■"Puerto Rico is dangerous ground for police: Much of violence linked to drug traffickers using island, by Kevin Johnson, USA Today, 23 November 2004, p. 5A.

I catch grief from some readers because this or that state is either inside or outside the Gap. People tend to take this designation very personally, and I understand the frustration. When I first drew the map, I simply drew my line around the icons representing the instances of U.S. military crisis response activity in the post-Cold War period without any great reference to the countries that Gap shape encompassed. That's true primarily because the map I use in my brief is rather iconic in its simplicity, failing to include small islands and not delineated in terms of national borders or state names.

When I got to the point of publishing the original article with Esquire, I was pushed by Bill McNulty of the New York Times, who constructed the map for the magazine, to get very specific about where the Core-Gap dividing line should be. That's because it's McNulty's style to have ultra-crisp maps (or should I say, it's the style of the Times). So he kept calling me up as he built the map, asking about this or that country, as in, "in or out?"

So I had to make a lot of choices, knowing that I really viewed the line less as a clear demarcation and more like a fuzzy, fat seamóor more like a deep beach against which the waves of globalization lapped constantly, altering the make-up of the shoreline. One of those choices was basically to include the entire Caribbean in the Gap, along with the southern (i.e., Chiapas) state of Mexico. Why be so inclusive/exclusive?

It's weird, but Caribbean islands are both slimly connected and more than disconnected as both tourism spots and off-shore banking facilities. Both ventures desire a minimal form of connectivity, but no more. If you're too connected in terms of tourism, you're not really a "get away from it all" spot. And if you're an off-shore banking center, you want certain basic forms of flows, but not exactly the oversightóif you know what I mean.

But the real reason why I chose to keep the entire Caribbean inside the Gap is the question of smugglingóboth in terms of drugs and people.

Puerto Rico is technically part of the United States as a U.S. territory, but it's not really part of the United States, meaning it's not a state, and that's what makes up these "united states." Part of why that's happened, meaning why PR has never become a state, is because of the way we've chosen to structure the political and economic system there. In effect, we've disincentivized statehood to a significant degree.

Lacking such statehood, PR is far more Gap-like than any U.S. state, and that should be no surprise. As the article says, "Puerto Rico may be an island paradise for tourists, but it's also one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a cop."

PR is an island of less than 4 million citizens, yet the number of cops who die there every year outnumber the states of Florida (best comparable in terms of drug interdiction issues) and New York (police capital of the world), two states whose combined population is over 50 million. Only the huge states of Texas and California have recorded more cop killings since 1994.

The drug trade is the prime reason for the high level of killings, since PR is a "staging area for illicit shipments of cocaine and heroin heading to the U.S. mainland from Colombia."

What has pushed this up-tick since 9/11 is the U.S.'s crackdown on traditional smuggling routes through Mexico and Central America, which means Puerto Rico has become more Gap-like as a result of America's attempt to firewall itself off from bad things vectoring into the continental U.S. So thanks to the System Perturbation of 9/11, Puerto Rico is more negatively connected to the United States.