It is probably an exaggeration to say that Rosario is a pool of blood, but it is not an exaggeration to say that one area of Rosario, an area that represents less than 20% of the city, exhibits a death rate similar to that of Medellín at the time. of Pablo Escobar, nor is it exaggerated, on the contrary, rigorously fair, that Rosario maintains a crime rate that is four or five times higher than the average of the main cities in the country.
The bullets that last week murdered two taxi drivers, a bus driver and a beachgoer were fired by the same hands that ten years ago shot up the house of the governor of the province, the same bullets that killed a child in a neighborhood shooting. eleven years old, the same ones who murdered a one-year-old girl after a mafia wedding.
Nothing new under the sun, under the narco sun.
Before last week's tragedy, the governor of the province was threatened more than twenty times;
him and his family.
A bus transporting prison staff was shot at and its passengers miraculously saved their lives.
The one who was not assisted by any miracle was Lorenzo Altamirano, a young musician far from drugs and the rough bars and who one night in February last year was kidnapped and his body appeared at the door of the Newell's Old Boys club.
Target of the crime?
A mafia message to another mafia gang.
They could have used an email or a WhatsApp, but the gentlemen were not going to miss the pleasure of using a corpse as a messenger, the corpse of a boy who dreamed of playing the bass.
Will, chance, destiny, the mafia game does not stop.
And its name is terror.
Or confrontations with the police, or settling of scores or simply terror, that is, killing, as Pablo Escobar taught so that the government learns to be afraid of us and people know that no one is safe.
In November 2015, on the Rosario Central field and in a match with Boca, posters hung with messages in favor of drug leaders.
The tribute to the Stonebird includes a legend between poetic and biblical: “God gives the worst battles to his best warriors.”
If they rehearsed the compadrada on the Rosario Central field, a few years later they will rehearse it on the Newell's Old Boys field.
With all the sports and political authorities present.
The sign lived up to the audacity: one hundred meters long.
“We are beyond everything,” they said.
And maybe they have a point.
Nor were they going to deprive themselves of honoring Messi.
In his style, of course: they shot up his sister-in-law's supermarket and left the ineffable legend: “Messi, we are waiting for you.”
When it comes to settling accounts, the gentlemen are as accurate as their bullets.
In December 2013, they ambushed Luis Medina and his girlfriend.
They both died.
Medina was a drug businessman who owned a computer whose contents became a state secret, although no one is unaware that it was manipulated by figures in power who were not interested in those secrets being aired.
Lucio Maldonado was another drug trafficker who did not do well in his internal bids.
They kidnapped him and shot him to death.
Then they dumped his body near another mobster's house with a piece of paper and a message: “You can't fuck with the mafia.”
Those who did not give time for anything and did not leave a message were the murderers of Emanuel Sandoval, one of the hitmen who shot at the governor's house and who was now enjoying house arrest in the house of a judge, whose brother was the lawyer of the shot governor. .
Suggestive coincidence, as it is also suggestive that the taxi driver murdered last week died a few meters from the Police Chief's house.
Drug traffickers, politicians, commissioners, businessmen, judges.
The complicity is transversal.
a transversality that has until now been successful.
The drug business spreads from the town, crosses the middle class and appears in the country and residential neighborhoods.
This transversality gives it the status of organized crime.
The hitman who shoots from a motorcycle is one of the faces of the “narco,” perhaps his most horrible face, but no less sinister than the face of the dapper businessman, the politician with an easy smile, or the severe judge, or the police chiefs. holders of a degraded and corrupt institution.
A mafia network.
A network in which some do the dirty work, others the clean work;
Some have blood stained hands, others have clean hands, but their soul is a dunghill of hell.
From Bolivia and along the Paraná River, to one of the most important ports in the world, the drug route makes its way.
The business is perfect because the demand is absolute.
The drug bosses may go to prison, but jail is not the end of their career, but rather the restart because the prisons became holding camps and operational centers.
It will never be known if Rosario earned the nickname “Argentine Chicago” because of its meat processing plants or because of its mafia bosses.
What we know is that in the '30s, when the national State decided to put an end to the mafia, it liquidated them in a short time.
Can he do it now?
I don't know, but so far they haven't done it or they've done it wrong.
What I do know is that without protection, without the complicity of power, drug trafficking can be defeated.
For good and bad.
Rogelio Alaniz is a journalist and historian