⚽Barras bravas and Narcos in Argentina
Rosario, beyond Los Monos. Plus, chaos in Haiti, the mathematics of crime, a new port in Peru, and more.
Although roughly 10% of the global population lives in Latin America, the region accounts for as much as a third of the world's homicides. Most take place in Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil but many others happen in lesser known places.
This week, a crime in Argentina has put the spotlight on a city where football, mafias, drug trafficking and violence come together a little bit like in a Netflix series.
On Saturday night, the historic leader of the barra brava of Rosario Central, one of the top local football teams, Andrés ‘Pillín’ Bracamonte, 52, was shot dead along with his deputy, Daniel Rana Attardo. Bracamonte and Rana were travelling in a pick-up truck when the street lights went dark and two hitmen on a motorbike fired five shots at each of them. Both died almost instantly.
Germán de los Santos, one of the journalists who for years has been investigating crime in Rosario, explained in an article in La Nación that the murder silenced the city in the midst of a homicide truce that for years put it at the epicentre of violence in Argentina, a relatively peaceful country.
The prosecutor's office has several theories about what happened, nearly all of them related to possible settling of scores linked to drug trafficking. It seems that many people wanted to kill Bracamonte. One hypothesis points to a betrayal by Los Monos, the best known criminal gang in Rosario and with which Bracamonte was linked, and the murder of Gorgo Samu, the son-in-law of one of the group's leaders, Ariel Máximo ‘Guille’ Cantero, who is in prison in a federal penitentiary.
The second hypothesis is that behind the attack are Los Menores, a drug gang that is gaining prominence in Rosario and whom Bracamonte had already accused of trying to assassinate him the last time he spoke with de los Santos.
Behind it all lies another complex web of names and a deep power struggle for all the business inside and outside the football stadiums. The big question is how this story will continue.
Interested to know more? We recommend you follow Germán de los Santos and read this brilliant feature by Osvaldo Aguirre.
There’s more. This week we spoke with Karla Salazar Sánchez, director of FLACSO Costa Rica - who will participate in a panel at the international seminar organised by Amassuru ‘Organised crime in Latin America from a feminist approach’ on 22 November - about the reasons why women commit crimes and the effectiveness of prison policies. You can read the full interview here.
7 DAYS, 5 NEWS
1. 🇭🇹Chaos. This was a new week marked by violence and a political crisis in Haiti. It all started at the weekend, when the transitional council that has governed the country since April fired the prime minister, Garry Conille, who had taken office six months ago. It seems they had political differences. Alix Didier Fils-Aimé took his place on an interim basis. The gangs, meanwhile, took advantage of the chaos and launched a new series of attacks, including on commercial airlines, leading to the closure of the airport and the cancellation of all flights. They also advanced their control of the capital, Port-au-Prince, which they now have almost total control of, terrorising the population. “Things are worse,” a French nun told Frances Roble for this New York Times report.
2. 🇪🇨Deaths in prison. At least 17 people died in one of Ecuador's most violent prisons early Tuesday in what authorities said was a confrontation between inmates, AP reported. El Litoral prison in the city of Guayaquil has been the scene of violent clashes between gangs. The most deadly took place in September 2021, when more than 120 people were killed. Last September, the prison director, María Daniela Icaza, was shot dead after receiving death threats.
3. 🇲🇽Collusion. Authorities in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero arrested German Reyes, a former state prosecutor, and a former police officer on Tuesday on charges of murdering Alejandro Arcos, Milenio reported. The murder took place on 6 October, a week after Arcos took office as mayor of Chilpancingo, the state capital. The arrest would indicate that Reyes, who had been in the military and held a high-level position in the local judiciary, had worked in collusion with the criminal gang accused of the crime.
4. 💵Cost of Crime. The cost of crime in Latin America is equivalent to 78% of the public budget for education, twice the public budget for social assistance and 12 times the budget for research and development, according to an Inter-American Development Bank report released on Monday. The document, which uses data from 2002, calculates the cost of crime in terms of loss of life, crime mitigation spending by businesses and public spending on prevention and criminal justice.
5. 🇵🇪Sea ‘Silk Road’. Chinese President Xi Jinping inaugurated a new port in the city of Chancay, 60 kilometres from Lima, in Peru on Thursday. The port will be one of the main in South America, with capacity to accommodate the world's largest containers, which will reduce the complexity of logistics. This, and the future construction of a rail route connecting it to Brazil, one of the region's top soybean producers, is a bid by Beijing to create a modern version of the old “silk road” to Latin America. But the port has drawn criticism over its environmental impact. Analysts have also warned of the opportunities it could create for criminal organisations.
THE FACT
18.677
Number of children recruited by six former FARC commanders The former commanders were charged by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.
THE QUOTE
The fight against organised crime anywhere in Central America is welcome.’
Rodrigo Chaves, President of Costa Rica, when presenting the Juan Mora Fernández Order, the highest recognition of the country's diplomacy, to El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele. Chaves proposes a “tough on crime” Bukele-inspired approach to security, to tackle a crime rise in the country.
ALSO
Other top reads of the week
El Mayo Zambada's interview with Diego Enrique Osorno: ‘We are in a business that the United States needs. That's what we do ‘ (Pablo Ferri, El Pais)
A Decade Later: Taking Stock of Cannabis Regulation in Uruguay (Lauren Predebon and Nancy Calisto, Talking Drugs)
Coca leaf legalisation in Peru (Nicolás Zevallos Trigoso, Jaris Mujica and Christian Campos Vásquez, GI-TOC)
prison (BBC Mundo)
Rubio's election as top US diplomat could reshape US policy in Latin America (Joshua Goodman, AP)
That’s all. Have a great weekend.
See you next week.
Josefina Salomon
Have you got any ideas or comments? Emails us: invisibles@invisibles.info