Patricia Bullrich states crackdown on drug gangs is being successful

Cocaine exports to Europe have actually been blocked, she states

Murders in Rosario hub lowest in at least a years

By Lucinda Elliott

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

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

Bullrich, in a rare interview with global media, told Reuters the year-old government of libertarian President Javier Milei was breaking up the gangs and blocking deliveries from making their method to end markets, consisting of to Europe, where the cocaine market has actually expanded recently.

“We’ve had record cocaine seizures which’s created great respect for us regionally and likewise in Europe, since (in 2024) no shipment from Argentina was spotted in Europe,” she said at her workplace in Buenos Aires, including that “naturally there might be some deliveries that were undetected.”

The security ministry verified that cocaine was not discovered in any shipments that crossed the South Atlantic from Argentina to a major European port in 2024. Reuters was not able to individually validate that.

Once a rival 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 utilizing synthetic intelligence to track gangs.

In Rosario, according to local federal government figures, murders dropped to 90 last year - the lowest 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 between the national and asteroidsathome.net regional federal governments in Rosario had actually been a key element, along with the courts taking a tougher line. The federal government has also targeted drug kingpins already behind bars.

“We eliminated the power that the drug bosses had in the jails, who used the jails to keep their drug criminal activity rings going. We separated them,” she said.

Andrei Serbin Pont, an Argentine security and intelligence professional and president of regional think tank CRIES, credited a focus on event intelligence with aiding the crime decrease.

“There was a concerted security effort by the national federal government to prioritize Rosario, with a concentrate on criminal intelligence rather than simply having more police on the streets, which is a much more feasible technique,” he said.

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

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

“In our case, our system has actually been a little, let’s say, less extreme. But when we have to be difficult, we are difficult,” said Bullrich.

TOUGHER BORDERS

Bullrich informed Reuters she was reinforcing border controls to stop drug gangs, planning sees to cocaine-growing locations in Peru, and improving cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Bullrich said the border with Bolivia was being reinforced, consisting of by constructing a short stretch of wall in northern Salta province. Argentina is likewise doing more monitoring of entry points with Brazil where there had been a “lack of control in the last few years,” she said.

“We’re going to start a program, a strategy, we’re taking troops to the border location with Brazil,” she said.

Authorities in Bolivia and Brazil did not right away react to an ask for forum.altaycoins.com comment. Brazil’s Minister of Justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, recently welcomed the idea of reinforcing border security in a response to the steps.

Bullrich, a political veteran who has brought Milei key center-ground assistance, said she had actually been won over to the libertarian’s wider financial and social reforms beyond his security focus, which have actually divided Argentines but helped stabilize the country.

The two are previous rivals. During the election race, Milei identified her a leftist “bomb-thrower” - a recommendation to her time with the youth wing of the Peronist movement - to which Bullrich had actually shot back that the former economic pundit was emotionally unsteady.

Bullrich said the differences were now behind them and she and her bloc were assisting him as he looks for to in legal mid-term elections set for archmageriseswiki.com later on this year.

“We’re more libertarian than conservative now,” she said.

(Reporting by Lucinda Elliott. Additional reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia and Daniel Ramos in La Paz