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Thursday, February 2, 2012

Pierluisi Continues His Fight Against Drug-Related Violence in Puerto Rico

Meets with Deputy Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection

WASHINGTON, DC- Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi met yesterday afternoon with the second-highest official at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Deputy Commissioner Thomas S. Winkowski, to discuss drug-related violence in Puerto Rico and to underscore the need for additional federal resources to address that violence.

In Washington, the Resident Commissioner has been expressing his strong concern over the level of federal resources currently being devoted to fight drug-related violence in Puerto Rico. Pierluisi has insisted that there is a fundamental mismatch between the level of violence in Puerto Rico and the size and scope of the federal response.

“Unfortunately, Puerto Rico is an attractive target for traffickers because, once drugs enter the Island, they are within the U.S. customs zone and not subject to the same level of scrutiny as shipments from a foreign Caribbean nation to a U.S. state. Not surprisingly, drug-related violence in Puerto Rico has reached a crisis level. Since 2008, the murder rate in Puerto Rico— and in the neighboring U.S. Virgin Islands—has been about six times the national average and nearly three times as high as that of any state. During the same time period, the U.S. homicide rate has significantly declined,” said Pierluisi.

During the meeting, Pierluisi discussed his proposed “Caribbean Border Initiative,” which calls upon federal law enforcement agencies, including CBP, to work in coordination with each other and to assign additional resources and personnel to Puerto Rico. The Resident Commissioner urged Deputy Commissioner Winkowski to support this initiative. In addition, Pierluisi raised questions about the possible shortage of CBP Border Patrol agents in Puerto Rico, especially along the Island’s east coast. Border Patrol agents are responsible for protecting the Island’s long coastline.

The Resident Commissioner also used the meeting to urge CBP to expand its effort to inspect cargo entering and departing Puerto Rico’s maritime ports and airports and, if necessary, to join forces with the Puerto Rico Ports Authority in order to improve the screening process.

“What I want is to be able to send a message to the large traffickers that the U.S. government is going to do everything within its considerable power to detect and confiscate drugs entering and leaving Puerto Rico. If you want to transport drugs, go somewhere else, because we are going to make it extraordinarily difficult for you to do it here,” said the Resident Commissioner.

At the same time that Pierluisi was meeting with Deputy Commissioner Winkowski, the U.S. Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control was holding a hearing on drug-related violence in the Caribbean. The Resident Commissioner submitted a statement for the hearing in which he admonished the federal government for not treating the problem of drug-related violence in Puerto Rico with sufficient urgency.

“To date, the federal government has not meaningfully altered its approach to combating the escalating drug-related violence in Puerto Rico, which is home to over 3.7 million American citizens. This is unacceptable. That is why I have called on the federal government to establish a ‘Caribbean Border Initiative,’ modeled after the successful Southwest Border Initiative, to deploy the level of personnel, assets, and other resources that are needed to successfully combat drug-related violence in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The federal government cannot maintain its current posture in the Caribbean while drug-related violence remains at unacceptably high levels in these two U.S. jurisdictions,” Pierluisi wrote in his statement.

This past month alone, as part of his mission to obtain additional federal resources to help the Puerto Rico government fight drug-related violence, Pierluisi met with the second- highest ranking official in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, DHS’s representative on the President’s Task Force on Puerto Rico, and Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, the co-chair of the Task Force.