As drug trafficking advances in neighborhoods, solidarity resists

By Matias Pacheco - militant of the Organizations in Combat Front (FOL, Frente de Organizaciones en Lucha)

English translation by Yenni Castro (Valestra Editorial)

The sun sets in the Argentine autumn, earlier and earlier every week. The streets and alleys of slums and working-class neighborhoods change their protagonists. Families rush to finish their errands before shops close their shutters or lock their doors. Many women return from the soup kitchens that still survive, at a time when demand is growing. As the hours pass and night falls, the risk increases. The streets and alleys are areas of influence for criminal gangs, the law of the strongest rules the shantytowns, there, the drug trafficking reigns supreme.

Drug trafficking has been present in Argentina for several decades. It can be found in major cities, with varying degrees of development in each. What we are currently witnessing is the expansion of criminal organizations across different slums and working-class neighborhoods: greater presence, greater territorial control, and business expansion.

Criminal gangs have taken advantage of the territorial vacuum generated by the reduction of public policies aimed at social containment and poverty alleviation, while benefiting from the state's attacks on different types of neighborhood organizations.

Unlike other Latin American experiences, where the organized strength of the people lies mainly in peasant or environmental structures, in Argentina, grassroots organization has a strong presence in large urban centers, particularly in the lowest-income neighborhoods with the highest population density. Neighborhood organizing experiences have been developing there for more than 20 years: soup kitchens and community health centers, neighborhood soccer clubs, cultural centers, retirement centers, community gardens, primary, secondary, and tertiary education centers, women's shelters, and addiction treatment centers. It is a network of neighborhood organization, gathering, and action. These experiences are now threatened and undermined by the policies promoted by Javier Milei's libertarian government. This space is slowly being lost, along with its social role, leaving drug trafficking free to expand its territory and influence.

In an Argentina where food is becoming more and more expensive and around 20 million people are below the poverty line (according to official statistics), the State is deliberately absent. It persecutes community social organizations, resulting in an open path for drug trafficking to assume the role of social actor in the neighborhoods, in a mix of violence and generation of consensus for its presence and advance.

In an increasingly dire economic situation, it is drug trafficking who offers desperate families a way out: job opportunities within the neighborhoods in barbershops, bakeries, bars, food stores, which serve as fronts for drug sales, renting rooms or houses for dispatching, payment for distribution or fractioning, loan granting, payments for street and alley surveillance, as well as the recruitment of young people for the armed defense of their territories. The territorial advance implies greater control over the daily dynamics of each neighborhood, controlling essential resources (e.g. gas distribution), continuing to run a number of soup kitchens that were forced to close due to the national government's failure to distribute food, and creating corridors and “liberated” zones where even the security forces are not allowed to enter. On the other side of the coin, a narrative is being built, a cultural battle, as President Milei himself calls it, where individuality is emphasized over collective work, demonizing the latter to the point of prosecuting urban social organizations.

The dispute over public space also has a violent side. Families are threatened and displaced. Drug trafficking advances by distributing a small portion of the money it obtains, but mainly through force, intimidation, and violence. Several social organizations have reported being victims of evictions from community spaces by drug traffickers using armed force. In some cases, these spaces have been reclaimed by the community itself, supporting the social work of the organizations. A neighborhood “code” that has recently been broken, as in previous years, those who work selflessly for their communities were never attacked.

Young people and families living in poverty find themselves abandoned by the state in the face of cutbacks to social programs: employment programs have been shut down, programs to encourage education, such as PROGRESAR, have been gutted, with a 60% reduction in their budget, salaries for community work have been cut by 50% (from an average of US$400 to US$200), community work crews have been disbanded, and public works have been halted (sewers, drinking water network, street urbanization, construction of low-income housing). In relative terms, spending on young people and the elderly was reduced by 40% from 2023 to 2024, according to the Ministry of Economy itself. These austerity policies have reached the extreme of no food distribution to soup kitchens nationwide.

 The attempt to close the soup kitchens is an attack on neighborhood and community organization. It is in these soup kitchens that families, mainly women, meet, articulate, and help one another. It is more than just a dining room for daily food distribution; it is also about community ties, detecting cases of gender violence, addressing the need and the promotion of school support for children, and providing comprehensive support and treatment for addiction. They are among the few places where the voices of the less fortunate are heard, where a helping hand is always available. Closing a soup kitchen means severing this set of community ties and actions. The conditions are given, drug traffickers are aware of this, and they act accordingly.

Criminal gangs take advantage of these policies promoted by the national government to advance territorially in the face of the fragility to which millions of families are exposed. At the same time, their expansion is also taking place in the financial sphere, with diversification of businesses in response to the opportunities generated by the money laundering that has been promoted over the last two years. Investments in real estate, in the construction industry, purchase of corporate shares, and even the public management of Argentine soccer clubs.

This advance of criminal gangs is slowed only by the community action and awareness cultivated in the heart of the Argentine slums, where poverty strikes hardest, where temptations knock at the doors, where weapons and drugs fall into the hands of more and more young people, and where the strength of solidarity is also expressed.

Drug trafficking advances, solidarity resists, the dispute continues.

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