“Paco is a tsunami that has hit the most vulnerable. If we weren’t working here, then there would be nobody to help families fight against this. The state and wider society have washed their hands of us,” Pepe says.
Rising crime has made Villa 21-24 a byword for violence in Buenos Aires with many areas of this vast urban settlement being controlled entirely by narco-gangs. Last year Pepe was forced to ask for official protection and faced death threats after he spoke out against the traffickers and rising crime in the neighborhood.
“In the last few years we have seen many more problems with crime, with violence and guns linked to a more coordinated narcotics operation here in the slums. It’s an increasingly big business,” he says. “Yet the capacity of the people to prevail, to want something better, lives on, and this is what we should be supporting.”
But as Argentina gains a new unwanted status as a premier narco-trafficking route, the outlook for campaigners such as Pepe is bleak. Traditionally used mainly as a transit route to get cocaine out of Latin America to Europe, Argentina is increasingly used as a producer and consumer of cocaine and cocaine byproducts in Latin America.
Drug Enforcement Argentina, an anti-drugs pressure group, claims cocaine kitchens like those first discovered in the slums in 2006 are booming and that there are more than 1,500 clandestine airstrips bringing cocaine base into the north of the country.
SEDRONAR admits that porous borders, limited resources and expertise and a lack of effective coordination between regional and national agencies means that Argentina is losing the battle to contain the rise of narco-trafficking into the country.
In Villa Itati, Chamorro and thousands of others like her are desperate that paco should disappear and their children be given the chance of a way out of the spiral of poverty and drug addiction that is destroying their future.
“We have been abandoned by the government, by everybody. They are all terrified of our children coming to their houses and taking their things, but [our children] need hope for something better. There has to be more for them that this,” Chamorro says as she heads inside the soup kitchen.
Her words are an almost certainly futile expression of despair.
In the grip of ‘paco’
• Paco is cocaine base paste, a byproduct of the refining process, cut with chemicals such as sulphuric acid and kerosene as well as glue, rat poison and crushed glass.
• Readily available, paco is sold for as little as US$0.15 a hit. The average paco user smokes more than seven doses a day.
• Madres en Lucha, a group of campaigning mothers, estimates paco kills two people a week in Buenos Aires.
• Drug Enforcement Argentina, an anti-drug lobbying group, says paco trafficking exceeds US$927.3 million a year. Cocaine seizures in Argentina doubled between 1999 and 2006.
• Paco was smoked in other cocaine-producing countries before it reached Argentina: It is known as kete in Peru, bazuco in Colombia and pitillo in Bolivia.
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