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Patricia Bullrich states crackdown on drug gangs is prospering

Cocaine exports to Europe have actually been blocked, she says

Murders in Rosario hub least expensive in at least a decade

By Lucinda Elliott

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 7 (Reuters) - Patricia Bullrich, Argentina's security minister, is on an objective to stamp out drug gangs in the South American country that have actually driven rising violence and caused a spike in cocaine shipments to Europe. She states she is succeeding.

Argentina has actually grown in importance as a transit center for cocaine as production from Peru and Bolivia has actually streamed down key waterways and classifieds.ocala-news.com out through river ports such as that of Rosario, Lionel Messi's hometown. Gang-related murders increased in tandem.

Bullrich, in an unusual interview with global 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 actually expanded over the last few years.

"We've had record cocaine seizures and that's created excellent respect for us regionally and likewise in Europe, because (in 2024) no delivery from Argentina was spotted in Europe," she said at her office in Buenos Aires, including that "naturally there might be some deliveries that were undetected."

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

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

In Rosario, according to local government figures, murders dropped to 90 in 2015 - the most affordable in a minimum of the last years and down from nearly 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, including that cooperation between the nationwide and local governments in Rosario had been a crucial element, clashofcryptos.trade along with the courts taking a harder line. The federal government has also targeted drug kingpins currently behind bars.

"We eliminated the power that the drug managers had in the jails, who utilized the jails to keep their drug criminal activity rings going. We separated them," she said.

Andrei Serbin Pont, an Argentine security and intelligence specialist and president of local think tank CRIES, credited a focus on gathering intelligence with aiding the criminal activity reduction.

"There was a collective security effort by the nationwide government to prioritize Rosario, with a concentrate on criminal intelligence rather than just having more cops on the streets, which is a much more feasible strategy," he said.

Bullrich has actually sent out an expense to congress to develop a new anti-mafia law, code.snapstream.com similar to U.S. RICO legislation, to take down criminal networks, and said she has 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 countless gang members in hard conditions that have drawn praise from hardline law-and-order political leaders and criticism from rights groups. Photos have actually shown rows of tattooed and topless prisoners kneeling with their hands behind the heads.

"In our case, our system has been a bit, let's say, less severe. But when we need to be hard, we are tough," said Bullrich.

TOUGHER BORDERS

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

Bullrich said the border with Bolivia was being reinforced, including by constructing a brief stretch of wall in northern Salta province. Argentina is also doing more tracking of entry points with Brazil where there had been a "absence of control recently," she said.

"We're going to start a program, a strategy, we're taking soldiers to the border area with Brazil," she said.

Authorities in Bolivia and Brazil did not instantly react to a for remark. Brazil's Minister of Justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, recently invited the concept of reinforcing border security in an action 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 however assisted stabilize the country.

The 2 are previous competitors. During the election race, Milei identified her a leftist "bomb-thrower" - a reference to her time with the youth wing of the Peronist movement - to which Bullrich had shot back that the former economic expert was mentally unstable.

Bullrich said the differences were now behind them and she and library.kemu.ac.ke her bloc were helping him as he seeks to gain seats in legal mid-term elections set for 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; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Rosalba O'Brien)