In Messi’s hometown, also Argentina’s most violent city, the murder rate has mysteriously dropped

ROSARIO, Sept. 27 — Argentina’s most violent city, Rosario — best known as the birthplace of soccer star Lionel Messi — has seen a dramatic, and some say suspicious, drop in homicides in recent months.

Authorities boast that the change is the result of a crackdown on drug gangs, both on the streets and in prisons.

However, some believe that a tacit pact between the government and criminal groups may explain the turnaround.

Rosario has a major port on South America’s second longest river after the Amazon – the Parana – making it a hotspot for drug trafficking from Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay to Europe and Asia.

The city, Argentina’s third largest, has long had a murder rate about five times the national average, with up to 260 murders a year.

Even the families of famous residents like Messi or fellow footballer Angel Di Maria have received violent threats or attacks from criminal organizations.

But everything seems to have changed since late 2023, when President Javier Milei took office and promised zero tolerance for crime.

At the same time, the province of Santa Fe, where Rosario is located, had a new governor, Maximiliano Pullaro.

Pullaro immediately imposed harsher conditions on prisoners, especially gang bosses, and published photographs of prison raids and subjugated prisoners.

His actions earned him some 30 death threats in the first months of his term and sparked resistance from gangs, who killed four civilians in March.

Milei then sent federal police and troops to Rosario.

‘Tacit agreement’

According to a report from the Ministry of National Security, the number of homicides in Rosario fell by 62 percent between January and August compared to the same period last year.

“We have the lowest homicide rate in 17 years in Rosario,” said Security Minister Patricia Bullrich.

“We said we were going to bring order to the prisons and order to the streets. And that is what we did,” added Pullaro, who is accused of copying popular President Nayib Bukele’s brutal tactics to expose gangs.

Still, experts are skeptical that these measures alone have led to the rapid decline in homicide rates.

Former Santa Fe Security Minister Marcelo Sain, who also has a doctorate in social sciences, believes there was “an agreement” between the state and the criminal world in which “the killing of people stopped.”

“There is no other explanation, because there is no other policy in the world that reduces the murder rate so much,” he added.

Ariel Larroude, director of the Criminal Policy Observatory at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), said the decline in violence was “striking” because “drug consumption continues to grow.”

“This may be the result of an exceptional success in criminal justice policy” based on “a reorganization” of the police and prisons, he said.

But it is also possible that this involves a “tacit deal with the gangs to reduce violence, while (the government) turns a blind eye to drug sales.”

Larroude said this could only mean police ceasing control of certain street corners or neighborhoods.

On the ground, feelings are mixed.

“We see more police, but everything remains the same,” said Sandra Arce, a 46-year-old mother who runs a soup kitchen in the Boca neighborhood

“On the streets the situation remains the same: they rob you, they take things from you, they shoot,” she added.

However, she’s glad that a local drug-selling hotspot, across the street from her soup kitchen, recently disappeared. —AFP