Patricia Bullrich says crackdown on drug gangs is prospering

Cocaine exports to Europe have been obstructed, she states

Murders in Rosario center lowest in a minimum of 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 country that have actually driven rising violence and resulted in a spike in cocaine deliveries to Europe. She states she is succeeding.

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

Bullrich, in an uncommon interview with worldwide media, informed Reuters the year-old government of libertarian President Javier Milei was breaking up the gangs and obstructing deliveries from making their method to end markets, including to Europe, where the cocaine market has broadened recently.

“We’ve had record cocaine seizures which’s produced fantastic respect for us regionally and also in Europe, due to the fact that (in 2024) no shipment from Argentina was spotted in Europe,” she said at her office in Buenos Aires, including that “obviously there might be some shipments that were unnoticed.”

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

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

In Rosario, bbarlock.com according to local government figures, murders dropped to 90 last year - the most affordable in a minimum of the last decade and down from almost 300 in 2022 and 261 in 2023, the year before Milei and Bullrich took workplace.

“We decided to hit hard against the gangs,” Bullrich said, adding that cooperation in between the nationwide and local governments in Rosario had actually been a key factor, as well as the courts taking a tougher line. The government has also targeted drug kingpins already behind bars.

“We eliminated the power that the drug employers had in the jails, who utilized the jails to keep their drug crime rings going. We separated them,” she said.

Andrei Serbin Pont, an Argentine security and intelligence expert and president of regional think tank CRIES, credited an emphasis on gathering intelligence with aiding the crime decrease.

“There was a collective security effort by the nationwide government to focus on Rosario, with a concentrate on criminal intelligence rather than just having more authorities on the streets, which is a much more practical technique,” he said.

Bullrich has sent out a costs to congress to establish a brand-new anti-mafia law, akin to U.S. RICO legislation, to take down criminal networks, and said she has actually likewise gained from security forces in Britain and Italy.

In 2015, she hosted El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, sciencewiki.science and visited his mega-prison that holds tens of thousands of gang members in difficult conditions that have drawn praise from hardline law-and-order political leaders and criticism from rights groups. Photos have revealed rows of tattooed and topless inmates kneeling with their hands behind the heads.

“In our case, our system has actually been a bit, let’s state, less severe. But when we need to be difficult, we are hard,” said Bullrich.

TOUGHER BORDERS

Bullrich informed Reuters she was enhancing border controls to stop drug gangs, planning check outs to cocaine-growing areas in Peru, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile