Salvadorans Feel Pain of ‘Gringo’ Scourge: Crack

San Miguelito, a few blocks of ruined mansions and improvised shacks in this capital, is the nightmare that Central 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 said that cocaine was a gringo problem and that combating it was a costly struggle the United States imposed on countries where people were too poor to buy the white powder.

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 1980s. Now, crack cocaine competes with model airplane 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 spindly 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 parochial schools, and Raquel, a secretary who became a prostitute after an affair with her boss. They gather at the house that Wilfredo, a tall redhead 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-spreading virus, and underfunded public officials scramble to find an antidote.

Welded Gate Testifies to Area’s Decline

The air is still crisp and the morning sun reflects off the thin, wooden steeple of the Don Rua, arguably the 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 with Peter Pan collars to scurry into the sanctuary of the school patio, under the watchful eyes of a nun.

For decades, students passed through a wide front gate and beneath a statue of the Virgin Mary as they entered school. That gate was welded shut during the civil war that ended in 1992 and was never reopened. Don Rua and Our Lady of Perpetual Help, nearly a century old, are reminders of the kind of place that San Miguelito used to be.

“It was a pleasant residential neighborhood,” recalls David Escobar Galindo, a writer who lived in the area from the 1940s until the 1970s. “In those days, the social classes were not as clearly marked. That part of the city was shared by people of all social classes. . . . Then the middle class [and above] moved away.”

Many houses destroyed in a 1986 earthquake were never rebuilt. Refugees fleeing the war squatted in the shells, and others built shanties around the original neighborhood. Then crack arrived, and with it 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 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 short green satin skirt, whistles to passersby.

“I’m up early because I need some breakfast,” she says, shaking her curly ponytail with an almost compulsive flirtatiousness. At this moment, 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 discovered 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.

If the customer can pay for it, they find a motel. Otherwise, it’s off to the “Hotel Buena Vista,” or Good View, the remnants of an Art Deco house that takes its name from the lack of privacy that its crumbling walls afford.

No religion or social status provides protection from crack.

Just a decade ago, Yvonne was one of those blue-jumpered schoolgirls, chauffeured here from better neighborhoods. She never expected to end up living in San Miguelito.

In high school, she transferred to the San Jose Day School, a Jesuit institution considered the strictest and most academically demanding parochial school in the country. She was a second-year law student at the prestigious 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 beating, 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, begging for money. When she has gathered the equivalent of 50 cents, she approaches Wilfredo’s barred door, shows her coins and is ushered inside.

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 illuminates a huge wooden desk that belongs to Wilfredo.

Computer Technician Turned Crack Dealer

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.

He is a computer systems engineer, he says, who lived in North Hollywood, Burbank and Van Nuys in the late 1980s, supervising technicians who copied documents onto microfilm and earning $17 an hour.

Returning to El Salvador in 1990 because his mother was ill, he could not find a job. He tried working in his family’s auto repair business but argued with his brothers and quit. Bored, he started using cocaine six years ago and quickly moved on to crack. Now he can’t stop.

“We addicts become nomads,” he explains. “Even our families close their doors to us.”

About a year ago, Wilfredo rented a spacious fixer-upper for $115 a month from a landlady who is interested only in getting the rent on time. It is one of more than 200 crack houses that operate in greater San Salvador, police estimate. Wilfredo pays expenses with profits from drug sales, and insists that he has little money left over.

“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 Salvadoran law prohibits selling drugs and consuming them in public, but not using them in private.

Wilfredo built up a staff: a non-addict couple to run the house; Juan Carlos, a crack-using lawyer, to get commune members out of jail; and Angel, a muscular ex-guerrilla who watches the door. He periodically declares breaks of several hours when no one is permitted to use crack, as an exercise in self-discipline.

“Those who do not fulfill their responsibilities [such as cleaning or watching the door] cannot stay,” he says. However, many who frequent the house say the penalties are more severe, from head shavings to beatings for suspected thieves and snitches.

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 within days.

Then, in November, police raided the house, taking everyone there into custody, including Wilfredo. Juan Carlos went to court the next day to post bail, and he was arrested as well. Fearing a warrant, Angel disappeared, but not before shearing several suspected snitches.

“We are orphans,” laments Yvonne. “We have lost our father.”

Margarita, Elizabeth and Jeremias, the bristles of their shaved heads barely starting to show, are notably less saddened by the raid on Wilfredo’s.

They grumble vaguely of terrorism and torture as they hustled for coins down the block at Tutunichapa, a labyrinth of shanties and open sewers that sprang up in the 1980s to house refugees from the war-torn countryside.

