By Lucinda Elliott
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) – Patricia Bullrich, Argentina’s security minister, is on a mission to stamp out drug gangs in the South American nation that have driven rising violence and led to a spike in cocaine shipments to Europe. She says she is succeeding.
Argentina has grown in importance as a transit hub for cocaine as production from Peru and Bolivia has flowed down key waterways and out through river ports such as that of Rosario, Lionel Messi’s hometown. Gang-related murders increased in tandem.
Bullrich, in a rare interview with international media, told Reuters the year-old government of libertarian President Javier Milei was breaking up the gangs and blocking shipments from making their way to end markets, including to Europe, where the cocaine market has expanded in recent years.
“We’ve had record cocaine seizures and that’s generated great respect for us regionally and also in Europe, because (in 2024) no shipment from Argentina was detected in Europe,” she said at her office in Buenos Aires, adding that “of course there may be some shipments that were undetected.”
The security ministry confirmed that cocaine was not found in any shipments that crossed the South Atlantic from Argentina to a major European port in 2024. Reuters was unable to independently verify that.
Once a rival to Milei as the presidential candidate for the main conservative bloc, Bullrich is now leading the crackdown on crime, tightening borders with Brazil and Bolivia, privatizing some prisons and using artificial intelligence to track gangs.
In Rosario, according to local government figures, murders dropped to 90 last year – the lowest in at least the last decade and down from nearly 300 in 2022 and 261 in 2023, the year before Milei and Bullrich took office.
“We decided to hit hard against the gangs,” Bullrich said, adding that cooperation between the national and regional governments in Rosario had been a key factor, as well as the courts taking a tougher line. The government has also targeted drug kingpins already behind bars.
“We took away the power that the drug bosses had in the prisons, who used the prisons to keep their drug crime rings going. We isolated them,” she said.
Andrei Serbin Pont, an Argentine security and intelligence specialist and president of regional think tank CRIES, credited an emphasis on gathering intelligence with aiding the crime reduction.
“There was a concerted security effort by the national government to prioritize Rosario, with a focus on criminal intelligence rather than just having more police on the streets, which is a much more viable strategy,” he said.
Bullrich has sent a bill to congress to establish a new anti-mafia law, akin to U.S. RICO legislation, to take down criminal networks, and said she has also learned from security forces in Britain and Italy.
Last year, she hosted El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, and visited his mega-prison that holds tens of thousands of gang members in tough conditions that have drawn praise from hardline law-and-order politicians and criticism from rights groups. Photos have shown rows of tattooed and topless inmates kneeling with their hands behind the heads.
“In our case, our system has been a little, let’s say, less harsh. But when we have to be tough, we are tough,” said Bullrich.
TOUGHER BORDERS
Bullrich told Reuters she was strengthening border controls to stop drug gangs, planning visits to cocaine-growing areas in Peru, and boosting cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Bullrich said the border with Bolivia was being strengthened, including by building a short stretch of wall in northern Salta province. Argentina is also doing more monitoring of entry points with Brazil where there had been a “lack of control in recent years,” she said.
“We’re going to start a program, a plan, we’re taking troops to the border area with Brazil,” she said.
Authorities in Bolivia and Brazil did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Brazil’s Minister of Justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, last week welcomed the idea of strengthening border security in a response to the measures.
Bullrich, a political veteran who has brought Milei key center-ground support, said she had been won over to the libertarian’s broader economic and social reforms beyond his security focus, which have divided Argentines but helped stabilize the country.
The two are former rivals. During the election race, Milei labeled her a leftist “bomb-thrower” – a reference to her time with the youth wing of the Peronist movement – to which Bullrich had shot back that the former economic pundit was emotionally unstable.
Bullrich said the differences were now behind them and she and her bloc were helping him as he seeks to gain seats in legislative mid-term elections set for later this year.
“We’re more libertarian than conservative now,” she said.
(Reporting by Lucinda Elliott. Additional reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia and Daniel Ramos in La Paz; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Rosalba O’Brien)
