Argentina Gang Crackdown has actually Dried Up Cocaine Exports, Security

Patricia Bullrich states crackdown on drug gangs is succeeding

Cocaine exports to Europe have actually been blocked, she says

Murders in Rosario hub lowest in at least a years

By Lucinda Elliott

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 7 (Reuters) – Patricia Bullrich, Argentina’s security minister, users.atw.hu is on a mission to mark out drug gangs in the South American country that have actually driven rising violence and caused a spike in cocaine deliveries to Europe. She says she is prospering.

Argentina has actually grown in importance as a transit center for cocaine as production from Peru and Bolivia has flowed down key waterways and out through river ports such as that of Rosario, Lionel Messi’s home town. Gang-related murders increased in tandem.

Bullrich, in a rare interview with international media, informed Reuters the year-old of libertarian President Javier Milei was breaking up the gangs and blocking deliveries from making their way to end markets, including to Europe, where the cocaine market has broadened over the last few years.

“We’ve had record cocaine seizures and that’s produced excellent respect for us regionally and also in Europe, because (in 2024) no delivery from Argentina was discovered in Europe,” she said at her workplace in Buenos Aires, including that “naturally there might be some shipments that were undetected.”

The security ministry confirmed that cocaine was not discovered in any deliveries that crossed the South Atlantic from Argentina to a significant European port in 2024. Reuters was unable to separately confirm that.

Once a rival to Milei as the presidential prospect for the main conservative bloc, Bullrich is now leading the crackdown on criminal activity, tightening borders with Brazil and Bolivia, privatizing some jails and using expert system to track gangs.

In Rosario, according to local government figures, murders dropped to 90 last year – the least expensive in a minimum of the last years and down from nearly 300 in 2022 and 261 in 2023, the year before Milei and Bullrich took workplace.

“We chose to strike hard against the gangs,” Bullrich said, adding that cooperation in between the nationwide and regional federal governments in Rosario had been a key factor, as well as the courts taking a tougher line. The federal government has also targeted drug kingpins already behind bars.

“We eliminated the power that the drug bosses had in the jails, who used the jails to keep their drug criminal offense rings going. We isolated them,” she said.

Andrei Serbin Pont, an Argentine security and intelligence expert and president of regional think tank CRIES, credited an emphasis on gathering intelligence with aiding the crime decrease.

“There was a collective security effort by the national government to prioritize Rosario, with a focus on criminal intelligence rather than simply having more cops on the streets, which is a far more feasible strategy,” he said.

Bullrich has sent out a bill to congress to develop a brand-new anti-mafia law, akin to U.S. RICO legislation, to remove criminal networks, and said she has actually also gained from security forces in Britain and Italy.

In 2015, she hosted El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, and visited his mega-prison that holds tens of thousands of gang members in hard conditions that have actually drawn praise from hardline law-and-order political leaders and criticism from rights groups. Photos have actually shown rows of tattooed and partially nude prisoners kneeling with their hands behind the heads.

“In our case, our system has actually been a bit, let’s say, less severe. But when we have to be difficult, we are hard,” said Bullrich.

TOUGHER BORDERS

Bullrich informed Reuters she was enhancing border controls to stop drug gangs, preparing check outs to cocaine-growing locations in Peru, and improving cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Bullrich said the border with Bolivia was being strengthened, including by developing a short stretch of wall in northern Salta province. Argentina is likewise doing more monitoring of entry points with Brazil where there had been a “lack of control in the last few years,” she said.

“We’re going to begin a program, a strategy, we’re taking troops to the border location with Brazil,” she said.

Authorities in Bolivia and Brazil did not instantly react to a demand for remark. Brazil’s Minister of Justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, last week welcomed the idea of enhancing border security in a reaction to the measures.

Bullrich, a political veteran who has brought Milei essential center-ground assistance, said she had actually been won over to the libertarian’s wider economic and oke.zone social reforms beyond his security focus, which have actually divided Argentines but assisted stabilize the country.

The 2 are former rivals. During the election race, Milei labeled her a leftist “bomb-thrower” – a recommendation to her time with the youth wing of the Peronist movement – to which Bullrich had actually shot back that the former economic pundit was emotionally unstable.

Bullrich said the differences were now behind them and she and her bloc were helping him as he seeks to gain seats in legislative mid-term elections set for later this year.

“We’re more libertarian than conservative now,” she said.

(Reporting by Lucinda Elliott. Additional reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia and Daniel Ramos in La Paz; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Rosalba O’Brien)