(Bloomberg) -- The death of six people after a furious gun battle at a housing project on the outskirt of Puerto Rico’s capital Monday night was the latest in a series of dramatic public crimes that have shaken the Caribbean island.
The firefight that began just after nightfall sent residents of the Residencial Ernesto Ramos Antonini housing complex in the San Juan suburb Rio Piedras fleeing indoors and cowering in their apartments as intense, sustained automatic weapons fire echoed around the squat buildings. Video of the exchange shared on social media seemed more reminiscent of the narco wars familiar in parts of Mexico than a placid Caribbean island.
When the bullets finally stopped flying, five people lay dead (a sixth, believed to be one of the gunmen, died in the hospital early Tuesday).
One of those killed, 21 year-old Angel Henriquez Agosto had been sought by federal authorities for possible involvement in a January shooting outside of a nightclub in the posh Isla Verde neighborhood that left one man dead.
Puerto Rico has been rocked by a series of high-profile violent incidents in recent months. Hours before the Rio Piedras killings, two men died in an exchange of fire with two other men wielding automatic weapons on a busy street in the suburb of Guaynabo in broad daylight. In August, a man was slain by two gunmen as he exited his car in the parking lot of the Hard Rock Cafe in Condado during a busy afternoon. A series of killings of recently released convicted drug traffickers in and around the southern city of Ponce has added to a feeling of insecurity.
Though Puerto Rico police statistics show there were 483 homicides on the island this year, a drop of 32 over the same time period last year, those in the capital region have actually increased, with 129 murders thus far this year compared with 106 during the previous year.
The death count in the capital comes as the island’s population has declined by 3.9%, leaving it at 3.2 million residents in 2018, the lowest level since 1979 and down sharply from 2017, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data published in July.
Following a meeting between the heads of the island’s security agencies and Governor Wanda Vazquez on Tuesday, Secretary of Public Security Elmer Roman said that “adjustments” would be made to existing public-safety measures. While he called for the “cooperation of citizens,” no new initiatives were proposed.
Eduardo Bhatia, the minority leader in Puerto Rico’s senate and a member of the Popular Democratic Party, said he was considering introducing legislation to decriminalize some drug use as a way to stem the violence.
“I am considering what the options are, what places like Portugal, Colorado and California have done,” Bhatia said. “Decriminalizing narcotics is a step in the right direction to try and make this an economic debate and not a criminal debate. We have to see how many kids can we save.”
After years of allegations of corruption and brutality, Puerto Rico’s police department has been under a federally mandated reform program, known as a consent decree, since 2013.
“There is a battle going on in the streets to control illegal drug-related businesses,” said attorney Fermin Arraiza, legal director with the Puerto Rico branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. “But, clearly, police reform has failed and another war on drugs is not the answer. We need a new approach.”
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