08/18/2021 17:52
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 08/18/2021 5:52 PM
A drug trafficker will begin to be tried from this Friday in Rosario and the Santa Fe Police are on high alert.
A confidential report from the force warned the Justice that judging the main defendant had
"extreme risk"
if it was done in person and
"high risk"
if it was done virtual.
As the trial has to be done anyway, virtual mode was chosen:
“high”
risk
.
However, even the virtual situation
"can cause severe injury
(to people),
significant damage to property and contain serious potential risks that are likely to occur,"
the report concludes,
without anesthesia
.
The trafficker will be judged by a string of
14 shootings
at buildings and houses where they
worked or lived court judges in 2018.
What they now foresee are
new shooting attacks on
the building where the trial is going to take place -the Rosario Criminal Justice Center-, totally clad
in glass
.
To try to avoid it, 250 police officers are going to surround the property and restrict traffic on the nearby streets.
Above all,
motorcycles
.
The extraordinary thing is that the main accused was imprisoned in 2018, when those attacks occurred, and is still imprisoned now, when they fear new attacks.
The accused is Ariel Cantero, alias
"Guille"
, the head of the
Los Monos
gang
.
He is imprisoned in the Marcos Paz maximum security prison, in the province of Buenos Aires, but from his cell he continues to manage the business of his Rosario empire.
This is not a hypothesis: Cantero went to jail sentenced to 22 years and then other sentences raised the unified sentence to 50 years.
He committed the other crimes
while he was in prison:
from inside the jail he ordered kidnappings, murders, and shot down the fronts of houses and public buildings to intimidate and exploit more routes for drug trafficking, according to the judicial proceedings against him.
Guille Cantero, in 2018. While he was being judged, his gang went out to shoot out all over Rosario.
Photo: Juan José García.
Guille
Cantero does not act from the outside nor does he hide behind the fugitive.
The State has him in a federal jail.
And from there he attacks the State again.
The State also fears it: the recommendation to the Justice for the trial to be virtual was to avoid at all costs the transfer of Cantero from Marcos Paz to Rosario, 314 kilometers where the possibilities of a drug attack on the caravan to try to Releasing the imprisoned chief was
"extreme,"
according to the Santa Fe Police intelligence report accessed by
Clarín
.
"The presence, which would imply the daily and repetitive transfer of the accused, would give a
considerable tactical advantage
to the opponent,"
says the report, as if it were the planning of
an act of war
.
And he adds:
"The mere presence of the main accused generates an extra motivation among the criminals to challenge justice and public order
.
"
The shooting attacks have such a volume in Rosario that the Justice of the province created a
special prosecutor's office
exclusively to investigate them.
It is called the
“Shooting Unit of the Public Prosecutor's Office”
.
Its head, prosecutor Valeria Haurigot, said this month that there are
"about twenty daily complaints of attacks on homes and businesses
.
"
Every day, 20 shooting attacks in the streets of Rosario.
In the Province of Buenos Aires there are no specific prosecutors for shooting attacks, but last week two drug gangs shot each other in Florencio Varela and killed three people.
One of them was a teenager who was inside her house, oblivious to everything.
A
thin red thread
ties all these facts together.
Drug trafficking is almost never on the public agenda of campaign candidates.
The nation must prevent it with gendarmes on the borders and drug routes, but many of those gendarmes
end up in the suburbs
to reinforce municipal security and fuel a political fight between Minister Frederic and Minister Berni that the drama of the daily insecurity no longer tolerated.
Statistics show that the highest drug circulation in Argentina is always
in odd-numbered years:
Café Blanco
(1995);
Operation Strawberry
(1997);
White Carbon
(2005);
Balkan Warrior
(2009);
White Background
(2013).
It is not by chance.
It's because in odd-numbered years, like this one, there are elections.