of a peace accord in 1992. He took a job in a law firm but then watched with growing bitterness as he saw the principles he fought for negotiated away in the National As sembly or pushed aside by political infighting. Two years ago, some friends of fered him cocaine. "It was an escape from reality," he says. "But when you come back, the problems are twice as bad." Cocaine took over his life almost immediately. He quickly switched to the cheaper, more intense crack. In contrast, Jeremias, the 14-year old, says he does not remember a life without crack. For the last four years. he has awakened each day on the sidewalk in front of an open-air mar ket. When he gets up, he stands on Espana Avenue, the neighborhood's main thoroughfare. waiting for cars to slow, expectantly. The occupants send him to STUDENT CONVICTED munist regime was rooting for the KMT whose leaders have few if any personal ties to the mainland. White House of using gun deaths to further its political interests. "I'm just trying to keep more people alive," Clinton told about 350 people at the restaurant, defend ing his push for trigger locks as well as a 72-hour waiting period and background checks for firearms purches at gun shows. The NRA has'stepped up its criti olf sof Clint ale tone w laws I ,_ ° . r ? say is wrong, When you know 'a a lie," Heston says ion' commercials, Wilfredo's to buy crack or cocaine, and he keeps a little for himself. Ev ery shirt, every piece of candy he is given is sold to buy crack. No one is sure how the skinny, ragged child sur- Rosario Maravilla Rivera watches him every day from the cart where she sells fresh coconuts, and she frets. With four children ages 3 to 15, drug addiction is high on her list of wor-. ries. When her husband lost his job as a soil studies technician four years ago, the family had to move to Tutunichapa. "I cannot leave them in the house," Rivera says. "They come from school to the market and do not go home until I do." So the children end up doing their homework on the side walk or on the hood of the pickup their father uses to haul goods for cus tomers. They walk home past rows of addicts and hear the sounds of fights and raids all night. Police, with limited resources, of ten must choose between the con cerns of their own citizens, like the Rivera family, and U.S. pressure to stop the big drug shipments, Perez says. "We cannot stop the big drug ship ments if we are concentrating our ef forts on local consumption," he says. "Salvadorans do not care how many tons of cocaine pass through here on the way to the United States; they care about the crack being sold on the cor- Joshua Cole, 19, of Southgate, Mich., was convicted of involun- tary manslaughter and mixing and mingling a harmful substance on March 14 in Detroit, Mich. During a January 1999 party, Cole mixed the date rape drug GHB into drinks consumed by Samantha Reid, 15, and Melenie Sendone,l6. Reid died and Sendone went into a coma which are airing on network affili ates and cable network& In addition, NRA Executive Di rector Wayne LaPim:: said Sunday, March 12, that the President "needs a certain level of violence in this country" and is "willing to accepta certain level of killing to further his political agenda and his vice presi dent too." "I dicln' that," Clinton re sponded. "I've met with a lot of people who have died from vio lence and : I just wants to keep more people alive," The ac- cg flying between Clinton and We NRA also provide added fodder for ,the fall presiditn dal campaign. Gun control, the President Slid, was one example of the differ -1 *netts, that .enisti betWeint*Pfo. sumPtiveDefo o - 1 cretit anei Re publican nominees. • Bush, as Tema gctirern94 gig* into law a measure allOWing Via/i7 fied residents to natty Acat#Salsai fueanns. Bush adolunisaidUesult. ports mandatingthestde:oloo locks wi ing th fire 1410 ing their use, oanl.. would be unenfOtnelt It 'without creating “t r igger loek pou04:0,
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers