Máximo Jérez was not on any hitlist. On his way home from a birthday party, the 11-year-old stopped to buy juice from a small store in the Los Pumitas district of Rosario, Argentina, unaware that narcos embroiled in a turf war were also on their way.
Witnesses say the gangsters showered bullets from a car, killing Máximo and injuring three other children.
“The scene was a disaster, a bloodbath,” says Antonia Jérez, Máximo’s aunt. “Children were cowering on the floor, crying. One was shot in the face, a toddler in the shoulder. Máximo was shot in the back. His last words were: ‘Mummy, Daddy.’”
Máximo’s death in March 2023 rocked Argentina and sent a message across its most drug-embattled city: as the kingpins vie for control – driven in part by increasing demand from Europe – anyone could become their next victim.
Rosario, an inland river port city, has been ensnared by gang violence for decades. Its location is of strategic importance, sitting along the country’s main agricultural transport channel. Shipments from cocaine-producing Peru and Bolivia funnel down the Paraguay-Paraná waterway, switching boats in Rosario and other ports, before continuing to Europe and Africa.
And now, experts warn business is ramping up.
“The maritime route through the Paraguay-Paraná waterway has become very important for drug trafficking to Europe in the past five years,” says Angela Me, the chief of research at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). “There’s more competition recently, more gangs seeking presence in Europe – from the Balkans, Albania, Brazil – which in turn has increased demand. The difficulties of crossing the ocean seem to have disappeared.”
Between February 2020 and July 2022 at least 10 shipments of cocaine larger than 500kg and seized in European ports were believed to have travelled through the Paraguay-Paraná waterway. The UNODC has said these incoming drug flows probably feed into Argentina’s domestic market as drugs and guns are exchanged as payment, in turn fuelling internal violence.
Local communities say they are the ones who suffer the consequences.
“The gangs never used to kill children, now they do. Children don’t play outside, they are scared. Gangs evict people from their homes, to use them to store drugs and weapons,” says Jérez, watched over by three heavily armed soldiers. “It was once peaceful here, but now the violence is daily.”
Rosario’s annual homicide rate is five times the national average, at 22 for every 100,000 inhabitants. While violence has been widespread for years, experts say the gangs’ latest tactic is to turn on innocent bystanders, such as Lorenzo “Jimi” Altamirano, who fell victim to a mafia-style kidnapping and killing last year.
As the 28-year-old musician left rehearsals in the leafy city centre in February 2023, two men dragged him by his hair into a waiting car.
“After a while, they pulled him out in front of the football stadium, an area covered by CCTV – they wanted to send a visible message,” says his mother, Liliana Altamirano. “They shot him three times, in the hand, the stomach and head.”
Liliana said her son was a “quiet, careful” man, unconnected to the city’s gangs. A note was left inside his pocket, with a warning to a rival cartel. “It was a message for us all: that anyone can be killed,” she says.
This March four more murders rattled the city, when gangs targeted innocent workers in retaliation for a proposed crackdown on prisoners.
The victims included a petrol station worker and father, Bruno Bussanich, 25, who was shot three times at close range. Near his body a note addressed officials. “We don’t want to negotiate anything. We want our rights,” it said. “We will kill more innocent people.”
Such notes have become a feature of Rosario’s gang disputes. In 2023, even the in-laws of the footballer Lionel Messi, who own a supermarket in the city, were targeted. Assailants fired 14 shots at the store and left a note reading: “Messi, we’re waiting for you.”
Experts say the increasing flow of drugs through the city has also led to the “intense recruitment” of children.
“Twenty years ago, football teams took the children to make them professionals, but now the gangs take the children,” says Gabriela Meglio, a deputy secretary of Amsafe Rosario, a teachers’ union.
Luis Schiappa Pietra, an organised crime prosecutor, said the children on trial were getting “younger and younger”. “Now they are 14, 15 – mostly poor boys who want an identity, to be part of something,” he says.
