Nina Chamorro runs her finger across the montage of photos of neighborhood children tacked to the wall of her community soup kitchen in Villa Itati, a sprawling urban slum on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
“He is dead now. And him. And him,” says the 75-year-old grandmother, her eyes drifting sadly over grinning faces. She points to another photograph. “He was shot by the police last month. That girl disappeared. We have lost so many of our beautiful children. We knew them since they were born. They had their whole lives to live.”
Villa Itati is only a few minutes’ drive from the more upmarket parts of Buenos Aires. Ask most people here to explain the cause of the grisly gallery in Chamorro’s kitchen and the answer will be a single word: paco. A toxic and highly addictive mixture of raw cocaine base cut with chemicals, glue, crushed glass and rat poison, paco is the curse of Argentina’s urban poor. And consumption of this bastardized, low-grade drug is eating away at the vitality and hope of the most deprived neighborhoods of the capital.
Essentially a chemical waste product, paco is what remains from the narco-kitchens producing cocaine bound for US and European markets. Since its appearance on the streets of Buenos Aires in the late 1990s, the drug has taken a deadly grip in slums such as Itati. Levels of addiction rose by more than 200 percent in the first part of the decade and more than 400,000 doses are now being consumed daily.
Users are witheringly referred to as the muertos vivientes — the living dead — of Buenos Aires. Addictive after one or two hits, the drug systematically destroys the nervous system. Users quickly become skeletal and ravaged, resorting to crime, violence and prostitution to feed their habits. Enormous numbers die in short order.
Villa Itati runs on paco: an economy that is an endless, grim cycle of illicit profit, addiction-fueled crime and wasted lives, all witnessed by a despairing generation of parents.
According to urban myth, the first paco in Argentina was sold here. Residents say narco-traffickers started flooding the neighborhood with paco in 2005, selling hits for as little as US$0.15 each. According to provincial government reports, 50 percent of Villa Itati’s 60,000 residents have used or are currently addicted to the drug. Across the country, 2008 government figures show that 64.9 percent of under-18s in addiction and treatment services are there because of paco.
Virtually no one owns a car in Villa Itati. But in a place where there is only one source of wealth, there are stark signs of big money being made by some. Shiny black four-wheel-drives with darkened windows are parked in the unpaved street near Chamorro’s kitchen.
“Paco,” says one woman, pointing to the trucks. “Those cars are what they buy with our children’s blood.”
“The dealers came here and first they targeted kids,” says one resident running a community project who didn’t want to be named. “They sold these kids hits of paco for 1 peso [US$0.26] and got them hooked and now they work for them selling it in the streets. If they lose one dose, they shoot them in the legs or kill them. Families are cooking paco in their houses because it is the only way they can make money.”
“This place used to be a real neighborhood, people had work. We were poor but we were a community; now it is all crime and drugs and sewage,” Chamorro says. “There is no work, the factories all closed. Some of the women go into the city to clean rich people’s houses and a few of the men collect cardboard. But there is nothing for the young people.”
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