A 12-year-old boy became the latest victim of the war between drug gangs that swept Rosario on Sunday. The deceased, identified as Máximo Jerez, was with his cousins when a group of hitmen fired on them from a car, neighbors told the media. Jerez was shot in the chest and the others – two 13-year-olds and a two-year-old baby – were shot and are being taken to hospital. That Monday, a day later, the minor’s wake became a neighborhood town against the suspected drug dealer they blame for the murder. Neighbors threw rocks at the precarious home and held it under siege until police arrived and took away its three occupants: two men and a woman. The mob then looted and vandalized the house in front of the television cameras.
“The presence of children was generally an obstacle or code to avoid these types of attacks, not today. All limits have been crossed,” said the prosecutor on duty, Adrián Spelta, of the attack that took place in the neighborhood of Los Pumitas, north of Rosario. “They had a birthday and the boys bought something in a kiosk. They were all children,” said the victim’s father, Julio Jerez. Investigators suspect the bullets were actually intended for members of the Los Salteños gang, led by Cristian Carlos Villazón. This drug lord, sentenced to 15 years in prison for triple murder, had his home on the block where the shooting took place and a few yards from the building, which neighbors demolished on Monday because it was thought to be a bunker, ie , a drug sales outlet
Neighbors in the Los Pumitas neighborhood remove the home of suspected drug dealer Rodrigo Abd (AP)
A murder a day
Violence is out of control in Rosario. There have been 63 murders so far this year, nearly one a day. Also in the early hours of Sunday, 15 shots were fired at the facade of a school in the south of the city, and inside the drug dealers left a mafia message: “Chuki Moneda. Brandon and Fernando Morel. Stop killing guinea pigs [policías] and women. We’re going to war. The mafia”. As in the attack on Lionel Messi’s in-laws’ supermarket last week, the school seems to have been used to reinforce the message.
The lack of government response to the encroachment of drug-related crime is unworthy of Rosario’s population, particularly in the city’s slums where most homicides are concentrated. That Monday afternoon, the residents of the Los Pumitas neighborhood who had gathered at the wake decided to seek justice themselves. They began throwing rocks and other objects at the suspected drug dealer’s home. The man they were looking for appeared on the terrace armed with a pistol, but a rock hit him in the back and he ran inside with his wife and son for cover.
“We have lived here for 30 years. My kids were born in the neighborhood, grew up in the neighborhood, and that never happened. How many dead will we still live? We’re scared, we’re scared to go out, now we have to do it ourselves,” one of the neighbors told Todo Noticias.
“We can’t make a living locking our kids at home at 7 p.m. And this crap is coming, which is useless, we all have to get it out,” added another neighbor on the same channel, referring to the first police officers who had just entered the neighborhood.
A group of riot police protect a man accused of drug trafficking in the Rosario neighborhood of Los Pumitas. Rodrigo Abd (AP)
Neighbors were drilling holes in the wall with cement mortar when agents arrived, first from the provincial police and then from the special forces. He entered the house and took the alleged perpetrator and his family with him. “Don’t let go, uh, don’t let go,” a neighbor yelled at police officers, who put the building’s three occupants into a squad car. To keep the crowd away, officers fired rubber bullets, injuring several including Julio Jerez, the murdered boy’s father.
When the police retreated from the neighborhood, the neighbors ransacked the house. They took away the refrigerator, air conditioner, toilet, fans, closet, toys, water tank, doors and windows. When the looting was over, they set the house on fire and did the same in two other suspected drug bunkers without the agents stopping them.
The attack on Messi’s father-in-law José Rocuzzo’s supermarket last week has exposed the intensification of clashes between criminal gangs in Rosario and its periphery for control of the territory. The experts warn of a lack of police officers trained to fight drug trafficking networks, budgets for security forces, and also prosecutors and judges to identify and convict the perpetrators of the increasingly frequent shootings. A neighborhood riot in front of the cameras today shows the anger of a society at the mercy of this violence.
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