Patricia Bullrich says crackdown on drug gangs is succeeding

Cocaine exports to Europe have been obstructed, she states

Murders in Rosario center most affordable in at least a years

By Lucinda Elliott

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 7 (Reuters) - Patricia Bullrich, Argentina’s security minister, is on a mission to stamp out drug gangs in the South American nation that have driven increasing violence and led to a spike in cocaine shipments to Europe. She says she is prospering.

Argentina has actually grown in value as a transit hub for cocaine as production from Peru and Bolivia has streamed down essential waterways and out through river ports such as that of Rosario, Lionel Messi’s hometown. Gang-related murders increased in tandem.

Bullrich, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr in an unusual interview with worldwide media, informed Reuters the year-old federal government of libertarian President Javier Milei was breaking up the gangs and obstructing shipments from making their way to end markets, including to Europe, where the cocaine market has broadened in current years.

“We have actually had record cocaine seizures which’s produced terrific regard for us regionally and also in Europe, because (in 2024) no delivery from Argentina was spotted in Europe,” she said at her office in Buenos Aires, adding that “of course there may be some shipments that were undetected.”

The security ministry validated that cocaine was not found in any shipments that crossed the South Atlantic from Argentina to a major European port in 2024. Reuters was unable to separately confirm that.

Once a competitor to Milei as the governmental candidate for the main conservative bloc, Bullrich is now leading the crackdown on crime, tightening borders with Brazil and Bolivia, privatizing some jails and pipewiki.org using expert system to track gangs.

In Rosario, asteroidsathome.net according to city government figures, murders dropped to 90 last year - the least expensive in at least the last years and down from almost 300 in 2022 and 261 in 2023, the year before Milei and Bullrich took workplace.

“We chose to hit hard against the gangs,” Bullrich said, adding that cooperation in between the national and local governments in Rosario had actually been a key element, in addition to the courts taking a harder line. The federal government has actually also targeted drug kingpins currently behind bars.

“We removed the power that the drug managers had in the jails, who utilized the jails to keep their drug criminal activity rings going. We isolated them,” she said.

Andrei Serbin Pont, an Argentine security and intelligence expert and president of local think tank CRIES, credited an emphasis on event intelligence with aiding the crime reduction.

“There was a collective security effort by the nationwide government to focus on Rosario, with a focus on criminal intelligence instead of just having more cops on the streets, which is a much more feasible technique,” he said.

Bullrich has sent out an expense to congress to develop a brand-new anti-mafia law, comparable to U.S. RICO legislation, to take down criminal networks, and said she has actually also gained from security forces in Britain and [forum.kepri.bawaslu.go.id](https://forum.kepri.bawaslu.go.id/index.php?action=profile