Andrés Giura, a 54-year-old teacher who works in the west of the city, says the shift began 10 years ago.
“The first sign was the language the students began using – words that Pablo Escobar would use,” he says. “Then in 2017 there was a shooting outside our school. Now the boys say that working is stupid, that workers are poor all their lives, that the only future is being in a gang. Lots of students have dropped out.”
Two of Giura’s teenage students were shot dead last year. Such attacks are common across the city – in 2023 a six-year-old was injured after a school was shot at, while this May, a gang left a note in a kindergarten threatening that “deaths will occur” if the security minister “takes charge”.
Drug “bunkers” – small brick huts where gangs sell drugs and store weapons – are common near the schools. “Argentina is not a producer – we just have the nightmare of being in the export route,” says Giura.
Neighbourhoods across the country have become inundated with narcotics, prosecutors say.
“There has never been more drug use here. Consumption has spread to all geographical areas and classes,” says Mónica Cuñarro, a federal prosecutor for cases involving complex crimes and drugs.
According to UNODC data, Argentina ranks 14th in prevalence of cocaine use globally, and experts warn much of what is consumed is of low quality. In 2022 one toxic batch of cocaine killed at least 20 people and left 74 people in hospital.
“What leaves the country is of good quality, and what is left goes to the domestic market,” says Cuñarro.
Much of the local trade focuses on paco, or coca paste, a toxic and highly addictive mixture of raw cocaine base cut with chemicals, which can even contain glue, crushed glass or rat poison. The drug – essentially a waste product of cocaine bound for export – is the third-most consumed illegal substance in the country.
Paco is rumoured to have first emerged in Zavaleta, a slum in the capital, in the early 2000s. Now local people say the drug, which can be bought for less than a small bar of chocolate, has spread across the country.
Luji Guastamacchia, a 34-year-old teacher who works in Buenos Aires, says people buy and sell paco “like sweets”. “It’s not hidden. The children think it is normal to see people buying drugs in broad daylight,” she says.
Between 2010 and 2020, the number of urban-dwelling Argentines aged 15-65 consuming illicit drugs more than doubled, from 3.6% to 8.3%, while cocaine and paco consumption increased by 100% in the same period, according to Eduardo Tomás Cánepa, a doctor in chemical sciences at the government’s research facility, Conicet.
The recent increase is fuelled by poverty, he says. Argentina has been embroiled in an economic crisis for decades, and currently has an annual inflation rate of 289%. Nearly 60% of the country’s 46 million people live in poverty, a 20-year high, according to a study by Argentina’s Catholic University.
“The increase in poverty levels in Argentina has led to an increase in the consumption of illegal substances, especially paco and cocaine,” says Cánepa, adding that consumption had notably increased in the newly impoverished middle classes.
The narcotics crisis has offered an early test to Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei.
Since taking office in December, Milei has promised to prosecute gang members as terrorists and sought to broaden the scope for security agents’ use of firearms. Throughout Rosario’s working-class neighbourhoods, federal forces patrol with guns and in armoured vehicles. The security minister, Patricia Bullrich, has also announced a new anti-drug trafficking unit.
But human rights activists and prosecutors warn that such tactics fail to tackle the problem.
“Throughout Latin America, we’ve documented that using the military for public security problems is heavily correlated with human rights abuses, because of the type of weapons they use, training they have, operations they have conducted,” says Juanita Goebertus Estrada, Human Rights Watch’s Americas director. “Instead, the government should be strengthening judicial capacity and preventing gang recruitment, not opening the door to excessive use of force.”
Prosecutor Schiappa Pietra says police corruption is rife. “Without the police corruption, the gangs would not be able to operate here as they do,” he says.
But he warns that simply locking gangsters up offers no solution.
“All of Rosario’s gang chiefs are in prison, but four or five years ago they started to operate from within the prisons. One of them has committed more crime from inside jail than when he was free,” he says. “We see thousands of cases of narco-trafficking in the courts every year, but to fix it we have to attack the money laundering – justice must follow the money.”
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