An alleged threat to soccer player Ángel Di María triggers fear of drug violence in Rosario

The Argentine city of Rosario dawned again this Monday paralyzed by fear of violence from drug gangs.

The police in the province of Santa Fe, north of Buenos Aires, are investigating a threat to the family of soccer player Ángel Di María after a group of people this morning threw a message at the door of the private neighborhood where the player maintains a house. to which he returns when he visits his hometown.

According to local media, the message aims to ensure that the footballer “does not come back again.”

“We don't throw away pieces of paper.

We throw lead and dead people,” said the message that was thrown from a moving car and that has mobilized the police.

Rosario is experiencing weeks of tension after criminal gangs increased their violence in the city in response to the tightening of government controls against their imprisoned leaders.

While the Di María family received this threat, another intimidation of a bus driver has paralyzed transportation in the city for the second time in a month.

On Sunday, March 10, driver Marcos Daloia, 39, died after dying for three days in the hospital.

A hitman had shot him at point-blank range while he was carrying out his work route and his death was the fourth in a week of contract workers killed in the city.

Between March 5 and 11, in addition to Daloia, two taxi drivers and a gas station attendant were murdered in a week that spread terror in the city, which suspended transportation, school classes and even collection for days. of waste after threatening another worker.

The political response has been a large deployment of federal security forces that have distributed the conflictive areas of the city, between the south and the northwest, and a proposal from the Milei Government, which last Thursday asked to reform the Security Law Interior to involve the Army.

The threat to Di María, who was born in Rosario in 1988 and played until he was 19 for the local club Rosario Central before migrating to Europe, is not the first that criminal groups have launched against a footballer to amplify their message.

Last March, a group of hitmen attacked the supermarket of the in-laws of Lionel Messi, also a native of Rosario, with bullets and left him a similar message: “Messi, we are waiting for you,” the text said, and pointed against the mayor of the city: “[Pablo] Javkin is a drug trafficker, he is not going to save you.”

As with Messi then, the threat to Di María occurred while sports news speculated about his possible return to the city to play local soccer again.

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The message to Di María targeted the governor of the province, Maximiliano Pullaro, whose cabinet spread on social networks a few weeks ago how prisoners for drug trafficking were isolated during a search in a local prison.

The “Bukele-style” photos, in reference to the emergency regime with which the president of El Salvador has managed to control the gangs in his country, have unleashed a fury that has been known for decades in Rosario, but that had not reached the center. of the city as in recent weeks.

Rosario, 300 kilometers from Buenos Aires, is the most violent city in Argentina.

Its homicide rate, 22 per 100,000 inhabitants, is five times the national average due to the viciousness of the rivalry between dozens of criminal gangs associated with drug dealing.

Rosario is a port city where a good part of Argentine agricultural exports are concentrated.

The organizations in charge of international trafficking have a low profile, unlike the dozen drug gangs that fight among themselves and to which they attribute a large part of the more than 200 homicides per year that are recorded in the city.

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