🗞️ Between a rock and a hard place

Hello!

In Rosario, a city at the epicentre of Argentina’s criminal map, it is estimated that the vast majority of people arrested for drug-related offences are users or small-time dealers. Many of them come from marginalised backgrounds.

Rosana Gambacorta is the only female lawyer in the city’s federal courts, where she has worked for 36 years. She says she represents those no one cares about.

This week we published an interview by Evelyn Arach, who is part of the Red Federal de Periodistas Judiciales of Argentina. You can watch the full interview here.

Women and young people in Rosario are not the only ones who have been caught between the violence of criminal organisations and the absence of the state.

This week, violence has flared up again in Haiti, where an international mission continues to try, with limited success, to stop the gangs' control over most of the country. In Mexico's Sinaloa state, entire towns are trying to survive a new confrontation between factions of the country's most powerful cartel, a criminal reconfiguration following the arrest of Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada Garcia in the United States.

All this and more in this week's round-up of the top stories on violence and organised crime in Latin America.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

Josefina

1. 🇲🇽⚖️It’s All Go. The transformation of Mexico's justice system is nearly a done deal. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced that he will sign the reform this weekend, in the context of the country's independence celebrations. Under the new system, more than 7,000 judges and magistrates, including those on the Supreme Court, will be elected by popular vote. While the government says the change will help end endemic corruption, critics - who have been protesting against the reforms for weeks - claim the change will end the division of powers (López Obrador's party controls the executive and legislative branches) and make the courts more permeable to organised crime.

2. 🇲🇽🇺🇸Not Guilty. This is how Sinaloa cartel co-founder Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada pleaded in his first court hearing in New York on Friday, El País reported. Zambada faces charges of drug trafficking, organised crime, illegal possession of weapons and money laundering. The head of the prosecution team, Francisco Navarro, described him as "one of the most powerful drug kingpins, if not the most powerful". The court will now decide whether his case will go to trial or whether he will avoid a trial by negotiating a plea bargain, despite pleading not guilty at the first hearing. Experts agree that the revelations that could emerge from a possible trial could be explosive, including about the cartel's alliances with Mexican officials and the extent of its international network. Meanwhile, in Sinaloa, a new struggle between the two most powerful factions of the cartel - the one that follows Zambada and the sons of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán - has transformed life in several cities, where many residents are not even leaving their homes, as reported by Animal Político and Elías Camhaji, in this excellent story for El País.

3. 🇭🇹🚨More Violence. A pastor in the community of Cité Soleil, one of the poorest in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, described the latest wave of violence following a clash between rival gangs. The conflict broke out in the middle of a football match on Wednesday and continued over the weekend. "Many people have died," Pastor Enock Joseph said, including the leader of a local gang. The United Nations estimates that more than 3,200 people have died between January and May across the country. The violence has presented a huge challenge to the international force led by some 400 Kenyan police, as we analysed in In.Visibles. On Thursday, they were joined by some 20 soldiers and four police from Jamaica, the second country to contribute security forces to the mission.

4. 🇪🇨⛓️Hitmen. On Thursday, gunmen shot dead Maria Daniela Icaza, the director of the Penitenciaria del Litoral, Ecuador's largest prison, located in the city of Guayaquil. Icaza, who was travelling in the passenger seat on her way to the town of Daule, near Guayaquil, died on the way to the hospital, BBC Mundo reported. She is the second prison official to suffer an attack in two weeks. In addition to being the country's main prison, the Penitenciaría del Litoral is considered the most dangerous, having been the scene of some of the country's worst massacres and a centre of operation for criminal organisations, El País reported. Ecuador, once one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America, is now plunged into a security and violence crisis. In response to a spike in homicides earlier this year, Daniel Noboa's government installed a state of emergency, which included placing prisons under army control.

5. 🇻🇪✈️Forced Exile. Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González, who was recognised by many inside and outside Venezuela as the winner of the presidential elections at the end of July, arrived in Spain on Sunday as an exile after Nicolás Maduro launched an arrest warrant against him. Leaders from several countries in the region including Chile, Paraguay and Costa Rica denounced the political persecution faced by Venezuela’s opposition in Venezuela. González said he will continue his fight to "achieve freedom and the recovery of democracy" in his country, reported BBC Mundo.

ALSO

Other essential reading this week

🌎From Fujimori's Peru to Bukele's El Salvador: the failed experiment of 'faceless judges' in Latin America (Elías Camhajijuan and Esteban Lewin, El País).

🇲🇽Ayotzinapa, 10 years without the truth (Fabiola Chambi, Connectas)

🇸🇻Who was Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, a key figure in Bukele's war on gangs who died in a helicopter crash in El Salvador (BBC Mundo)