After the random murder of four people on a weekend, a bomb threat that caused its bus terminal to be evacuated, and a riot of intimidating messages and threats that left the city without schools or hardly any public transportation for a couple of days, Rosario tries to get back to normal.
The third largest city in Argentina, a port city of just over a million inhabitants 300 kilometers from Buenos Aires, has returned to the spotlight due to the violence unleashed by groups that have been fighting for years for control of drug dealing in its peripheries. and who have taken their violence to the center to challenge the heavy hand in the prisons of President Javier Milei and the governor of the province of Santa Fe, Maximiliano Pullaro.
The murders of Bruno Bussanich, 25, a gas station worker in the west of the city who was shot by a hitman, and taxi drivers Héctor Figueroa and Diego Celentano, 43 and 32, both ambushed by gunfire in the south of the city. city, and the driver Marco Daloia, 39, who lay dying for 72 hours before being shot by another hitman who got on the bus he was driving, paralyzed the city for days.
On Monday, Rosario woke up without classes in schools, businesses closed, without public transportation, and even with waste collectors on strike after the driver of a collection truck was threatened while working in the west of the city.
The political response has been a deployment of security forces that have flooded the city: the Milei Government has distributed federal forces – from the Gendarmerie to the Naval Prefecture or the airport police – in the low neighborhoods of the south, west and north from Rosario, while the Armed Forces send a convoy of at least twenty military trucks and helicopters as support, and the local police stand guard in the center of the city.
On Thursday, under torrential rain, dozens of police guarded the Mariano Moreno bus terminal since dawn, next to the center of Rosario, where two men were arrested on Tuesday morning accused of having made a call with a false bomb threat. which forced the terminal to be evacuated.
Schools reopened on Wednesday, taxi drivers went out again only in daylight, and the city center reopened its shops.
The fear, however, did not end.
“If the terminal opens… well, I have to keep coming to work.
The only thing that happened here is that on Wednesday more people ended up coming who wanted to leave, afraid of not being able to leave later,” said a young woman who runs one of the station's cafes on Thursday morning.
She did not want to give her name, also upset by the barrage of press and onlookers that has called for a new wave of violence.
Rosario is the most violent city in Argentina.
Its homicide rate, of 22 per 100,000 inhabitants, is five times the national average due to the viciousness of the rivalry between criminal gangs associated with drug dealing.
According to a report from the civil organization Financial Intelligence Research Foundation (FININT), 250 homicides were committed in Rosario alone in 2022 and 221 in 2023, with more than half of them centered in the southern, western and northern areas, in neighborhoods which comprise only 12% of the city's territory and which are disputed by more than a dozen criminal groups.
Violence in the city has exceeded the national average for two decades, but until now most of the murders were linked to settling scores between the gangs themselves.
The exception in recent weeks has unleashed panic.
Argentina is above all a transit country on international drug trafficking routes.
The choice of Rosario as a base of operations has to do with geostrategic reasons.
In a radius of 70 kilometers around the city, there are around thirty ports on the banks of the Paraná River dedicated to agro-industrial exports.
Camouflaged among such a volume of river transport are also hidden shipments of cocaine destined for Europe and Asia.
The millionaire business also finds facilities for money laundering in a city where large black sums are also moved in the thriving real estate sector and agricultural production.
The organizations in charge of this international trafficking are low profile, unlike the atomized drug dealing networks that fight among themselves and to which they attribute a large part of the more than 200 homicides per year that are registered in the city.
The expansion of violence from marginal neighborhoods to the center has been progressive and has gone hand in hand with the infiltration of drug trafficking in all powers of the provincial State: police, prosecutors, judges and politicians have been denounced and investigated by the Justice Department for their alleged links to criminals terrorizing the city.
There have been several purges of the Santa Fe police leadership, but their successors have not been slow to raise suspicions again.
The last conviction was just a month ago: former police officers David Luciano Arellano and Marcos Barúa, who were members of the Criminal Investigation Agency, were sentenced to three years in effective prison for sharing confidential information with members of the Los Monos gang, the most feared by Rosario.
Experts emphasize that to combat drug criminals, a comprehensive policy is necessary, which includes more intelligence resources to detect the forces co-opted by them, pursues the financial circuit they use to launder money and promotes a greater presence of the State in the poor neighborhoods where The gangs recruit young people to sell and transport drugs and/or as hitmen.
