The drizzle falls without pause on the Müller neighborhood soccer field and four boys play ball without the bad weather seeming to bother them.
They tell their own plays and shout goals between little dances while looking at imaginary stands.
In front is the "Crucifixion of the Lord" parish attended by Father Mariano Oberlin, one of the leaders in the fight to
free young people from addictions
in Córdoba.
The priest knows that the fight is unequal and that although Córdoba does not have the levels of violence that are palpable today in Rosario, in recent months the confrontations between drug gangs and crimes at the hands of
burned
thieves
who do not hesitate to shoot have intensified.
and kill
for a cell phone, a motorcycle or whatever they can sell to buy drugs.
The last week was very busy for Cordoban security officials.
Governor
Martín Llaryora raised his full support for his Santa Fe counterpart, Maximiliano Pullaro
, in the midst of the wave of murders that occurred in the neighboring province.
And the Minister of Security, Juan Pablo Quinteros, traveled to Rosario to make himself available to his colleague, Pablo Cococcioni.
The greatest fear of the people of Córdoba is that with the arrival of the flood of federal forces to Rosario,
the drug traffickers will completely move to other destinations
where they have already spread their tentacles.
For this reason, this week they deployed a large number of agents from the Anti-Drug Police Force (FPA) on the border between
San Francisco
– the city of which Governor Llaryora was mayor – and
Frontera
, in Santa Fe. The two are divided a street.
In addition, Minister Quinteros appointed the new police leadership in that region of northeastern Córdoba.
Until recently, Bernardo Alberioni was San Francisco's anti-drug prosecutor.
The magistrate was threatened on several occasions.
In 2023, a few months before leaving his position, he received an anonymous letter with phrases like: “
Border is ours, mind your things if you love your family
.”
The prosecutor, who preferred not to speak with
Clarín
, left his position with
criticism of the provincial government
.
Those around Alberione point out that he did not leave his position out of fear but out of fatigue.
Behind the scenes, in San Francisco, as in other cities in Córdoba more related to tourism, there is more talk about
money laundering
than drug trafficking.
Dangerous relationships
In December 2014, the family of
Hernán Sánchez
, a well-known Carlos Paz night photographer, reported him missing.
He had left his apartment in the center of the city as if he had gone out to the corner to return in minutes, but he never did again.
Hernán Sánchez, murdered in Córdoba.
On March 13, 2015, while hundreds of neighbors and police and fire officials were searching for Andrea Castana (35), a woman who had disappeared two days before in Cerro de la Cruz, a special police group found her by chance. Sánchez's body.
The 34-year-old man was
hanging from a tree branch
and was in a state of decomposition.
A few hours later, they found Andrea's body, who had been raped and murdered.
In the Sánchez case there were two autopsies.
The first found a puncture wound in the abdomen and the experts on behalf of the complaint demanded that the
cover of suicide be changed to
homicide
.
That never happened and in a second autopsy it was determined that Sánchez had taken his own life, although his family continues
to insist that he was murdered
.
In the first months of the investigation, there were strong versions that indicated that the Los Monos de Rosario gang was behind the photographer's death.
Nothing more was ever heard about the subject and that line of investigation was abandoned.
Since that time, the presence of Rosario drug traffickers in Villa Carlos Paz became increasingly stronger.
Journalist Juan Federico, specialized in drug trafficking and author of the book
Drogas, Cocinas y Fierros
, told
Clarín
that the
relationship between traffickers from Santa Fe and Córdoba goes back years
.
He explained that the ties between the Alvarado clan, on the one hand, and Los Monos, on the other, with Córdoba can begin to be counted from the 2000s.
“For years it has been proven that there are links between the powerful Rosario gangs and the people of Córdoba,” says the journalist.
Federico reported that in March 2022, in the exclusive country Loma de la Carolina, in the capital of Córdoba, Fabián Gustavo Pelozzo was arrested, involved in the triple crime of marriage, on the outskirts of Rosario.
On January 29 of that year,
Ibarlucea
was at the center of the scene for the triple crime at the exit of a drug marriage that had as victims Iván Maximiliano Giménez (33), his wife Érica Romero (37) and their baby. both, one year old.
“There is also the case of the drug czar of Río Cuarto,
Claudio Torres
, who was murdered by hitmen in 2019 and one of Los Monos is being detained for that crime,” said Federico.
And he pointed out that that same year, Rosario drug lord Esteban Lindor Alvarado was apprehended at a campsite in Embalse.
Claudio Torres was murdered in Río Cuarto, Córdoba.
Suddenly, the tranquility of the gated communities of Córdoba and the mountain tourist paradises is disturbed by presences that until recently went unnoticed.
The case of the family of the dangerous Ecuadorian drug trafficker "Fito" Macías, who had settled in a country near Carlos Paz, is another warning of what has been happening for some time in the province.
Popular neighborhoods, fertile land
Last Thursday afternoon, Father Mariano Oberlin heard the bell ring at the parish house in the Müller neighborhood.
When he opened the door he found a woman who, in the midst of desperation and nerves, asked him to go with her to her house because one of her sons, out of his mind due to cocaine consumption,
wanted to set fire to all his belongings. things
.
The priest calmed her down and convinced her to go to the police since it was not an issue in which he did not get involved.
The drug business has been in the most popular neighborhoods of Córdoba for at least two decades.
