Regional Outlook : Central Americans Fighting a New Wave of Street Crimes : As the civil wars recede, murders, rapes and carjackings are rising. Poverty, drugs and and disorder are blamed.

The young woman university student was walking home from the bus stop one night when a gang of men, hooded and carrying assault rifles, drove into her path. They kidnaped, raped and robbed the woman, dumping her afterward along a darkened road.

Her family, alerted by witnesses that she had been abducted, rushed to the police. Oh, the police officer had said, they probably took her up by the prison. That’s where they always take the girls to be raped.

Brutal street crimes--from murders to rapes to carjackings--appear to be on the rise in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America, battering and bruising a population that was just struggling to recover from more than a decade of civil war.

Crime motivated by politics has not ceased and, as a series of assassinations in El Salvador in recent days demonstrates, may be increasing. But other more mundane causes, such as unemployment, poverty, drug abuse and the unraveling of society’s fabric, have become just as common--perhaps more so.

In El Salvador and Panama, public opinion surveys now list crime as the country’s No. 1 problem; in Nicaragua, lawlessness has paralyzed the countryside, and even in relatively peaceful Costa Rica, street crime is soaring.

The inability of governments to fight crime is made worse by longstanding public mistrust of police forces, which traditionally have been corrupt, abusive paramilitary organizations that were much more part of the problem than the solution. Few citizens have faith that the police can solve a crime; many are as afraid of the police as of the criminals. Or they can’t tell the difference: the United Nations estimates that El Salvador’s National Police are responsible for 35% of murders, torture and other abuses reported this year.

El Salvador, as part of U.N.-brokered peace accords that formally ended its war last year, is supposed to replace the dreaded National Police with a new civilian police force whose members include former leftist guerrillas and former soldiers. But the process is slow, and the new force is hampered by a meager budget and shortages of equipment.

Criminal attacks became so numerous in the Salvadoran capital that President Alfredo Cristiani risked international condemnation and ordered patrols of city streets by army troops--troops who only months before had been confined to their barracks because of the end of the war. The army deployment followed the apparently random murder of a Roman Catholic bishop, who was shot to death as he drove home from the airport.

The surge in crime is seen by many experts as a common postwar phenomenon. After years of conflict and tens of thousands of killings, an entire generation has grown up in what sociologists refer to as a culture of violence.

In El Salvador and Nicaragua, for example, thousands of young men who have done little but fight and kill for the last several years are now turned out onto the streets, often with scant prospects for work or education. Many turn to gangs that are not completely unlike the armies they once belonged to.

And guns abound. Many are Cold War leftovers such as U.S.-made M-16 or Soviet AK-47 assault rifles--formidable instruments of delinquent power.

As Central American societies seek to become more democratic, some of the newfound liberties actually contribute to crime, experts say, especially as the development of certain democratic institutions, such as the judiciary, lag far behind.

“Whenever you go from a strongly authoritarian regime to one that shows some degree of respect for citizens’ rights, you have an incredible increase in crime,” said Richard L. Millett, a historian based at Southern Illinois University who specializes in Central America.

“The biggest challenge is fixing the judicial system,” Millett added. “And there you have a Gordian knot. How can you expect the courts to work when the police don’t work? And the police don’t work because the courts don’t work.”

Elias Carranza, deputy director in Costa Rica of the United Nations Institute for Crime Prevention, blamed the so-called Lost Decade of the 1980s, when economic progress throughout Central America was subordinated to Cold War political goals, for bringing down living standards and pushing up crime.

In a survey conducted recently by the Jesuit University of Central America in El Salvador, nearly three-quarters of the people responding listed crime and public safety as the most pressing issue facing the nation. One of every three Salvadorans said they or an immediate family member had been robbed in the last four months. And perhaps most telling, of those who were victims of crime, 76% said they had not reported the incident to the authorities.

Reliable statistics were not kept before this year, but according to the U.N. peacekeeping mission here, 138 homicides were recorded in the month of July, 158 in August, and 169 in September. At that pace, El Salvador’s per capita murder rate this year will be approximately four times that of the United States.

The Salvadoran Justice Ministry says that 60% of crimes are committed by people between the ages of 16 and 23. Many people here believe that Salvadoran gang members returning to El Salvador after years of hardening in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., have ratcheted up the brutality of the streets.

Critics point to a more sinister undercurrent to the crime wave in El Salvador. They say the numbing preponderance of daily murders and assaults allows political crime to be hidden or disguised, frustrating human rights monitors working to build and strengthen a peaceful society.

