A twelve-year-old boy became the latest victim of the war between drug gangs that hit Rosario on Sunday.
The deceased, identified as Máximo Jerez, was in the street with his cousins when a group of hitmen fired at them from a car, according to the testimony of neighbors to the media.
Jerez died from a shot to the chest and the others—two thirteen-year-olds and a two-year-old baby—were shot and are hospitalized.
This Monday, a day later, the minor's wake became a town in the neighborhood against the alleged drug trafficker whom they consider responsible for the murder.
Neighbors threw stones at the precarious house and kept it under siege until the police arrived and took away its three occupants: two men and a woman.
Next,
“The presence of children was generally an obstacle or a code to avoid this type of attack, not today.
All the limits were pushed”, declared the prosecutor on duty Adrián Spelta about the attack that occurred in the neighborhood of Los Pumitas, in the north of Rosario.
“They had finished a birthday and the boys were buying something in a kiosk.
They were all children," said the victim's father, Julio Jerez.
Investigators suspect that the bullets were actually intended for members of the Los Salteños gang, led by Cristian Carlos Villazón.
This drug lord, sentenced to 15 years in prison for a triple homicide, had his address on the block where the shooting took place and a few meters from the building that was destroyed on Monday by the neighbors for being considered a
bunker
, that is, a point of sale of drugs.
Neighbors of the Los Pumitas neighborhood, remove the house of an alleged drug trafficker. Rodrigo Abd (AP)
One homicide per day
Violence is out of control in Rosario.
So far this year there have been 63 homicides so far this year, almost one per day.
Also in the early hours of Sunday, in the south of the city, the façade of a school received 15 shots and inside the drug traffickers left a mafia message: “Chuki Moneda.
Brandon and Fernando Morel.
Stop killing cobani [police] and women.
We are going to the war.
The mafia”.
As happened last week with the attack on the supermarket of Lionel Messi's in-laws, it seems that the school was used to amplify the spread of the message.
The lack of state responses to the advance of drug crime is unworthy of the Rosario population, especially in the poor neighborhoods of the city, where most of the homicides are concentrated.
This Monday at noon, the residents of the Los Pumitas neighborhood gathered at the wake decided to take justice on their own.
They began to throw stones and other objects at the home of the alleged drug trafficker.
The man they were looking for appeared on the terrace armed with a pistol but a stone hit him in the back and he ran to take cover inside with his wife and his son.
“We have lived here for 30 years.
My children were born in the neighborhood, grew up in the neighborhood, and this never happened.
How many more deaths are we going to live?
We are afraid, afraid to go out, now we have to do it ourselves,” said one of the neighbors to the
Todo Noticias channel.
“We cannot live by locking our children at home at seven in the evening.
And these crap come that are useless, we have to get them all out," another neighbor added to the same channel, referring to the first police officers who had just entered the neighborhood.
A group of riot police protect a man accused of drug trafficking, in the Rosario neighborhood of Los Pumitas.
Rodrigo Abd (AP)
The neighbors were drilling holes in the wall with a cement mortar when the agents arrived, first from the provincial police and then from the special forces.
The latter entered the house and took the alleged offender and his family.
"Don't let go, eh, don't let go," a neighbor yelled at the policemen who put the three occupants of the building in a patrol car.
To keep the crowd away, the officers fired rubber bullets, which injured several, including Julio Jerez, the father of the murdered boy.
When the policemen withdrew from the neighborhood, the neighbors ransacked the house.
They took the fridge, air conditioning, toilet, fans, closet, toys, water tank, doors and windows.
Once the looting was over, they set fire to the house and did the same in two other alleged drug bunkers without any impediment from the agents.
The attack on the supermarket of Messi's father-in-law, José Rocuzzo, last week, made visible the intensification of clashes between criminal gangs in Rosario and its periphery for control of the territory.
The experts warned that there is a lack of police officers trained to confront drug trafficking networks, a lack of budget for the security forces and also prosecutors and judges who investigate and convict the perpetrators of the increasingly frequent shootings.
The uprising of a neighborhood today before the cameras shows the rage of a society hostage to that violence.
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