In Argentina, social activists and the church agree that drug trafficking is increasing due to the elimination of the public policies promoted by La Libertad Avanza [LLA, “Liberty advances” in English, the party founded by Argentina’s president Javier Milei]. This includes increased consumption of narcotics in addition to turf wars, drug traffickers turned financiers, and extreme violence.
“They don’t want to sell; it’s worse: they want to control areas,” we were told by one witness.
“Drug trafficking has been present in these neighborhoods for at least 20 years: we’ve always had the drug dealers and the kids who use drugs,” said a source whose real name will not be used, as with almost all of those who will speak to us and who live in working-class neighborhoods. Juan allows us to say that he is active in the community, in a social organization he joined in 2002, when he was a teenager. He was greatly influenced by his community organizing: if he finished high school, it was at a high school run by his organization, and if he left the country, it wasn’t on a family vacation but as a brigade member. His perspective on what’s happening in the neighborhoods is that of an activist.
“What we’re seeing now is territorial control, control by force, with weapons, and by consensus because consensus isn’t reached only through agreements but also through horror,” Juan says.
“What would it mean to control the territory?”
“My brother is also in the movement,” Juan said. “The organization asked him to move to a neighborhood across the Matanza River, a new settlement. I went to visit him. I arrived at 7 p.m., and at the entrance, an armed kid stopped me. He wanted to know where I was going and what I was doing. They control who comes and goes: after that time, no one opens the housing association or the school unless you know them. They set up security cordons.”
Later, the source spoke about another neighborhood: “In September, two women appeared floating in the Matanza River; they were 28 and 14 years old. They were seen because the river was low; the police had conducted searches, but the drug traffickers shot them. A few months later, there was a flood, and Civil Defense couldn’t deliver food to the isolated families because they were shooting at them from the rooftops. They came to ask us to bring it to them. We spoke, asked permission, and they let us in.”
This warning has been issued by all social movements: Javier Milei’s government, in its crusade to eliminate all traces of organization among the poorest, stopped sending food to soup kitchens, eliminated the Potenciar plan, launched a media smear campaign against social movements, and criminalized their members. As a result, the public policy bloc that the state coordinated with the movements in the most neglected areas of the AMBA (with soup kitchens, health workers, documentation operations, first-line support programs for victims of gender violence, high schools, urban development projects, and productive ventures) has been withdrawn. Many businesses have had to close, neighborhood improvement projects have been halted, and many of the community workers have had to leave to find other ways to earn a living. A void has emerged.
Priests from the slums and those who work to help the most vulnerable agree on this diagnosis and, like the social movements, warn that drug trafficking is advancing in the vacuum. But how does it actually happen?
“Everyone had to figure out how to survive”
Lidia—another fictional name—is in charge of a soup kitchen in one of the largest slums in the city of Buenos Aires. She has been a neighborhood leader for decades. “The first thing that happened to us with this government was that young people moved away,” she recalls. “They had joined the workforce during the pandemic. They asked us to help out in the kitchen because their parents didn’t have anything to eat. They took food to their grandparents, and then, they cooked or joined the health teams.”
“At that time, we had Potenciar Trabajo (Work Power Program), so they earned a minimum wage, between Potenciar and the Nexo plan; and they also had food. Several went on to study nursing. But this year, we lost almost all of them: of the seven young people, we were left with three. Without the Nexo Plan, without Potenciar, without food, everyone had to figure out how to survive. And not only do they leave the soup kitchen, but they end up in bad times.”
She will never use words like drug trafficking or drugs. She uses allusions, like “dirty money” or “bad path.”
“This is a very hard blow; we are very hurt. We are discouraged,” she laments. Several women also left the soup kitchen. One day, “one of the women left a bag behind, and we found a very small scale inside. She had been telling us she was going to work at a grocery store, but we saw the small scale for weighing [narcotics].”
“We have fought so hard for the women to escape, we have fought so hard for things to improve,” she reflects.
Javier Milei Deepens Argentina’s IMF Debt Trap With ‘Emergency’ Loan
Facundo and Gastón, slum priests
For Facundo Ribeiro, priest of the Caacupé parish in Villa 21-24, “we shouldn’t think of the advance of drug trafficking as something organized, in the sense that they’re opening soup kitchens, but rather as other real-life situations: there are many people who have nothing to eat because their income has fallen and social security has been reduced,” he explains. “The advance of drug trafficking occurs in a ‘hold this for me’ situation; the person keeps it at home in exchange for a few pesos and gets caught up in that situation… For the kids, it’s easy money, it’s quick money. It’s not something organized; it’s not the drug dealer opening a soup kitchen, but real-life situations.”
Father Gastón, a priest from the 1.11.14 slum in Bajo Flores, describes something similar: “Do they give food to a soup kitchen? No, that didn’t happen in the slums of the capital,” he asserts. “It does happen that the younger kids start selling drugs. A 16-year-old kid who pulls a cart to collect cardboard, who collects about 20,000 pesos a day, stands on a street corner selling instead of earning a decent living; we do see that. And it doesn’t just happen with the kids: before, people tried to earn a few pesos selling food, Milanese sandwiches. Now they start selling from their homes,” he adds.
He maintains that “there are more and more sales jobs, and it won’t be easy to get out of there, because you can’t say, ‘I’ll sell this for a month and then go back to the Milanese sandwiches.'”
The priest lists the jobs for drug dealers that don’t involve being a soldier or using violence: storing, weighing and portioning, monitoring an area, carrying, and delivering.
The drug dealer becomes a financier
Juan returns to the topic of territorial control. He asserts that gangs have a belt-like dynamic to control areas through which they need to move their merchandise. “It’s not that they want to sell, but worse: they want to manage areas, corridors,” he insists.
This leads to more violent confrontations. Burning of shacks that neighbors point to as sales sites is followed by other, bloodier fires in retaliation. He adds that another aspect of the issue is that, as a result of the gangs’ economic growth, their businesses are diversifying: “the drug dealer becomes a financier and takes over the drug sales business.” All the issues that affect the community, which could have a community resolution, become a variable in their business.”
In a sense, social organizations see a situation similar to that of the late 1990s when, faced with the emergence of paco (a smokable, cheap, and highly addictive street drug that is a chemical byproduct of cocaine production), they had to develop strategies to increase their presence in public spaces: they held activities in the plazas and were on the ground with community initiatives. Later, in coordination with the state (through Sedronar), they opened care centers for people with substance use problems—Community Care and Support Centers.
However, the similarities between that crisis and the current one are not so great. The dispute over public space today is much more violent. Young people have a different perspective, and the idea of joining a social organization no longer appeals to them as it did then. The movements themselves are in retreat. The community dimension is shrinking, fraying. It resists, but it is sustained by the commitment of the most militant, who face the difficult task of saving what can be saved and the challenge of devising new strategies.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/KW/SL
