They destroy houses of alleged drug traffickers after the death of a child in a shooting in Argentina.
Neighbors of the humble Los Pumitas neighborhood, in the Argentine city of Rosario, looted and destroyed the homes of suspected drug traffickers on Monday in reaction to the death of a child in the middle of a shooting over the weekend.
Source: AFP
The looting of the precarious houses occurred after the neighbors tried to attack its occupants those they held responsible for the child’s death.
The people were rescued by the police, who intervened at first to protect their lives.
Rosario, 310 km north of Buenos Aires, the most violent city in the country, It made headlines last week when two unknown assailants attacked the supermarket owned by the in-laws of star Lionel Messi and left a threatening note that mentioned the world champion. The origin and motive of the attack could not yet be determined.
Last Saturday night, Máximo Geres, 11, was playing with three friends a few meters from a kiosk where drugs were sold when four people passed by in a vehicle and opened fire on them. The child died and a 13-year-old teenager was shot in the chest, reported prosecutor Adrián Spelta, who is investigating the case.
“All limits have been crossed,” Spelta told Radio 2 in Rosario. According to the prosecutor, “there is a territorial bid between a gang that has been in that area for a long time and another that is not from the area, for the sale of narcotics. In those attacks between them, four boys were playing near the main target and one died,” he added.
It may interest: Prosecutor’s Office summons the president of Peru in investigation for deaths in protests
Then during a raid on a house where they would have hidden, an old FMK machine gun with a silencer and a 9 mm pistol were seized, in addition to a blood-stained motorcycle, which he presumes would have been left by the attackers, the prosecutor said. This Monday two women and two men were detained, he added.
Fury and indignation broke out this Monday in the poor neighborhood where the boy lived with his family. Numerous neighbors with their faces covered and armed with sticks forced their way into the house of an alleged drug trafficker. They looted it and destroyed it with a hammer, according to television images. Then they went to another house from which they stole all the belongings and tried to set it on fire, for which the police and firefighters intervened.
“This is a demonstration of social weariness. Here we have the death of a little boy, who was shot to death,” admitted Claudio Brilloni, Minister of Security of the province of Santa Fe, who accompanied the police operation in the Rosario neighborhood. In statements to the press, he stated that the violence “is exacerbated by the accessibility that drug gangs have to firearms.”
Also read: They report a new shooting in Asunción: they are looking for those involved
According to Brilloni, Rosario, the largest Argentine agro-export port, “It has characteristics that make it a desired place for drug criminal organizations.”
He affirmed that there coexist “one facet that is large-scale drug trafficking and the other that is the drug dealing business and the confrontations that take place in neighborhoods of social vulnerability.”
In the last two decadesviolence has been increasing strongly in Rosario, which last year had a rate of 22 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, five times higher than the Argentine average, according to official data.
