Puerto Rico Building Walls to Keep out Crime : Safety: Some say ‘closed communities’ will aggravate effects of economic segregation.

Chattering jackhammers rip up part of an intersection as workmen prepare to seal off a suburban neighborhood with walls and guard posts.

Such “closed communities” have sprouted throughout this U.S. commonwealth as fear grows along with the crime rate.

“Crime is not just a problem of one neighborhood; it’s happening everywhere on the island,” said police spokesman Baltasar Vazquez, whose oceanfront district is beginning to fortify itself.

Outside Vazquez’s bungalow one day, a robber ripped a gold bracelet from a neighbor’s arm and stabbed the man. He needed 57 stitches.

“People are going crazy with the holdups and the car thefts,” Vazquez said.

Puerto Rico recorded 813 killings in 1991, compared to 600 in 1990 and 467 in 1989.

“One of the first things you hear when you turn on TV news, almost every night, is the number of people killed so far this year,” said Madeline Roman, sociology professor at the University of Puerto Rico. Vazquez said the pace was about the same as the record rate of 1991.

Even at the level of 1990, the latest year included in FBI national crime statistics, 17 of every 100,000 Puerto Ricans were murdered--nearly twice the 9.4 per 100,000 on the U.S. mainland that year. Increases were reported in robberies, burglaries, aggravated assaults and thefts.

Distrust of policemen combines with rising crime to feed the public fear.

A few years ago, an elite police squad became a gang of hired killers and extortionists. The chief of the traffic police now is under indictment, accused of running a protection and gun-smuggling racket for drug dealers.

Vazquez says police officers are doing their share against crime, but points out that pay is as low as $775 a month. All political parties now support a pay raise.

Police commandos have been sent into two of the island’s 330 public housing projects to restore order, and more than half of the current police academy graduating class will be assigned to the projects, Vazquez said.

He noted that residents of the Nemesio Canales project in San Juan had asked that their streets be closed to keep out the drug trade.

Roman believes wall-building by those who can afford to pay for it will increase the price of protection in the long run.

“We are seeing new forms of segregation, economic segregation,” she said of the closed neighborhoods. “These methods are going to provoke a greater fragility of the social order.”

Work crews have been especially busy in Guaynabo, a southwestern suburb, ripping up street entrances to build walls, guard posts and beeper-activated electric gates.

One morning, workers were blocking off four streets that fed into a main avenue.

Across the avenue, Yvelise Geigel Vela said walls soon might rise around her block, too. She expressed dismay at the “paranoia about security,” calling it the latest step in destroying the island’s civility.

“When I was small, things were so different,” said Geigel Vela, a real estate agent. “I grew up opening windows and doors. I like to see the sky.

“It takes a lot of patience to live the way we live now,” she said. “I just can’t get accustomed to it.”

Many new subdivisions come with electric fences and guards.

In March, the Puerto Rican Senate voted unanimously to relax restrictions on sealing off existing communities, and the mayor of San Juan supported efforts to close some streets in the city of 437,000.

In Vazquez’s Ocean Park neighborhood, residents plan to put up gates restricting access to the 250 homes and their beach.

On a Sunday afternoon, residents led a visitor to a spot where a car was stolen the night before and to an abandoned house, reeking of urine, that was used by drug addicts.

Some say the problems originate about a mile to the east, at the Luis Llorens Torres public housing project, one of the world’s largest. The project is gripped by some of Puerto Rico’s deeper problems: drugs, unemployment of 17.5% and a school dropout rate of 50%.

“It’s a battle, and you’re banging your head against a wall,” said Elaine Hopgood, who has lived in Ocean Park since 1950.

Of 20 people who complained of crime, only Hopgood, secretary of the local Neighborhood Watch, expressed reservations about closing off Ocean Park.

“I would like to think there is another solution,” she said. “But . . . “

She fell silent and bent down to pluck a beer can from the beach.