Along with the Müller neighborhood, the neighboring sector of Colonia Lola is another of the sectors that Father Oberlin knows inside out.
That neighborhood, due to the reach of drugs in its social fabric, was called "Colombia Lola."
Sitting in the kitchen of the parish house, Oberlin has just come out of a case of
dengue
fever that kept him at rest for several days.
Father Mariano Oberlin knows in detail the Müller and Colonia Lola neighborhoods, hit by drugs.
“In the neighborhood I see a lot of consumption and it is very worrying.
But I think we are far from being Rosario,” she says and points out: “From the outside, it seems to me that, although we are quite far away, nothing would prevent us from becoming the same.”
The priest affirms that 20 years ago no one thought that in Córdoba drugs would be so involved in the families of the popular neighborhoods.
“Today we think that we are far from Rosario, but, a year from now, five or I don't know how much, we could be the same or worse.
That is assuming that
Rosario is not the bottom of the well either
because we have to look a little at what is happening in Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, we could be much worse,” says Oberlin.
–What type of approach is necessary so that the fight against drug trafficking is not so unequal?
–We must take an approach that is as comprehensive as possible: on the one hand there is sales and on the other hand there is consumption. Usually the one who gets arrested is the monkey who consumes or the drug dealer. Rarely does someone a little bigger fall. And also if you know who the neighborhood drug trafficker is and see the house he lives in, you are not even far from being part of the second economy in the world as they say. If drug trafficking moves the billions of dollars that it is said to move in the world, it is clear that that money does not remain even in those who sell wholesale. There are politicians out there who say that to solve drug trafficking we have to go to Nordelta. And when they arrested the wife of the Ecuadorian drug trafficker in Córdoba, she was not in a villa, she was in a country house. Political complicities are known to exist, including those of the Police. Not all the politicians nor all the Police, but there is some complicity because if not, it is not understood.
–What is day-to-day life like in a neighborhood where drug traffickers are involved?
–Müller is known as a drug neighborhood and it is a stigma that affects us all, but the vast majority of people are into something else. There are mafias that are destroying the lives of children and there are very harsh realities. I once asked a guy why he was consuming something that was killing him. And he answered me: “At least this is the only nice thing that has happened to me in my life and if I have to die, I want to die like this.” In other words, when a boy tells you something like that, he means that as a society we have failed because we have not offered him a connection with something that excites him to live.
Soccer player or drug trafficker
For the priest, the danger that looms on the horizon is the lack of state policies for the most humble families.
“In the neighborhood, when you ask the kids what they want to be when they grow up, the answer is '
soccer player or drug dealer
,'” says the priest.
And he affirms that when he arrived in the neighborhood, almost two decades ago, he encountered situations in which the drug trafficker helped the neighbors with food and money for medicines.
“If there is no State to help us balance social forces, this completely disbands,” says the priest and continues: “It was said that drug traffickers had taken the place of the leader.
At that time, the State began to invest heavily in different forms of proximity and social aid.
What the State never finished assuming was the leadership role that the drug trafficker did assume
.
A "Rooster" for Colombia Lola
The quartet music could be heard several blocks away, but that is normal in the neighborhoods of Córdoba, where “tunga tunga” beats the heart of the margins.
In a house in Colonia Lola, the neighborhood that the drug traffickers themselves baptized “Colombia Lola”, an impressive police raid ended with the arrest of the area's drug lord,
Jorge Guillermo Altamira (67), known to everyone as "El “Rooster
. ”
Jorge Guillermo Altamira, alias "El Gallo", drug lord in Colonia Lola, Córdoba.
Photo The Voice
It was a night in July 2016 and during the raid, the Córdoba Police officers managed to prevent some of the attendees from throwing bags of cocaine down the toilet.
Two of his sons and one of his sons-in-law fell along with "Gallo", who along with other people were tried and convicted in 2018. Altamira received a
six-year prison
sentence .
The first time the term "Colombia Lola" was heard to describe that area of the capital was in 2007. Journalist Miguel Durán wrote a report in
La Voz del Interior
after speaking with the residents of the neighborhood a few days after Facundo's crime. Novillo, a 7-year-old boy who was traveling in the back seat of a Renault 12. The car was caught in the middle of a shootout between two drug gangs and one of the bullets broke the rear window of the 12 and killed Facundo.
“They call the neighborhood Colombia Lola,” exclaimed a neighbor, her soul destroyed by the little boy's treacherous crime.
In March 2016, a few months before being arrested, "El Gallo" suffered firsthand the loss of a son in a fight involving drug traffickers.
Two neighborhood residents, father and son, got into a fight with Diego Altamira and stabbed him to death.
A life in crime
When reviewing Córdoba police files, you don't have to go far to find that one of the first arrests of "Gallo" Altamira occurred in November 2007.
In 2009, after an abbreviated trial, it was the first time that a court applied a penalty for money laundering.
Altamira received six years in prison for drug trafficking and illicit association.
"El Gallo" returned to the streets after being released in November 2011, four years later and, for the first time in his long life in crime, he chose to hide in a low profile.
After the 2018 conviction, her last name once again appeared in the headlines of the Cordoban newspapers after it was learned that another of her daughters had been arrested in a raid.
She was accused of leading a drug gang in the hottest sector of the capital of Córdoba.
Cordova. Special
MG - EMJ