CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay — The gangsters came a long way to die.
Wong Chun Shan was a boss in the Tai Chen, the Cantonese mafia. Yan Wu was his soldier. They migrated a few years ago to this riverfront outpost of frontier capitalism in the jungle where the borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina converge: Ciudad del Este. City of the East.
The triple border was a global village of outlaws: Lebanese terrorists, Colombian drug smugglers, yakuza hoodlums from Japan, Nigerian con artists. The Tai Chen ruled by fear in the trash-strewn downtown, a Latin American casbah seething with smugglers, merchants and shoppers haggling in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Asian languages and indigenous Guarani.
But then the gangsters tried to extort $200,000 from Roberto Shih, a Taiwanese immigrant building an industrial park here. He resisted, even when an investor was killed. On Oct. 13, Wong and Yan stormed into Shih's office and forced him to accompany them to the gravel parking lot.
"They showed me their guns and told me I had to go with them to see their 'brothers,' " Shih recalls. "I accepted. But finally I asked them if I could bring my cellular phone with me. They accepted."
Instead of a phone, Shih pulled a 9-millimeter pistol from the glove compartment of his car. He killed both Wong and Yan in the ensuing shootout, which authorities ruled self-defense. He has lived a hunted, heavily guarded existence ever since.
The bloodshed revealed a beachhead of Asian mafias in South America. And it contributed to a realization in the region--and as far away as the United States, Taiwan and Israel--that the triple border has become an alarming enclave of lawlessness. The polyglot mix of thugs epitomizes a foremost menace of the post-Cold War world: the globalization of organized crime.
"The triple border is a magnet for organized crime," says Mario Baizan, an Argentine presidential advisor. "It is a danger to the entire continent."
During a recent South American visit, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh announced a multinational crackdown here, an initiative seen as the seed of a hemispheric police alliance. Freeh called the border region "a free zone for significant criminal activity, including people who are organized to commit acts of terrorism."
Mafias, primarily drug cartels, have replaced restive militaries as the top threat to democratic stability on the continent. Paraguay, one of the hemisphere's poorest, most fragile democracies, has become "a prototypical laboratory for developing a base for bad guys," a U.S. diplomat says.
