THE THIN RED LINE

From Drug Cartels to Criminal Organizations. The Changing Landscape in Rosario Echoes What Happened in Sicily.

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Organized crime is a social phenomenon that evolves alongside and through the hundreds of other social phenomena that unfold over the course of history. In the 21st century, organized crime has become one of the most pressing challenges facing global society. The concern generated by this phenomenon is reflected in the various treaties, protocols, and laws promoted by international organizations and only partially implemented by governments.

One of the first United Nations conventions of this century was the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (2000), known as the Palermo Protocol, named after the city where the convention took place—home to the oldest known mafia organization in history: Cosa Nostra. The same Cosa Nostra that recently lost its last major boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, after more than 30 years as a fugitive.

Organized crime took its first major leap in the 1970s, spurred by the liberalization of financial systems, unrestricted capital flows, a dramatic rise in inequality, the monocultural globalization of consumerist "well-being," and the growing dominance of hedonism as a life principle. These processes not only reshaped organized crime—they were also shaped by it.

Cosa Nostra has over a century of history. Its most expansive growth came when the international drug market flourished in the United States and Western Europe, especially after the closure of opium refineries run by the Corsican mafia. Because of preexisting ties with opium suppliers in the Middle East, the wholesale heroin trade came under the control of Cosa Nostra, which supplied nearly all of the heroin consumed in those regions.

The profits the Sicilian mafia earned from heroin trafficking were invested primarily in two sectors: construction and finance. In construction, Cosa Nostra secured government permits to build wherever it pleased in Palermo. In finance, the mafia deepened existing ties with banks, which not only earned considerable profits by laundering mafia money but also managed to "rescue" dismal balance sheets that would have otherwise led to bankruptcy.

The Sicilian political class—and parts of the national government—benefited economically from mafia money and also gained a volatile but useful political ally. Due to historically low civic trust in the national government among Southern Italians, political participation was weak. In that vacuum, Cosa Nostra’s clientelist networks became an appealing voting bloc for political parties during elections. But this unstable alliance between the mafia and parts of the state fractured when a group of politicians, judges, journalists, and honest police officers chose to confront Cosa Nostra head-on.

A special group of judges and prosecutors—known as the famous antimafia pool—conducted a series of investigations that, in 1987, resulted in the conviction of nearly three hundred mafiosi, including the top leaders of the organization. The ruling shattered the pact between the mafia and corrupt state officials. Prior to the ruling, violence levels were high but tolerable—for the mafia, for complicit officials, and even for segments of public opinion.

The informal agreement between state actors and the mafia stipulated that the former would ensure no state institution interfered with Cosa Nostra’s criminal operations, while the latter would provide money, votes, and "special solutions" to problems requiring action outside the rule of law. The mafia understood the power of state actors was superior, and that their “suggestions”—delivered in commanding tones—had to be obeyed. For example: whether or not an assassination could be carried out, or whether or not they could participate in a public tender.

But Cosa Nostra’s growing involvement in Sicily’s economy and culture led its leaders to target the very officials who were once their allies. Their objective: to punish them and, more importantly, to replace them with new officials capable of forging and sustaining a new pact.

ARGENTINA AND THE MARKET

In Argentina, drug processing laboratories—both synthetic and plant-based—have been detected for several years now. However, Argentina is part of a global phenomenon that is constantly evolving.

UNODC and other multiregional organizations have reported the discovery of drug production labs—both for cocaine and synthetic substances—in Eastern Europe, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. These changes are the result of the economic ingenuity of criminal organizations and their use of technological advancements. Creativity and technology have dismantled long-held notions about producer and consumer countries.

In the international drug trade, Argentina remains predominantly a transit country for cocaine produced in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia en route to Europe and Asia. The administrative and operational weakness of governmental institutions, the extensive and interconnected waterways the country shares with its neighbors -which ease the movement of goods-, and a national currency weakened against the US dollar have turned parts of the country into significant transshipment hubs within the global cocaine market. But Argentina’s role as a transit country does not exclude the presence of a domestic drug market.

Domestic drug markets everywhere depend on the overall economic development of a country and its relationships with others. Like any economic sector, both legal and illegal markets rise and fall with the broader economy. Argentina’s market—both formal and informal—is small, which is why the internal criminal market has never been particularly attractive to major international criminal organizations.

Drug prices in Latin America are set in US dollars. While all international transactions—from production to wholesale—are conducted in dollars, retail sales are carried out in local currencies.

