The rivers of shit and drug trafficking as a lifeboat

Lara Morena Gutiérrez (15), Brenda del Castillo (20) and Morena Verdi (20).

The murders of two twenty-year-old girls and one fifteen-year-old girl are new proof of a broken system. Some organized and disorganized sectors of the community try to contain this overflowing river of shit, but the efforts are not enough. The murder of the three girls has its direct causes in the hands of a group of merchants of death, who for a long time have been exploiting the poor sectors of society: poor women prostituted by adults, poor boys with weapons in their hands, weapons that adults give them to guard the drugs that those same adults sell to them and to other poor boys, in their vast majority. Those murderous hands that killed the three poor girls are part of the current of that river of shit that drowns the poor above all. We must stop training our sense of smell to endure that putrid stench that is suffocating us.

The fight against drug trafficking, more or less organized, began fifty years ago. States decided to hand over the battle against a complex social phenomenon to the security forces and the judiciary. Politics decided that the tools at its disposal would define how and when to face it. It was determined that supply had to be persecuted and demand had to be contained. That strategy, which is still in force today, not only turned out to be a failure, but also added other enormous problems. The attempts to contain demand were few, very ineffective, and ended up dehumanizing the victims, all of them. Those who fell into drug use, the children exploited by those merchants of death, the families powerless in the face of the destruction of their homes, and the community, guided by fear, begins to distance them, turning them into dead who speak but have no voice, who swallow instead of eat, and who walk nowhere. That strategy must change.

The fight against drug trafficking cannot aim at statistics or the sensationalist spectacle of a community dragged into coprophagy. The goal of politics, the State, and the community must be that those boys and girls return home, to the community from which violence drove them away. Every drug shipment discovered and theatrically displayed in the media is only a partial victory in a lost match if the victims are not taken into account.

Pope Francis said that crises are opportunities to come out better or worse, but that in the end, one always comes out. In the face of a humanitarian crisis like the one we lived through this weekend in Argentina, and of which we have unfortunately already suffered many, we have come out worse. Drug trafficking and human trafficking are a reality that demands a response from all of us. No one develops alone, and a community does not develop if one of its members is wounded on the side of the road. The State must change its strategy. It must develop policies to integrate neighborhoods and their communities. A community that must be filled with workers with decent jobs, with young people who have dreams and opportunities to turn them into reality, with women living in equality and without fear, with entrepreneurs making money by producing wealth for all. The leaderships of all sectors, with the vocation for leadership that characterizes them, must once again look at and listen to the people they lead, respond to the many urgent needs, while planning and building the future.