St. Lucia Coping With Unprecedented Crime Rate

When there´s still a couple of months to go before the coming of 2006, two more slayings have put small island nation of St. Lucia on track to break last year´s record number of homicides, officials said last week.

The shootings, which authorities suspect were drug-related, brought the number of homicides this year to 33 –just four short of the total for all of last year, police said.

“This is a worrying trend, because it indicates that the young are resorting to violence to settle their scores,” police spokesman Modestus Louis said.

St. Lucia recorded less than ten homicides a year until 1998. The figures have been steadily rising each year in this former British colony of 162,000 people.

Police blame much of the violence on drug trafficking. A U.S. State Department report this year called St. Lucia a “well-used transshipment site for cocaine from South America” that is smuggled to the United States and Europe.