“The different governments in the province of Santa Fe allowed drug traffickers to enter due to apathy, disinterest, lack of fear and corruption.
It was transversal to all governments,” says Jorge Luis Vidal, a specialist in public security, criminal intelligence and the fight against drug trafficking.
Vidal believes that “equating Rosario with El Salvador is a mistake and it is not Mexico either because the Mexican cartels are infinitely more violent and there is a much older drug culture.”
In Vidal's opinion, the city with which Rosario has the most similarities is Medellín, and he remembers that although drug trafficking had an unstoppable force there for more than two decades and generated rivers of blood, the homicide rate is today lower than that of Rosario , 12 per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 22 per 100,000 in the Argentine city.
The expert points out that the change was possible thanks to a pacification strategy that Rosario currently lacks.
"The security forces do not have to dedicate themselves to controlling vehicles as they do now, but they have to go to the field, pacify it with orders from the justice, displace the drug traffickers and involve the entire State: build schools, hospitals, libraries, amphitheaters... to "That all those teenagers who have the future of being drug soldiers ahead of them see that they can live without drug traffickers," he says.
“Rosario is the most beautiful city in Argentina.
But you can't live like that anymore," says José C., an 87-year-old retiree, who describes the city's crisis with an anecdote: widowed, and with his three children already away from home, he has been left alone in his house in South of the city.
“I was robbed twice in the last year,” he says.
“The last time I came from collecting my pension and, luckily, I hid it before going out again.
I think that one of those who are with drugs in the neighborhood knew the times in which he left and marked me, because when I returned they did not even leave me the brass for the door plate.
In Rosario, fatigue and a growing fear due to insecurity coexist with helplessness in the face of the lack of solutions.
The Rosario Central soccer player, Juan Cruz Komar, 27, expressed it like few others this week.
“In recent years we had an elephant in the room, we knew the problem was there, but he looked sideways.
“He had to go through this week's situation,” he said in a conference after training.
And he attacked the Government's latest response to organized crime: “There has to be a commitment from everyone.
"It doesn't seem to me that a repressive show can solve it."
On Sunday, two buses from the Santa Fe Penitentiary Service were shot. A clear threat from drug traffickers in the prisons.
In Rosario, Governor Pullaro acted clearly.
In federal prisons we have the Management Protocol for High Risk Prisoners, with which… pic.twitter.com/n0BOToGhYc
— Patricia Bullrich (@PatoBullrich) March 6, 2024
He was referring, without naming her, to the photo that unleashed violence last week, when the local government published on the networks an image that referred to the exhibition of inmates in the prisons of El Salvador during Nayib Bukele's emergency regime.
The exceptional regime decreed by Bukele in March 2022 has resulted in the arrest of at least 75,000 people since it was imposed to neutralize the gangs in the Central American country.
The Salvadoran police regime guaranteed Bukele's re-election with sky-high popularity for controlling insecurity, but has raised many complaints of human rights violations due to arbitrary detentions, violations of due process and torture and deaths in prison.
The Argentine Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, has praised the Salvadoran president many times, and has even stated that he will receive “technical support” from the Salvadoran Government.
Bukele has taken her to the left: she has stated that Argentina's problem “was not as big” as his and that, perhaps, he did not need to “take such drastic measures.”
As the newspaper Clarín
revealed
this week, the Salvadoran Minister of Security called Bullrich this week to tell him that the photo had been “a very serious mistake.”
“You can only do it when the gangs are already neutralized and you have total control of the street,” she would have told him.
For the Mexican Cecilia González, author of the journalistic investigation
Narcosur, the shadow of Mexican drug trafficking in Argentina
, Argentina is wrong to declare war on drugs and focus on a police approach.
“This strategy, imposed by the United States five decades ago, has not had any positive results.
Today there are more prisons, more drugs and more victims.
“No one is going to put an end to drug trafficking because there is a sector of society that will always consume substances,” she believes.
González believes that the situation in Argentina is not even remotely that of Mexico, which faces a humanitarian crisis with more than 100,000 people missing and where there are states taken over and dominated by drug traffickers and narcopolitics for more than a century.
Even so, despite the popular support for strong-arm speeches, she believes that it would be a big mistake to involve the Armed Forces in this combat.
“The corrupting power of drug trafficking is immense, it is the most lucrative transnational crime.
If they militarize Rosario they will corrupt those forces and violence will increase,” she warns.
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