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!”.