Rosario, a laboratory for the entry of organized crime in Argentina?

By Sabina Frederic, Mariana Galvani, and Alina Ríos

English translation by Yenni Castro (Valestra Editorial)

During the first months of 2023, the city of Rosario, province of Santa Fe, was the stage for a series of violent events, some of them lethal and others described as "mafia-like", which were amplified by the national and international press, making it the place where "organized crime" had settled. The event that gave it greater international visibility was undoubtedly the shooting that took place in front of the supermarket owned by Lionel Messi's in-laws.  But Rosario is not a new scenario of violence, quite the contrary, since 2017 the homicide rate has been rising, following the opposite trend that Argentina has been reporting since 2014. According to the most recent official data, the 2021 homicide rate reported 4.6 intentional homicides per 100,000 people in the whole country, 4.7 for the Province of Buenos Aires, where Argentina's most densely populated metropolitan region is located, and 10.1 for the Province of Santa Fe. Preliminary data from 2022 from the province of Buenos Aires indicate a new decrease in that region, while those in Santa Fe increase.

It is evident that the illegal drug market is immensely larger in the metropolitan region of Buenos Aires (including the city of Buenos Aires) than in Rosario. There are more consumers, more distribution venues, and an articulated network of agents and groups of different scales that deal with money laundering, wholesale transport logistics, fractioning, retail trade, and arrangements with state authorities, among other issues. However, we tend to make the mistake of thinking that crime is "organized" in Rosario and not in Buenos Aires, because there it is associated with extreme violence, but not in the latter city. That is to say that the way in which the categories of "organized crime" or "narco" are generally used leads to eluding the analysis of the forms of criminal organization that include mechanisms for regulating violence and/or that produce less lethal violence. We believe that it is necessary to understand the relationship between "organized crime" and "violence" as a more complex phenomenon in order to observe and understand the mechanisms used by criminal organizations to manage the use of violence and even to ensure its functionality regarding the development of the illegal business.

In every urban center in Argentina, there are organizations of people who trade in the illegal drug market. But, judging by the objective data of declining homicide rates in Argentina's largest urban centers, violent forms of criminal organization have been more encapsulated in the city of Rosario since 2014. It is worth asking, then, what are the conditions that prevent the city of Rosario from managing the illegal drug business with lower lethality rates.

The State, a regulatory agent

Among the variables that explain Rosario's particularity is undoubtedly the role of the State, embodied in laws and agents that apply or negotiate its application. The organization of the illegal drug trade does not "penetrate" society and state institutions as something that comes from "outside". It emerges as an effect of regular and common exchanges. So, it is not "the absence of the State" or the "weakness of its institutions" which causes the "advance of drug trafficking crime". On the contrary, the State intervenes in the conditions of possibility of any illegal market and is the one that imposes the illicit nature of certain practices and merchandise.

The crime of illegal drug trafficking in Argentina was established as an offense by law in 1989, in accordance with a global prohibitionist policy that, in the name of health care, criminally prosecutes the consumption and trafficking of certain narcotics and promotes treatment through abstinence. In the name of health care, criminals are created, and consumers are persecuted. The State defines which drugs are illegal and which can be bought in a pharmacy.

Furthermore, notes should be taken on the operation of State devices that enable or encourage violence among those who traffic illegalized merchandise and towards those who are not part of the business. The State negotiates its intervention through various agents that produce a discretionary administration of illegalized practices. The state actors involved range from police officers deployed in the territory to judges, as well as political officials. Some, by omission and others by action, promote mechanisms that combine formal and informal regulation. Thus, the forms of governance, as Benjamin Lessing explains in Conceptualizing criminal governance (Perspectives on Politics.19(3), 854-873, 2021) of criminal organizations vary according to the agreements -more or less extortive- that they make with state actors. It also varies the violence they use to support themselves and move forward.

Likewise, and conversely, one should not think that a strong state control intervention will necessarily result in an immediate drop in violence levels. In 2020, the authorities of the federal forces estimated that the increase in homicides in Rosario could be the effect of the intervention of federal forces when the leaders of the most important groups were arrested in 2014. This would have provoked fierce clashes between potential successors, leading to increase in homicides.

The identity matter

Understanding this encapsulation of violence in Rosario also requires the introduction of forms of identity reaffirmation through "narco" self-perception and the application of lethal violence among young men, as Eugenia Cozzi shows in De ladrones a Narcos. Violencias, delitos y búsquedas de reconocimiento (Teseo, Buenos Aires, 2022). It is also necessary to relativize the view that there are only two gangs (“Los Monos/Cantero” and “Los Alvarado”) that fight for controlling the market while in prison, leading to all the shootings in Rosario. The competition for the market of illegal drug sales and illegal arms trafficking, which generates violence, is much more atomized.

Rosario lacks a police force with the authority to regulate crime. There are indications suggesting that its successive reforms weakened its authority, as did the judicial reform that introduced the accusatory system and with it, the body called the Public Prosecutor's Office. These indications point to the rupture of the former - and undoubtedly spurious - ties with the judicial branch. In other words, the pseudo-legal criminal prosecution scheme that once allowed to control illicit markets by trafficking impunity collapsed, and today there is a profound disarticulation and lack of coordination, which lacks strategies aimed at reducing lethal violence.

We understand that in the city of Rosario the increase in violence may not be an expression of an increase in the magnitude of the crime of "drug trafficking". Rather, it is an expression of a crisis in the forms of governance, that is to say, in the formal and informal mechanisms for regulating violence. To reverse this situation, it is necessary to identify how state agencies participate in the configuration of these logics of criminal activity, and with political creativity design new forms of intervention. We know the negative effects of the prohibitionist perspective. Perhaps we should be encouraged to re-discuss what are the social harms we want to prevent, what are the practices that must be avoided, and what are the ways to achieve that, even beyond legal prohibition.

About the Authors

Sabina Frederic holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She is an Independent Researcher at CONICET and a Professor at the National University of Quilmes. She was the Minister of Security of the Argentine Nation (2019-2021) and is the president of the En Foco Research Institute on Policies on Crime, Security, and Violence.

Mariana Galvani holds a Ph.D.in Social Sciences (UBA) and is a researcher at the Gino Germani Institute, Faculty of Social Sciences, UBA. She was the National Director of the Ministry of Security during the administration of Sabina Frederic (2019-2021). She is a professor at several universities: UBA, UNLA and IUPFA; and the Executive Director of the En Foco Research Institute on Policies on Crime, Security, and Violence.

Alina Ríos holds a Ph.D.in Social Sciences. She is a researcher at CONICET at the Gino Germani Research Institute, UBA. Currently, she is a professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, UBA; and a member of the En Foco Research Institute on Policies on Crime, Security, and Violence.

Excerpts from this article were previously published in El Diplo, April 2023. https://www.eldiplo.org/286-ganara-china-la-batalla-tecnologica/el-estado-en-el-mercado-de-drogas-ilegalizadas/

Join our newsletter

This article is included in the 13th edition of our newsletter. To receive the next issue in your email, click here.