By Jorge Rolón Luna*
Paraphrasing a character from the TV series “Fariña” that deals with the story of Galician drug traffickers, we can say that today it is easier to find illegal drugs on the street than it is to get a decent job in Paraguay. International organizations, foreign governments and specialized publications regularly report on the high, growing and healthy drug trafficking activity in Paraguay, in contrast to what is observed in terms of the widespread lack of protection and job stability.
Drug trafficking has an impact on almost all areas of Paraguayan society. One characteristic expression of this world is the “sicariato”, a phenomenon now endemic in some areas of the country and linked to certain geographical specificities, but ignored by official statistics (National Police, Public Prosecutor’s Office, Judiciary). If these data exist in any security or intelligence agency, the fact is that they are not available to the public, investigators or the media, which makes it even more difficult to advance towards an understanding of the issue.
Hitmen, as the usually invisible phenomenon that it is, are suddenly in the spotlight for a number of reasons: a) sustained frequency of cases, b) victims who come from the public arena such as mayors, councilors and candidates for those positions, especially in 2021, c) recent cases that have caused social commotion as the quadruple homicide and death of the daughter of a governor, the murders of a high military chief and of a well-known businessman of Asuncion, all of them with echoes in the foreign press. News about hired assassins shooting at large have become part of our daily life, generating at the same time a sensation of national hyperviolence. Paradoxically, this is false, as we will see below. We live in a paradox of less violence, but more danger.
The available data show that homicides in the areas with high drug trafficking activity are primarily contract killings, which, as we said, represent a third of the homicides in the country. Without them, the national rates of violence would be closer to the European average and further away from the most violent countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Contrary to what might be thought, Paraguay is a country with relatively low homicide rates. According to 2020 figures, the 481 homicides recorded represented a 13% drop from the 554 in 2019. Even more telling in this regard – and again strange – is that last year we had the lowest number of homicides since the last peak in 2008 with 833 cases. Since then, homicides have dropped by 42%. If we go further back, in 2002 there were 1272 homicides, which means that today we have a spectacular 62% decrease in the last two decades.
Paraguay has only 6.6 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, which is the ratio used to measure the levels of violence in a country. Our numbers are far from the hyper-violent levels of Jamaica (46.5), Venezuela (45.6), Honduras (37.6), Trinidad and Tobago (28.2), Mexico (27) or Colombia (24.3), the countries with the highest homicide rates in Latin America and the Caribbean. To get an idea: the average rate in the Americas is 17.2, in Europe it is 3 and the world average is 6.1 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
The question that arises then is, what is happening in terms of homicides and violence in Paraguay?
The answer is relatively simple. While common homicide cases are decreasing, certain areas of the country are experiencing a reverse process of increasing homicidal violence. Here it is worth mentioning the cases of Amambay and Alto Paraná, for example. Geography plays an important role in explaining the reason. A recent Mexican university study on violence in Latin America, by Juan Mario Solís Delgadillo and Marcelo Moriconi Bezerra, considers borders as an important variable to explain the phenomenon. For both authors, borders can be characterized as “hot”, “temperate or hybrid” and “cold or peaceful”, according to their levels of violence as measured by homicides. Basically, the “hotter” the border, the greater the violence. Paraguay has six departments that border different Brazilian states: Alto Paraguay, Amambay, Canindeyú and Concepción with Mato Grosso do Sul; Canindeyú and Alto Paraná with Paraná. Of the six, five are considered “hot” while only the border between Concepción and Mato Grosso do Sul is considered “temperate or hybrid”. A “cold” border with Brazil simply does not exist.
Already in 2014, a European media outlet highlighted that Amambay had homicide rates (84 per 100,000 inhabitants) higher than Ciudad Juarez, Cali, Guatemala and violent cities in Brazil, Honduras, Mexico and Colombia. More recent studies indicate similar figures for Amambay and reveal that other departments also have high homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants: Concepción (18.6), Canindeyú (17.6), Caazapá (11.9) and Alto Paraná (11 in 2017, but 21 in 2010). Note that all of these departments have high drug trafficking activity and border Brazil (except Caazapá).
On the other hand, a plausible hypothesis of what is happening in the “hot zones” of the country would be the following: it is a localized violence preferably in the border area with Brazil (plus the increasingly less rare episodes in other areas, including in the Central Department and in Asuncion) that are the result of a high and growing drug trafficking activity, which has been brewing for at least a couple of decades.
First, the farming, processing, production and trafficking of our “star product” (marijuana), whose production has been increasing, making Paraguay the fourth largest producer of marijuana in the world, second in Latin America and first in South America. Second, an increase in cocaine trafficking and consumption (worldwide and especially in Brazil), already pointed out by the United Nations in a document last year. This has an impact on our country since, at the same time, it has become a key piece in the enormous network of organizations that traffic this substance to Brazil (today the second largest consumer of the drug in the world) and Europe. This, in turn, has led to an increasingly strong presence and activity of Brazilian criminal organizations such as the CV and the PCC. This, evidently, is generating territorial disputes between the various criminal groups that provoke different forms of violence, with the most notable being hired killings. Again, it is true that there are other variables involved, but we do not intend to delve into this explanation, already addressed in other broader works on violence in the country, since our subject is the sicariato (not “homicides” considered generically) and, in particular, in border (“hot”) areas.
Finally, the available data show that homicides in the departments with high drug trafficking activity are primarily contract killings, which, we reiterate, represent a third of the homicides in the country. Without them, the national rates of violence would be closer to the European average and further away from the most violent countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. All the more reason to seriously address the issue of hired killings and their relationship with the organized crime that produces them, once and for all.
*Lawyer, university professor and independent researcher, author of the book of short stories “Los sicarios”.
Designs by: Lissete Salguero