Crime Tarnishes Portrait of Tropical Paradise : Carribean: The notion of a haven of postcard beaches and lighthearted people is at odds with widespread poverty and drug trafficking.

Tourists arriving at the Holiday Inn learn at once that they didn’t escape crime by escaping to the Caribbean: A security gate blocks the entrance and two guards wave cars in and out.

Signs at the 558-room resort, Montego Bay’s largest, urge visitors to register at a security booth, advise that vehicles may be searched and warn against leaving valuables in parked cars.

In town, police with walkie-talkies patrol sidewalks and craft markets. On the scenic coastal highway between Montego Bay and Negril one Saturday, officers with machine guns stopped cars in a random check for drugs and weapons.

Jamaican authorities point to the police patrols and highway checkpoints as evidence of what they describe as a highly successful campaign over the last two years to protect tourists from crime and harassment.

In August, however, the U.S. State Department warned of “increased criminal activity in Jamaica” and described Kingston, the capital, as the most crime-ridden city in the Caribbean.

Reactions from stunned government officials ranged from denial to pledges of even more security.

Tourism, the leading earner of foreign exchange, put $740 million into the economy last year. Two-thirds of the tourists are Americans, and Jamaicans fear that they will be frightened off the winter season that begins in mid-December.

Jamaica and its neighbors share a dilemma: how to maintain the Caribbean’s image as a haven of postcard beaches and lighthearted people during a crime epidemic fed by poverty and drug trafficking.

“We project an image of the sun, sea and sex,” said Selwyn Ryan, a political scientist at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.

“But there is another reality--which you find on the underbelly of society--of poverty, dispossession, potholes in the road and inadequate supplies of almost every service.”

Unemployment in the Caribbean averages 20% to 50% among youth, and heavily indebted governments are spending less on schools, hospitals and roads. Ryan and other analysts say the region is fertile ground for crime, radical politics and civil unrest.

Radicalism rooted in poverty led to the Marxist coup of 1983 in Grenada, prompting a U.S. invasion and to an attempted takeover of Trinidad by 114 Muslim militants in 1990.

A widening gap between rich and poor was commonly blamed for looting on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricane Hugo struck in 1989.

Jobless, frustrated young people increasingly fall prey to drug use and dealing. The islands cannot patrol their shores adequately, and several are seeing sharp rises in violent crime.

Gov. Rafael Hernandez Colon of Puerto Rico suspended police vacations briefly last summer after 36 murders in three weeks. Puerto Rican authorities blame drug trafficking for 85% of crime, which includes 633 murders by mid-October, up from 483 at the same time last year.

A March Against Crime attracted 70,000 Puerto Ricans in October. The Roman Catholic Church organized the protest after a parish priest was murdered in a robbery.

In Christiansted, St. Croix, police increased patrols after 200 merchants and residents united to protest muggings and break-ins.

Trinidad police set up a 200-member patrol unit this year to fight urban crime. In Barbados, a 100-member force searches vehicles at roadblocks for weapons and contraband.

Some of the 12 million tourists who visit the Caribbean each year inevitably become victims, and occasionally the crimes are violent.

Two women from Massachusetts were stabbed to death on an Anguilla beach in 1988, a Briton was fatally shot leaving a pub in St. Maarten in 1990 and a Minnesota woman was murdered in Jamaica this year.

If Jamaica is a barometer, however, crimes against tourists are rare. Of 1.24 million visitors last year, the government said, only 371--or 0.03%--reported crime-related problems.

A drive through Montego Bay, Negril and Ocho Rios, the most popular north coast resorts, revealed the usual bustle of tourists browsing in souvenir shops and putt-putting around on rented motor scooters.

At the Holiday Inn, Sandy Lanphear, a 28-year-old systems analyst from Atlanta, sipped the local Red Stripe beer beside the pool and listened to amplified reggae music.

She said she felt safer in Jamaica than at home, because “I don’t think anyone’s going to put a knife or gun to my head to take my money.”

“You’ve got to keep your eyes open; it’s the same way in Paris, Brussels, wherever,” said her companion, Bob Darst, 45, a mechanical engineer from Atlanta.

One reason for the low rate of crime against tourists may be that many have little contact with residents.

About one-third of those in Jamaica stay at “all-inclusive” resorts that include drinks, food and entertainment in the price and provide them on the grounds. Tourists who venture out are escorted in air-conditioned buses.

Morris Gargill of the Daily Gleaner, Jamaica’s leading newspaper, suggests that the growing popularity of such resorts is directly related to crime and harassment of tourists.

In an article defending the U.S. travel advisory, Gargill said the all-inclusive concept was “based upon the full realization that the only way to preserve the tourist trade is to isolate visitors as far as possible from the local population, which regards them, not as visitors, but as prey.”

Jamaica’s crime problem arose from warfare between rival political gangs in the 1970s that transformed the slums of Kingston, a city of 900,000, into an armed camp and breeding ground for drug traffickers.

After a resurgence of drug-related killings last year, the government reimposed a 1974 crime-suppression law on Kingston and two adjacent districts. The law, lifted throughout the island for the first time earlier in 1990, permits curfews, search without warrant and detention without charge.

In the first eight months of this year, Jamaica recorded 383 murders and a startling 102 killings by police in a nation of 2.5 million people.

Robert Stephens, the tourism director, said the U.S. travel advisory is unwarranted because crime is concentrated in Kingston and most tourists go to the northern coast.

He said businessmen who visit the capital are no more likely to venture into dangerous neighborhoods than they would be in New York City or Washington, D.C.

“I don’t think the people who come up with these travel advisories take a look in their own back yards,” he said.

Lloyd Service, assistant police commissioner in charge of the resort district, said most tourist-related crime involves thefts from hotel rooms. He said police concentrate on stopping harassment of visitors by people selling trinkets or services in the street.

“We want an environment where the tourist is left alone,” he said.