The live torture and murder of three women in the hands of a drug gang shaken Argentina and highlighted the country's vulnerability to extreme violence fueled by drugs, although such events are likely to remain rare.
Police discovered The bodies of two women and a teenager buried in a garden in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, Florencio Varela, on September 24. The victims, Brenda del Castillo, Morena Verdi and Lara Guérrez, had been allocated in a van five days earlier under the pretext of attending a party before being launched by members of a drug gang, according to the local company.
Gang members tortured young women, removing their nails and hitting them with frank instruments before killing them, revealed an autopsy. The murders were filmed and shared on social networks with a private audience of 45 people, according to the provincial Minister of Provincial Security of Buenos Aires, Javier Alonso.
During the broadcast, a gang member said: “This is what happens when you steal the drug,” Alonso told local media.
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During the initial raids, the security forces arrested four people, two captured while trying to rub the blood stains on the ground and the walls of the house where the women were buried. Investigators believe that the graves were dug before the victims arrived, which suggests that the murders were planned and that the vehicle that transported the victims used a false digital plate to obscure the efforts of the police.
The brutality of the murders triggered indignation in the country and highlighted the long -term class and gender problems. The Ministry of Women and the Diversity of Buenos Aires describe Crime as “the most extreme expression of sexist violence” and human rights groups denounced Murders as an example of “narco-femicide”.
“The feeling is that if they had been men, they would have killed them with bullets,” an organized crime expert in Argentina told Insight Marcelo Bergman. “Here there is an attempt to make them suffer.”
Nine suspects were arrested, including the alleged brain of crime, the 20 -year -old Peruvian national Tony Janzen Valverde, known as “Pequeño J.” He had fled Argentina and was arrested on September 30 in Pucusana, a coastal fisherman and a seaside resort about 60 kilometers south of Lima.
An analysis of insightful crime
Although the distribution murders are rare in Argentina, drug trafficking groups in other Latin American countries have used them to inflict terrorism and impose control.
The targeted assassination of civilians with recorded and shared murders online by criminal groups is a tactic used more frequently in Mexico and Brazil. Criminal groups have regularly disseminated tortures and murders on social networks to send messages to competitors, terrorize populations living in criminal control areas and punish those who have buried rules established by certain criminal organizations.
Sophisticated groups also slow down social media for signs of disloyalty. In September 2024, the members of the Red Command (Comando Vermelho – Resume) Kidnapped, tortured and killed two sisters of a rural hamlet in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. The murders would have been triggered By an Instagram photo on which one of the victims made an apparently harmless gesture claimed by a rival gang. The execution was broadcast to group leaders in a local prison, according to the investigators.
Although the murders of Florencio Varela were extreme in their brutality for Argentina, the first evidence suggests that they were perpetrated by a less sophisticated criminal group, compared to powerful criminal groups in Mexico and Brazil, which are rarely captured in these cases. The police easily followed Pequeño J, for example, because he continued to use his mobile phone while he fled to Argentina in Peru.
“We see new cohorts of criminals who use excessive violence that no longer brings proportion to the objectives they are looking for,” said Esteban Rodríguez Alzueta, researcher at the National University of Quilmes and author of a book on crime for young people in Argentina. “We saw that in Rosario a few years ago, and we now see it in Buenos Aires.”
The 15 -year -old women are committed to sex work “to survive”, said a family member of one of the victims to local media. Investigators believe they have met members of the criminal group led by Pequeño J while frequenting Villa 21-24, one of the largest informal colonies in the province of Buenos Aires, where the gang had its logistics base.
Gustavo Vera, Director of Alameda, a non-profit organization that works with trafficking victims, especially at Villa 21-24, said that a governance vacuum caused by funding reductions had enabled local criminal groups to extend their power in the poorest peripherals of Buenos Aires.
In these fields, drug networks have “become a micro-state that travels the streets, buys medicines for neighbors and pays for funeral … But their favorite prey are young people, especially women and girls, which they capture for prostitution and drug distribution,” said Vera.
Bergman told Insight Crime that even if he did not believe that murders presumed a paradigm shift in drug -fueled violence levels in Argentina, the country's ability to contain such incidents depended on their rarity combined with strong civil society pressure that pushes the authorities to resolve these crimes.
“If we had one per week, we would be near what would happen in Mexico.” Said Bergman, referring to the triple homicide. “At least for the moment, (violence) has not spread.”
The surveys continue and the Argentine police seem determined to take advantage of the strong importance of the case to dissuade other criminal groups from committing similar violence.
“We have to leave a message,” Alonso told local media. “It's very serious, and we resolve it together, no one solves it.”
Featured image: Paula Fabero, Center, the mother of the victim Brenda del Castillo, is grieving with the parents and friends of the two women and a tortured and killed teenager, during a protest rally in Buenos Aires. Credit: Cristina Sille / Reuters
*Digs Muñoz helped make reports for this article.
