Pubdate: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 Source: Reuters BRAZIL STRUGGLES TO CONTAIN BLOODY DRUGS TRADE SAO PAULO (Reuters) - It is the same grisly story every week. Gunmen enter a makeshift bar or a house in the slums that ring South America's biggest city and start shooting. The body count is soaring this year - 197 fatalities in 56 multiple homicides between Jan. 1 and Aug. 21, compared with 162 dead in such massacres in all of 1997. Few of the killers are ever caught, but police are certain the booming trade in drugs is behind almost all of the bloodshed. "Traffickers are more and more violent. They shoot at random, to them it's the same thing to kill one or ten people," San Paulo police homicide head Marco Antonio Desgualdo said. - --- Checked-by: Patrick Henry