In small doses but without respite, local drug trafficking poisons life in poor neighborhoods of Rosario, the third largest city in Argentina where children are now also falling under the bullets.
It is bare ground where each stride releases a cloud of dust.
At the end of March, the children have regained their rights there and are kicking a ball into an empty goal. With armed mobile gendarmes as spectators.
Finally ! Because for several days, the kids no longer went out to Los Pumitas, a neighborhood of around 1,200 homes with bare brick or sheet metal houses and unpaved streets. This is where 11-year-old Maximiliano was killed on March 5 by a stray bullet during a drug-related shootout.
His death had little echo in the world press, unlike the bullets fired three days earlier on the front of a supermarket belonging to the in-laws of Lionel Messi, with a message half threatening, half abstruse.
Not a direct threat, seems to think the investigation, but a desire to give resonance to a local message, by "using" the name of the superstar.
But Los Pumitas did not get the news wrong. The day after Maximiliano's death, an angry mob attacked the home of a supposed trafficker. The police were able to exfiltrate it, but the neighbors methodically demolished the house, whose facade and partitions are nothing more than huge gaping holes.
- Five times more homicides-
"The neighborhood is not safe, never has been. There have always been gunshots. But never a child had been in the middle," a local resident told AFP, without revealing his face. nor name. "The neighborhood is really outraged. That's why we attacked the houses."
But after the angry catharsis came the threats. Several homes have received a video of a masked man, urging them, "band of cretins", to "return things" looted from the house of the supposed dealer (household appliances, furniture, etc.). “Or else (…) every day we will leave you dead”. The 19-year-old alleged perpetrator of the video has been arrested.
But the threat still lurks. As weighs, for several years, this drug trafficking (cocaine, "paco" or local crack) on a small scale, between local gangs in the territory not exceeding "no more than a few blocks", assures AFP a local deputy , Carlos del Frade.
With almost one homicide a day, Rosario is Argentina's most dangerous city: 22 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, nearly five times the national average.
But the figures do not tell the daily life of Los Pumitas, the regular shootings, the impacts of bullets in the walls, the windows...
Luciana Ginga, a criminologist at the University of Rosario, describes "gangs on a neighborhood scale, with a component of police complicity". But "very precarious" bands, far from a large-scale structure.
A giant river port on the Parana, Rosario is the gateway to vital agro-export for the country. Cereals, but also drugs from Bolivia, passing through Brazil or Paraguay, to Europe and Asia.
The city has gradually become a traffic hub, the dividends of which have fueled a local boom in real estate and luxury goods, says Ms. Ginga. Far from the corrugated sheets of Las Pumitas.
"Of this flow of drugs to other corners of the world there is always something locally, and its trade is anchored in neighborhoods with high social vulnerability", summarizes for AFP Claudio Brione, provincial Minister of Security. He has recently observed "unusual violence between gangs for a territory".
Shootings aimed at rivals, intimidation of businesses for the purpose of extortion, even of the media... Shootings have become such a problem that a "Shooting Unit" has been created.
One of its prosecutors, Valeria Haurigot explains to AFP that the perpetrators are very often identified, but that the phenomenon continues because from the prisons - where telephones are regularly seized - abuses are sponsored.
"And now ?" many wonder at Los Pumitas. What will happen once the hundreds of mobile gendarmes, deployed in early March by the national authorities with a lot of communication, leave the neighborhood?
"In Rosario, there is no narco militia. We are talking about a few kids on motorbikes, fragile, with serious social needs. Who is going to tell me that it is insurmountable?" annoys Marcelo Antonelli, president of a small football club, who has suffered many threats since he gradually snatched young people from drugs, or fired users of the facilities. "But we knew, and they also opposite, that what we are doing is good".
03/24/2023 11:41:16 - Rosary (Argentine) (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
