With bloodshed and public intimidation, the criminal organizations dedicated to drug trafficking in Rosario are trying to reestablish a coexistence agreement that they maintained for years with part of the provincial police, politics and justice. The author claims that the phenomenon replicates what occurred in Italy at the end of the 1980s. And he warns about the need to prevent that pact from being rewritten.
(For eldiarioAR)
The Cosa Nostra has a history of more than 100 years. The moment of greatest growth for the mafia organisation was when the international drug market grew in the United States and Western Europe in the 1960s, and then the closure of the opium refineries in the hands of the Corsican mafia in the 1970s.
The Sicilian political class and part of the national political class, in addition to increasing their standard of living with the money they began to receive from the mafia, had in it a political ally, unstable but an ally nonetheless. The low political participation in Sicilian politics due to the little confidence that southern citizens had - and have - in the National State, turned the networks of clientelist dependence of the Cosa Nostra into an appetizing portion of voters for political parties at election time. But the unbalanced agreement between the mafia and some sectors of the State was broken when a group of honest politicians, judicial officials, journalists and police decided to confront the Cosa Nostra.
In 1987, a special group of judges and prosecutors - the famous anti-mafia pool - managed to obtain, after a series of investigations, the convictions of almost three hundred mafiosi, including the heads of the organisation. With this sentence, the pact between the mafia and corrupt state officials was put in jeopardy. The levels of violence before this were high but tolerable by the standards of the mafia, the corrupt sector of the state and part of public opinion.
The agreement between the officials and the mafia organisation provided that the former would be responsible for preventing any state institution from interfering with the criminal activities of the Cosa Nostra and the latter would provide the money, the votes and any special solutions to problems that the officials needed to resolve outside the rule of law. The agreement between the mafia and the officials was tacit. The mafia knew that the power of state officials was superior and that the suggestions they made had to be accepted: for example, whether or not they could commit a murder, whether or not they could participate in a public tender.
But the constant growth of the Cosa Nostra's participation in the economic and cultural sectors of Sicilian society led the leaders of the criminal organization to attack officials who were once their allies. The aim was to punish them and, fundamentally, to replace them with other officials who could generate and sustain a new pact.
Argentina and the market
Since the beginning of the century, ingenuity and technology have destroyed historically rooted concepts about producer countries and consumer countries. Security agencies have detected dozens of laboratories set up to finish producing cocaine or to manufacture completely synthetic drugs.
In the international drug market, Argentina remains predominantly a transit country for cocaine produced in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia to Europe and Asia. The administrative and operational weakness of government institutions, the extensive and interconnected waterways that the country has with other countries in the region and that facilitate the transfer of merchandise in transit, together with a national currency weakened against the US dollar, have transformed various regions of the country into important transshipment centers for the international cocaine market. However, the almost exclusive role that international criminal organizations assign to the country in this large international market does not exclude the existence of a national internal market.
Domestic drug markets throughout the world are subject to the general economic development of each country and of those countries with the others. Like any sector of the economy, individual markets - legal or illegal - are largely tied to the development or decline of the economy as a whole. The Argentine market is small, both legal and illegal, which is why the domestic criminal market has never been attractive to international criminal organizations.
The price of drugs in Latin America is determined in dollars. All transactions in the international drug market - from the countries where they are manufactured to wholesalers - are made in dollars, but retail sales are made in the currency with the largest internal circulation, generally the national currency.
When comparing the drug market in Argentina with the markets in Brazil and Mexico, it is even more clear that the Argentine domestic market is much smaller. Not only because of the number of real and potential consumers in each of them, but also with respect to the difference in profit margins that could be obtained in each of them.
The weakness of the Argentine peso against the US dollar not only puts pressure on the profit levels that organizations can achieve, it also forces them to reduce the quality of the product if they want to maintain their previous profit margins. This situation occurred in the so-called "tragedy of Puerta Ocho" in February 2022, when cocaine was mixed with a synthetic opiate to reduce the quality and increase the available volume.
However, the fact that the Argentine market is small and periodically devalues does not cease to be attractive for organizations dedicated to the retail sale of drugs in the country's large urban centers. For a long time, cocaine entered the country from Bolivia to the bordering provinces. But with the qualitative and quantitative growth of drug trafficking organizations of Brazilian, Uruguayan and Paraguayan origin, cocaine transit moved eastwards, began to occupy the Paraná River and transformed it into a long, zigzagging and winding white line with 28 private and state ports between the cities of Santa Fe and Rosario.
If we take as a reference the investigations and judicial sentences, until the beginning of 2013, the organizations dedicated to retail drug trafficking in the department of Rosario had an agreement of coexistence and development with part of the provincial police, politics and justice; also between the different criminal organizations of the place.
The Santa Fe police acted as a control body of this pact. The police were in charge of maintaining the criminal levels in acceptable proportions. But unlike what happened in Italy, where criminality also had an opinion, in Rosario only the political, judicial and business class linked to criminality did so. But all that fell apart after the arrest of the then chief of the Santa Fe police; the agreements began to break down.
Faced with the judicial, journalistic and criminal events that were unleashed afterwards, politics responded by appointing and displacing different officials in the top ranks of the Santa Fe police and the Ministry of Security in very short periods of time. The coming and going of names, the internal and external disempowerment that was generated, brought with it greater problems: honest citizens and officials found themselves unprotected and criminal organizations began to act with greater autonomy, atomized and challenging the colluding power of the State that was once their ally.
The subordinates of the subordinates of the ex-commissioner who was displaced were also corrupt and also ended up displaced. Each of the drug trafficking organizations perceived themselves as sufficiently capable - economically and in terms of weapons - to sweep away their direct competitors in a market that expanded in dribs and drabs but that devalued like a broken dam.
Currently, in Rosario, as happened in other cities in the country in 2013 - Cordoba and Tucuman - the organizations are seeking to establish a new pact on the conditions of blood, bullets and public intimidation, fundamentally on the institutions of the State. Criminal organizations have no problem finding corrupt officials, but they need them to have enough power to order the phenomenon from head to toe.
The current situation in Greater Rosario represents a real opportunity to articulate a series of short, medium and long-term measures to prevent changes that could be much more difficult to reverse.
It is necessary to prevent drug trafficking organizations from becoming “complex criminal organizations” with the power to intervene in a greater number of aspects of society. The situation in Rosario and in many urban regions of the country is similar, but the breaking of the pact established in the city of Santa Fe brings with it the possibility of preventing the reestablishment of an agreement of coexistence, control and development between criminal organizations and corrupt state officials.
In Italy, the Cosa Nostra never intended to occupy the full role of the State, much less destroy it. Criminal organizations are parasitic; they need a living organism in order to survive. The Sicilian mafia, through public intimidation - murders and threats - sought new and more developed channels of dialogue with the corrupt and fearful sectors of the Italian State. In Sicily, the fight against criminal organizations remains in force. By reinforcing the work and memory with which the commitment and will of the officials and citizens organized in this struggle was sustained, working together to establish laws and mechanisms that would take away the assets of criminal organizations, legislating special penitentiary regimes to prevent mobsters from continuing to commit crimes from prisons and creating institutions dedicated exclusively to pursuing crimes linked to organized crime.
Perhaps the work, struggle and memory on the other side of the Atlantic can serve as a guide to confront a social phenomenon that in Argentina is still in its embryonic state.
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