In Argentina, the emotion remains strong after the death of 24 people who had consumed adulterated cocaine in a slum located about thirty kilometers from Buenos Aires, Villa Puerta 8, on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday. 24 hours later, the authorities announced, with supporting photos, that they had detained the members of the gang who had distributed this deadly drug. But, on the spot, we denounce a staging by a police accomplice of the drug traffickers.
With our correspondent in Buenos Aires, Jean Louis Buchet
In the narrow streets of Villa Puerta 8, children play as if nothing had happened. The rare men that one can meet slip away. Only women agree to speak. And they denounce the police, accomplice of drug traffickers.
” I got my kid in there, who was just a little soldier, explains Soledad. They came to arrest him at night, when he was working from 11 am to 11 pm, but like a little soldier, not a drug trafficker! I go to the police station every day, his father too, but they don’t hear from us. »
Erica testifies in turn: My brother and my father were arrested because they put drugs in our house! The prosecutor himself saw when the police put the drugs in the house! They want to make innocent people pay for the broken pots! »
” There were no searches! The police came running and they arrested the young people they found! They put their so-called evidence, little bags of drugs, here and there, and they arrested kids who wanted to play football! “, protests for her part Lorena.
A neighborhood under control
The latter is a municipal employee, at the head of a family of nine people who live in a two-room apartment with a dirt floor. Life in a neighborhood controlled by drug traffickers who are never named. “ We woke up on Wednesday to the news that the kids in the neighborhood were intoxicated. Near my house, there were at least six of them, including my brother, who stopped using as soon as he started to feel bad. He walked away with great fear. It’s a batch that arrived in bad condition or poisoned, because they arrived packed, at night, and in the early morning, they were all sick. We don’t know if it was done on purpose, we say so many things! Whether it comes from another neighborhood, that those above are angry with the distributor here, that a competitor could have made a bad move, I don’t know… »
There have always been drugs here, explains this woman again, but ” the neighborhood was pretty quiet until the new ones arrived, a year, a year and a half ago. They say they bought the neighborhood, that they paid a million pesos to settle here and… work, as they say. The majority of the inhabitants are against their presence and do not want to have anything to do with them. But when we tell them, they answer us: well, if you want to see us leave, give us back the million pesos we paid. This neighborhood, we bought it. »
In Puerta 8, where injustice is part of life, everything continues as before. Without really believing it, some hope that this case will bring in the gendarmerie, considered less corrupt than the police.
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