When comparing Argentina’s drug market with those of Brazil and Mexico, it becomes clear that Argentina’s is significantly smaller—not only in terms of current and potential consumers, but also in terms of profit margins.

The weakness of the Argentine peso against the US dollar not only reduces potential profits for criminal groups but also forces them to cut product quality in order to maintain previous margins. This was evident in the “Puerta 8 tragedy,” when cocaine was mixed with a synthetic opioid to increase profits.

Even though Argentina’s market is small and periodically devalued, it remains attractive to drug dealers operating in the country's major urban centers. For a long time, cocaine entered the country from Bolivia through border provinces. But with the qualitative and quantitative growth of trafficking organizations from Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay, cocaine transit shifted eastward and began to follow the Paraná River, transforming it into a long, winding white line.

The cities of Santa Fe and Rosario are, symbolically, economically, and demographically, the dual capitals of the province of Santa Fe—the northern official capital and the southern popular one. Together, they are home to nearly 1.5 million people and host the province’s most important political, economic, and judicial institutions. Both cities lie along extensive, interconnected rivers that carry all kinds of goods. Between them, 28 public and private ports are located, handling most of the province's agro-industrial profits.

Based on investigations and court rulings, up until early 2013, retail drug trafficking organizations in the Rosario area operated under a pact of coexistence and development with segments of the provincial police, political establishment, and judiciary—as well as among themselves.

The Santa Fe police acted as enforcers of that pact. Their role was to keep criminal activity within “acceptable” limits. But unlike in Italy—where organized crime also influenced decision-making—in Rosario, it was mainly politicians, judges, and businesspeople linked to crime who dictated terms. All of this began to collapse with the arrest of the then-chief of the Santa Fe police. The agreements began to unravel.

Faced with judicial, media, and criminal fallout, the political response involved rapidly rotating officials in the top ranks of the Santa Fe police and the Security Ministry. This instability—both internal and external—had serious consequences: honest citizens and public servants were left unprotected, while criminal organizations began to operate with greater autonomy, becoming fragmented and increasingly willing to challenge the very state that once protected them.

The subordinates of the deposed police chief were also corrupt and eventually removed. Each drug trafficking group now saw itself as financially and militarily capable of wiping out its competitors in a market that expanded slowly but devalued rapidly, like a cracked dam.

The murders that occurred in Rosario due to open clashes between criminal groups brought national media attention to a series of surnames and nicknames that came to represent, in the public imagination, a vast and sophisticated criminal network. Many of those names allegedly managed to bypass the complex regulations that govern currency exchanges, real estate, vehicles, boats, businesses, investments, and millions in drug money—often without basic education or any formal knowledge of financial or legal systems.

Meanwhile, the names of the police officers, judges, prosecutors, public officials, lawyers, businessmen, and accountants who were also charged in these same investigations—and who did possess the academic and technical know-how—received far less attention.

Today in Rosario—just as occurred in cities like Córdoba and Tucumán in 2013—criminal organizations are trying to forge a new pact, one based on bloodshed, bullets, and public intimidation, especially targeting state institutions. Finding corrupt officials is not a challenge; the real need is for those officials to have enough power to regulate the entire criminal ecosystem. The current situation in Greater Rosario presents a real opportunity to implement short-, medium-, and long-term measures to prevent changes that may become irreversible.

It is essential to prevent drug trafficking networks from becoming complex criminal organizations with the power to infiltrate broader areas of society. While the conditions in Rosario mirror those in other urban regions of Argentina, the breakdown of the previous pact offers a chance to stop the re-establishment of a system of coexistence, control, and development between criminal organizations and corrupt officials.

In Italy, Cosa Nostra never aimed to fully replace or destroy the state. Criminal organizations are parasitic—they need a living host to survive. Through public intimidation -murders and threats-, the Sicilian mafia sought more sophisticated channels of dialogue with corrupt and fearful state officials. When their previous allies lost institutional power, the mafia responded with violence to force the formation of a new pact—one in which they handled the business, and the state ensured enforcement.

In Sicily, the fight against organized crime remains ongoing. It took the Italian state over 30 years to capture the last free perpetrator of the major massacres. It was work and memory that sustained the commitment and determination of the public servants and citizens involved in the fight.

Officials and citizens worked together to pass laws and mechanisms to confiscate criminal assets, to legislate special prison regimes preventing mafiosi from continuing to operate from behind bars, and to create institutions solely dedicated to fighting organized crime.

Perhaps the work, the struggle, and the memory on the other side of the Atlantic may serve as a guide to confront a social phenomenon that, in Argentina, is still in its embryonic stage.

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