Tutunichapa is among San Salvador’s major cocaine distribution centers, says deputy anti-narcotics commissioner Gerson Saul Perez, second in command of this country’s 233-officer anti-drug division. Perez is one of a new generation of Salvadoran civilian police. Cleanshaven, with short-cropped hair and a muscular frame, he proudly displays a college degree in judicial science and a dozen diplomas from U.S. and European police courses on his office walls.

“Five years ago, a gram of cocaine cost 800 colones,” or about $91, he says. “It was too expensive for people to buy.”

That was when U.S. and Colombian 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 documents and government reports show.

The result: An ever-increasing amount of cocaine began staying here instead of moving north.

“Now, it is the second-most consumed drug, after marijuana,” Perez says. “It is easier to get and easier to hide than marijuana.”

Over the last five years, the amount of crack confiscated by Central American police has risen from negligible to thousands of rocks a year. That number is a more accurate measure of local consumption than captured cocaine shipments, because cocaine may be headed for the United States. Crack is a product for local consumption.

Police raid Tutunichapa frequently, but when they leave, the crack users drift back and squat along the walkways to smoke.

“I started smoking marijuana when I was 12,” recalled Milagros de la Paz, better known as Lola. “I supported myself for a long time on drug trafficking. During the war, I sold marijuana to soldiers before they went into combat.”

She first tried cocaine a decade ago and sampled crack three years later. “Pot, coke, crack and booze--I like it all,” she says, laughing and waving a half-pint of Tic-Tac.

Now a gaunt 45, she smooths her chestnut hair into a bun each morning and starts out at dawn for the office buildings where dentists are concentrated. Picking through the trash, she finds discarded anesthesia syringes and removes the 4-inch glass tubes.

Cleaned, the tubes make perfect crack pipes, which she sells for about 50 cents apiece, enough money to keep her in drugs and booze and to pay for her rented room. “Just because I stop selling pipes, drug addiction isn’t going to end,” she says, defending her livelihood.

Lola is proud that she has the discipline to pay rent. Most of the addicts who gather at Tutunichapa or Wilfredo’s, which has continued to do a lively business throughout his three months in jail, spend every cent on crack and sleep wherever they fall.

‘An Escape From Reality’

Jorge Edgardo, 43, shares the shell of a house destroyed in the earthquake with several chickens and a group that includes Nelson Trujillo, a construction worker; and Pati, a homemaker whose husband introduced 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 University of El Salvador, began to study law and was drawn into the university’s leftist movement, an important 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 Assembly or pushed aside by political infighting.

Two years ago, some friends offered 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. Now, he handles a few cases for other addicts and tries, he says, to find his way out of the crack maze.

Drugs Have Always Been a Part of His Life

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 the San Miguelito open-air market. When he gets up, he stands on Espana Avenue, the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, waiting for late-model cars to slow, expectantly.

The occupants send him to Wilfredo’s to buy crack or cocaine, and he keeps a little for himself. Every shirt, every piece of candy he is given is sold to buy crack. When they are sober, some of the women force him to eat. No one is sure how the skinny, ragged child survives.

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 worries.

When her husband lost his job as a soil studies technician four years ago, the family had to move from a house near Our Lady of Perpetual Help, where the rent was $45 a month, to Tutunichapa, only a few blocks--but a major drop in social status--away. It put the Riveras and their children in the midst of the city’s crack market.

“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 sidewalk or on the hood of the pickup their father uses to haul goods for customers. They walk home past rows of crack smokers and hear the sounds of fights and raids all night.

Police, with limited resources, often must choose between the concerns of their own citizens, like the Rivera family, and U.S. pressure to stop the big drug shipments coming through here on their way north, Perez says.

“We cannot stop the big drug shipments if we are concentrating our efforts 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 corner.”

City Hall is trying to help families like the Riveras fight back by offering an alternative to the environment that encourages crack use, San Salvador Mayor Hector Silva says. A neighborhood theater has been restored with municipal funds and was turned into a cultural center, with a cafe.

The vendors without stalls who gathered around the market--often providing a cover for illegal businesses, such as crack dealing--have been forced to leave. The number of raids on brothels throughout the city quadrupled--to 2,583 last year--compared with 1997.

“San Miguelito is a neighborhood in transition,” Silva says. “People are starting to invest in their houses again . . . but there are still drugs sold in the streets.”

It is a neighborhood at the heart of what the mayor calls his struggle to reclaim the city for people. But even if he succeeds in San Miguelito, Silva recognizes, “Given the situation in the country, all we are doing is moving the problem someplace else.”