By Pablo Daniel Magee *
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the cold-blooded execution of presumed criminal Marcos Rojas and young influencer Cristina Vita Aranda by a sicario in the middle of the Ja’Umina music festival of San Bernardino (2022/01/30), moved the entire country, to the point of raising debates about the fast evolving “industry” of sicariato (from “sicario”: hitman) in Paraguay. As political analyst Jorge Rolón Luna put it in a tweet, there now is a sicario hit every 28,2 hours, or 1,2 days, within the borders of Augusto Roa Bastos’ Island surrounded by land. If, like me, you are an expat living in this country, and depending on how long you’ve been here, the polemic around the wrongdoings of sicarios might still sound exotic to you. One might think that after all, we chose to live in a tropical country where sicarios are part of the charm of ever-growing corruption and flowering narcotraffic proper to this part of the World. Isn’t it the package we were rightfully sold on pop culture television ever since Pablo Escobar first hit the headlines in the 80s? To some of us (you know who you are), it’s like living the South American dream in all its transgressive Wild West-like splendour as portrayed in films such as Jorge Diaz de Bedoya’s sociological masterpiece Luna de Cigarras, upon the arrival of a young Yankee prospective drug lord in Paraguay: “Welcome to the jungle my friend!”.
Nonetheless, the very existence of sicariato is revealing of a much darker reality. One far away from the palm trees and narcos’ sportscars full of oddly attractive heavy calibre weapons and lightly dressed young ladies thrown at us on Netflix at any time of day or night. Going back in History, the sicarii were a group a Jewish Zealots who strongly fought against the Roman occupation of Judea, before the destruction of Jerusalem. They were named after the sicae, the small daggers they used to dissimulate under their cloaks. After a hit, the sicarii were known to disappear in the panicked crowds, never to be found again. I was always taught that the oldest form of terrorism was that of the Islamic Hashishins, as John Richard Thackrah also writes in his highly instructive Dictionary of Terrorism. But in fact, the sicarii walked the Middle East, centuries before those mythically stoned assassins. Therefore, the modern hitmen known as sicarios in South America etymologically turn out to perpetuate the longest tradition of assassination in human history. That must mean something. But what exactly?
The type of violence which has now become an everyday occurrence through the hands of the sicarios, arrived in Paraguay in the early 1970s from my country: France. At the time, a man named Auguste Joseph Ricord, who’d been a collaborator with the Nazis during the Second World War, was sent to South America by the mafia of Corsica to find a new base of operations for the dealing of heroin, when Fidel Castro put a halt to all drug trafficking in Cuba after winning the Revolution. Ricord initially travelled to Venezuela but didn’t stay long before finding his way to Buenos Aires, where he prospered as the representative of the French mafia on the new continent. Nonetheless, after an international warrant was sent out by Interpol, the man fled Argentina and arrived in the God forsaken Paraguayan dictatorship at the heart of its darkest age. The military held the almighty power over the population and as we learn in the overwhelming documentary Paraguay, Droga y Banana, by Juan Manuel Salinas, it wasn’t long before Ricord hooked up with the local chief of Secret Police Pastor Coronel and the men of General Andres Rodriguez, also called General Cocaine, who later overthrew the longest standing dictator in the history of South America: General Alfredo Stroessner. As it was planned, Paraguay then became the centre of operations of the French mafia in South America for the traffic of heroin and later cocaine, after all this happy crowd met with Escobar in the early 80s. Later, the prosecution of Ricord would inspire US President Nixon to create the famous Drug Enforcement Administration, better known as the DEA (no less!). But that’s another story.
See, the arrival of hits, or ordered assassinations by sicarios in a society, is usually closely linked with any kind of trafficking one may find in its particular area of the World. Call it blood diamonds in Africa, papaver poppies in Afghanistan, tellurium or cobalt in Asia, call it… marijuana and cocaine in Paraguay. According to the Transnational Institute (TNI), Paraguay is currently the biggest supplier of Cannabis in South America with about 20.000 peasants dedicated to cultivating 7000 acres of the magic plant for a yearly cashflow of 800 million dollars. Add to that an extra yearly 700 million dollars cashflow in cocaine trafficking and you’ll have the answer to why violence is increasing every day in a country where politicians are no longer being bought by narcos but becoming narcos themselves. When the system is rigged to such an extent, what’s the way out? Columbia paid the price of thousands of civil lives with an open war on drugs. So did Mexico. Is this the example Paraguay will choose to follow?
The type of violence which has now become an everyday occurrence through the hands of the sicarios, arrived in Paraguay in the early 1970s from my country: France.
When hearing the news about the double hit in San Bernardino, my first thought was for my son. Is this the kind of country I want him to grow up in? Should I take my family back to France? And then I remembered speaking with my mother a few days ago: “Did you hear?”, she told me, “We just got our three first drug related hits of the year in Marseille (the second largest city in France), and the police already seized two and a half tons of cocaine, just in the month of January. That’s more than in all of 2019!”. That immediately put things into perspective for me: there is nowhere to run. And in fact, should we run? As investigator Ruy Alberto Valdés Benavides legitimately asks, when lawmakers become the very evil that they are meant to fight: who will watch the watchmen? This is the all too serious question at hand that the Paraguayan civil society will have to take a strong stand on in the years to come, if we don’t want to face the conversion of this country into a heartless order run by fear of sicariato and kidnappings; the illusions of drugs and the almighty dollar… if this isn’t already that.
So yes. Welcome to the jungle my friends! But bear in mind that jungles also generate the antidotes to their deadliest poisons. Let’s take on the challenge to find these antidotes. If not to ourselves, we owe it to our children.
* French writer, journalist, screenwriter and playwright, author of the non-fiction novel Opération Condor, Un homme face à la terreur en Amérique latine, Saint Simon, 2020, 378p. ISBN 978-2-37435-025-7
Cover illustration: Paraguay, Drugs and Bananas, Documentary