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Patricia Bullrich states crackdown on drug gangs is succeeding

Cocaine exports to Europe have actually been blocked, she states

Murders in Rosario center most affordable in a minimum of a decade

By Lucinda Elliott

BUENOS AIRES, wiki.snooze-hotelsoftware.de Feb 7 (Reuters) - Patricia Bullrich, Argentina's security minister, is on a mission to stamp out drug gangs in the South American nation that have actually driven rising violence and caused a spike in cocaine deliveries to Europe. She states she is succeeding.

Argentina has grown in value as a transit hub for cocaine as production from Peru and Bolivia has streamed down essential waterways and disgaeawiki.info out through river ports such as that of Rosario, Lionel Messi's hometown. Gang-related murders increased in tandem.

Bullrich, in an unusual interview with worldwide media, informed Reuters the year-old federal government of libertarian President Javier Milei was separating the gangs and obstructing deliveries from making their way to end markets, consisting of to Europe, where the cocaine market has expanded over the last few years.

"We've had record cocaine seizures which's produced terrific respect for us regionally and likewise in Europe, since (in 2024) no delivery from Argentina was detected in Europe," she said at her office in Buenos Aires, adding that "of course there might be some deliveries that were undiscovered."

The security ministry confirmed that cocaine was not discovered in any deliveries that crossed the South Atlantic from Argentina to a significant European port in 2024. Reuters was not able to separately confirm that.

Once a rival to Milei as the presidential candidate for the main conservative bloc, Bullrich is now leading the crackdown on crime, tightening up borders with Brazil and Bolivia, privatizing some jails and utilizing expert system to track gangs.

In Rosario, according to city government figures, murders dropped to 90 in 2015 - the most affordable in a minimum of the last decade and below nearly 300 in 2022 and 261 in 2023, the year before Milei and Bullrich took office.

"We decided to strike hard against the gangs," Bullrich said, including that cooperation between the national and local governments in Rosario had actually been an essential aspect, along with the courts taking a tougher line. The federal government has also targeted drug kingpins already behind bars.

"We took away the power that the drug bosses had in the jails, who used the jails to keep their drug criminal activity rings going. We separated them," she said.

Andrei Serbin Pont, an Argentine security and intelligence specialist and president of local think tank CRIES, credited a focus on gathering intelligence with aiding the criminal offense reduction.

"There was a collective security effort by the nationwide federal government to focus on Rosario, with a focus on criminal intelligence instead of just having more authorities on the streets, which is a a lot more viable method," he said.

Bullrich has sent out a bill to congress to develop a brand-new anti-mafia law, akin to U.S. RICO legislation, to take down criminal networks, and said she has also gained from security forces in Britain and Italy.

Last year, wiki-tb-service.com she hosted El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele, and visited his mega-prison that holds tens of thousands of gang members in hard conditions that have actually drawn praise from hardline law-and-order politicians and criticism from rights groups. Photos have revealed rows of tattooed and partially nude prisoners kneeling with their hands behind the heads.

"In our case, our system has actually been a little bit, let's say, less extreme. But when we have to be hard, we are difficult," said Bullrich.

TOUGHER BORDERS

Bullrich told Reuters she was reinforcing border controls to stop drug gangs, preparing check outs 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 enhanced, including by developing a brief stretch of wall in northern Salta province. Argentina is also doing more tracking of entry points with Brazil where there had actually been a "absence of control recently," she said.

"We're going to start a program, a strategy, we're taking soldiers to the border location with Brazil," she said.

Authorities in Bolivia and Brazil did not right away respond to a request for online-learning-initiative.org comment. Brazil's Minister of Justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, users.atw.hu last week invited the idea of reinforcing border security in a response to the procedures.

Bullrich, a political veteran who has essential center-ground support, said she had actually been won over to the libertarian's broader economic and social reforms beyond his security focus, which have divided Argentines but helped support the nation.

The 2 are former rivals. During the election race, Milei identified her a leftist "bomb-thrower" - a referral to her time with the youth wing of the Peronist movement - to which Bullrich had shot back that the previous financial expert was mentally unsteady.

Bullrich said the distinctions were now behind them and she and her bloc were assisting him as he looks for to gain seats in legal 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)