Global Courant
The tour begins on a Friday minutes before 11:00 p.m. It includes visits to the neighborhoods of La Granada, Las Flores, La Cerámica, Tablada, Empalme Graneros, Rucci, and Ludueña. All of “the Rosario narco”. For four hours, very few sequences of buying and selling drugs are observed. There are no outlets in sight.
Unlike the towns of Buenos Aires or the suburbs, where the movement of consumers is constant, and it is common to find lines of people waiting to buy cocaine, in most of Rosario’s popular neighborhoods there is no movement. And he has a reason: many of the famous “bunkers” have disappeared. The sales modality that has grown strongly in recent years is delivery.
Carlos del Frade is a journalist, writer and deputy from the province of Santa Fe. In addition to all that, he must be one of the people with the greatest knowledge of the Rosario drug problem. He says he is aware of the phenomenon, and clarifies that it began between 2014 and 2015.
The drug bunker in the Los Pumitas neighborhood of Rosario, where the residents destroyed the facilities after the crime of Máximo Jerez (11). Photo: Juan Jose Garcia.
“In those years the first description of ‘slave labor’ appeared: boys, many minors, who spent 10 or 12 hours locked up in a bunker, without even being able to go out to go to the bathroom. That generated a shock between the gangs,” holds.
Then, always according to the deputy’s analysis, a new generation of youth gangs implemented delivery. “They gave motorcycles to street vendors and a supposed freedom, in contrast to the bunker. The greatest splendor was during the pandemic. The gangs achieved two advantages: they stopped having fixed points as possible places for attacks by rivals and the diversification of the business “adds the politician.
But there is another version. The one who tells it is a woman with direct access to the protagonists of these stories. “What happened is that the gangs would go and shoot rival bunkers so that it would be filled with police and their enemies could not sell. Who is going to sell and who is going to buy if there is a patrol car at the door of the bunker?” he points out. “With motorcycles you avoid shooting attacks and police presence at your place of sale,” she adds.
Ariel “Guille” Cantero, leader of Los Monos.
In the streets of the city it is affirmed that the idea of the bunkers would have come from Ariel Máximo “Guille” Cantero, leader of a faction of Los Monos, currently imprisoned in the Marcos Paz federal prison.
“All of this complicates our work,” says an investigator from a federal force, who has been in the city for months on drug charges and talks with Clarín in a bar in Puerto Norte, the most expensive neighborhood in the city: “At an evidentiary level “You have no choice but to go because of the regularity of the motorcycle in the same house. But you will not have the image of the supplier with whom you drive the motorcycle”.
Camouflaged so as not to attract attention
From what this newspaper was able to learn, there are drug dealers who disguise themselves as application workers. They use their boxes and their uniforms. Many of them are addicted and receive cocaine as a form of payment. Others, fewer, sell and distribute the drugs that they themselves bought in bulk on motorcycles.
The investigator recounts another peculiarity very typical of the narco Rosario. Every time they, as they say in police jargon, “kick in a door,” they find very little drugs.
“You kidnap a minimal amount, which could even be said to be for personal consumption. What do they do to not have anything on them? They rent furnished apartments to store kilos of drugs. We raided them so many times, and they lost so much money in drugs, that now they prefer to run with the cost of delivery and moving the cargo through different departments that they rent,” he says.
The recurring complaints of the neighbors in Rosario. Photo: Juan Jose Garcia.
Those who do not rent homes pay relatives or acquaintances with no police record to keep backpacks of drugs in their homes. And they come and go: always with few quantities. From side to side.
“To lose”, as the detective, who works for the Prefecture, says, is to suffer the seizure of drugs within the framework of an arrest. In Rosario, a kilo of cocaine, as cheap, is paid 5,000 dollars. There are those who buy it for 6,500. Although here is a clarification. The transaction installed in the environment is to deliver the kilo and collect it after marketing it. It can be a week, ten days or two weeks.
Therefore, the dealers, who are the ones who sell to the final consumer, run two major risks in case of drug seizure. One is cheap. They not only lose out on earning between 3 and 4 million for each kilo sold at retail. In addition, they will be in debt. And with the pressure that if they do not pay for the merchandise, even if they are detained, their families could be attacked.
To avoid this type of risk, there are even some businesses that buy one-gram doses that they resell as they receive them. That is why there are dealers who buy a kilo, divide it into a thousand doses and sell it by “bags” to resellers.
Los Pumitas neighborhood, in Rosario. Photo: Juan Jose Garcia.
“They will sell one gram. But they sell a lot of drugs, eh,” adds the prefect. A gram of cocaine is around 6,500 pesos. “What strikes us is the type of life they lead. They have no quality of life. They don’t improve the house they live in. We don’t know what they spend their money on. I would tell you that out of 20, only one lives well.”
Claudio Brilloni is Minister of Security of Santa Fe. Via WhatsApp audio he tells Clarín: “The latest investigations allowed us to identify 30 points of sale that were raided.” Although it is worth clarifying: they are posts that “move” to try to outwit the detectives.
“I am not saying that delivery does not exist. Now, the work of the Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC) allows us to infer the existence of points of sale at homes,” completes the official.
Rosary beads. Special delivery.
EMJ