Indeed, several murders have borne enough signs of random, common crime to remain unsolved and ambiguous. Earlier this year, two mid-level officials of the former guerrilla Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, Juan Garcia Grande and Oscar Grimaldi, were killed in just such murky circumstances, and a judge handling several sensitive cases was stabbed 10 times until he died outside his home. A gang member was killed shortly before he was to be arrested in the judge’s murder.

The more recent slaying of senior FMLN official Francisco Velis was so brazen that no one doubted it was a political assassination.

Alarm over crime, say the critics, can also be manipulated by the government as justification for strong-arm tactics and for maintaining security forces at a high level.

The government blames the rise in crime on the fact that it had to dissolve several paramilitary police forces as part of the peace accords. But critics say the government must share some of the blame for its failure to adequately promote the new civilian police force.

Already, law and order has become a campaign issue in elections scheduled for next March. All opposition parties are exploiting it, accusing the government of not being able to protect its citizenry.

A radio advertisement for the opposition Christian Democratic Party goes this way: “The government does not care about your safety. Prove it: Just try walking alone at night. Peace is not enough. Salvadorans want more.”

In much of Central America, it is the increased boldness and higher level of violence attached to crimes that is most alarming. Robberies are more often armed, and carjackings, where the owner is pistol-whipped, and sometimes killed, have become routine in parts of El Salvador and elsewhere.

Stories abound of armed hoodlums boarding packed buses and robbing the passengers in broad daylight or at rush hour. In San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second city, seven people were shot or knifed to death on buses during three weeks in September and October.

And in a country like Guatemala, where civil war simmers and military repression is still common, it is often impossible to distill politics from daily violence. The weekly magazine Cronica, quoting national police sources, reported that 1,207 people were killed and 562 kidnaped between January and August, but there is no breakdown on how many of those can be blamed on common thugs.

Mistrust of the authorities has contributed to a mini-arms-race in Guatemala, with the number of private bodyguards now totaling the number of active-duty police, Interior Minister Arnoldo Ortiz Moscoso told Cronica.

Costa Rica, Central America’s oasis from war and profound poverty, has seen a sharp increase in the last three years in thefts, violent robberies and assaults, while a low murder rate has held fairly steady. Reports of rape doubled and assault quadrupled in the last 10 years, a period during which the population grew by about 20%, according to the federal justice authorities.

By comparison, more people are murdered in El Salvador in a single month than in a whole year in Costa Rica.

Still, a Costa Rican police scandal has dramatized public frustration with the government’s ability to maintain order.

The police in San Jose had become increasingly fed up with street gangs of boys (and some girls) known as the Grasshoppers because they move in packs and swarm around their prey, mugging, robbing, and in a handful of cases, stabbing their victims. Some as young as 12 years of age and high on glue or crack, the gang members have been blamed by police for more than 500 assaults in the capital this year, up from 200 last year.

On Sept. 11, officer Ergon Arroyo of Costa Rica’s U.S.-trained Judicial Investigative Police was nearly stabbed to death by gang members as he tried to rescue a youth who was being mugged and beaten by the Grasshoppers on a downtown San Jose street in broad daylight.

Apparently in response to that attack, police arrested six of the gangsters, trundling them off to headquarters, where the police allegedly used batons to beat them.

One of the gang members, William Lee Malcolm, 20, died from his injuries. An autopsy showed he had been struck several hundred times and had died of a liver laceration and strangulation.

While government officials and most newspaper editorials were swift to condemn the police brutality, public opinion polls revealed widespread sympathy for the police among crime-weary citizens. La Nacion, San Jose’s largest newspaper, published a survey in which just 51% of those questioned disapproved of the police beatings, while 39% approved. And callers to La Nacion overwhelmingly demanded tougher action against criminals.

“Exasperated and anguished by the escalation of violence and the insecurity of these years, they tolerate and even praise the criminal actions of the (police) officers and, in general, the fact that police agents administer justice with their own hands,” La Nacion said in an editorial commenting on the public response.

Seven police officers were implicated in the case and may face murder charges.

The police scandal and perceived government impotence in fighting crime raised another fear in the minds of some Costa Ricans: vigilantes taking the law into their own hands in the form of paramilitary death squads. The phenomenon is common in some of Costa Rica’s neighbors, but Costa Rican commentators rued the possibility in their own country.

“We vigorously repudiate any attempt to create death squads in this country,” said Justice Minister Elizabeth Odio. “This is something that can finish any democratic system.”

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Special correspondent Christina Green in San Jose, Costa Rica, contributed to this report.