Let's count to ten.
Ready, prepared, now... The woman arrives at her house in the car with her daughter.
She stops in front of the barred gate.
Four robbers approach her and tell her to get off her.
She looks at her daughter, next to her, nervously.
She searches in the shadows for the red seat belt button.
She doesn't find it.
Try.
How the hell do you open this shit?
The robbers shoot him at point-blank range and flee.
End.
We haven't reached ten yet and María Arias
is already dead from a gunshot to the chest.
He is in a middle-class car - a VW Surán - in a middle-class neighborhood - Castelar, little gabled houses, clothes hanging in the background, trees, the smell of grass, neighbors waving, cars parked in front of the houses -, and next to him a teenager who has just lost her mother shouts.
Not tonight.
Not tomorrow or next week.
Forever.
“I was there when they told the girl that her mother had died. It was a heartbreaking, horrible scream…”
says Priscilla, a neighbor who comes out at midnight, when a while has passed since she heard two shots.
Priscilla, María (51) and their daughter (17) had read, seen and heard about the ferocious crime of Uma in Lomas de Zamora, the girl murdered during an attempted robbery
on Monday.
Now we all read, see and hear about María's crime
on Thursday.
Who will be next tomorrow, Tuesday, next Friday?
Who among those outraged by this news will be the next news of a new execution?
Now the Buenos Aires Police are going to show us the thieves' car that was set on fire in Fuerte Apache and perhaps, later, some kids with pixelated faces, with criminal records, and tell us that they catch them but justice releases them again and again.
As true as they often catch the wrong ones.
As happened with the crime of the bus driver in Virrey del Pino, in that episode in which the then Minister Berni was received with blows by the victim's colleagues.
Berni then said that
they had thrown a dead person at him
.
Who are they throwing at Uma and María now?
The stupid conspiracy hypothesis washes away the blame.
The economic logic of these assaults - the theft of middle-class cars - follows the line of impossible spare parts and workshops that do not give prices for any repair because they do not know how much they will get the missing parts.
That is the market of car thieves who never stop, no matter how many auto parts engravings they demand from any good person who wants to sell or buy a car.
The variant is
murder
.
Give us the car
and if it is not already - if you avoid us like Uma's father or your seat belt gets stuck -
we will execute you
.
It is a scale of social degradation that far exceeds the debate over the amount of penalties.
An essential and chilling violence that cannot be fixed with the Penal Code.
The Buenos Aires Police have not shown signs of profound transformations either.
After a historic strike asking for salary improvements, the government of Alberto Fernández took part of the contribution from the City to give it to the Province - at that time, 30,000 million pesos - and allocate it only to the Police.
What was seen regarding public funds in the Province were not improvements in crime prevention but a saga of scandals that began with the Chocolate trout cards
,
continued with the illegal spy Zanchetta collecting part of his dirty work with money from the Province and they continued on the yacht
Bandido
de Insaurralde.
Lethal irony: a sticker on the car of one of those arrested for the Uma crime says "
Maximum capacity, 4 bandits
."
Irrational violence - if repeated, if frequent - raises questions about causes and effects despite officials who only know it all on TV.
There is no official who does not say at some point that crimes are going down.
But in 1983 Argentina had 340,000 crimes with 30 million inhabitants, and now it has 1.96 million crimes with 46 million inhabitants:
53 percent more inhabitants;
477 percent more crimes
.
In 40 years, crime grew
9 times more than the population.
Of those 40 years, 28 are from Peronism (Menem, Duhalde, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner and Alberto Fernández), 8 from radicalism (Alfonsín and De la Rúa) and 4 from Together for Change (Macri).
The apathy or corruption that end in this perfect storm of
marginality, drug trafficking and murders
cannot be missing from the great national debate, now that we are debating almost everything.
Fast.
No more time.
People die before counting to ten.
See also
See also
Uma crime: the two older detainees refused to testify before the prosecutor and will remain in prison
See also
See also
They killed her to rob her in Castelar: a typical western neighborhood where living among shots, robberies and panic became a habit