Hired killings in 2022: geolocation. Hot spots and new locations

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By Jorge Rolón Luna* 

The re­cent mur­der in Asun­ción of Ed­er­son Sali­nas Benítez, a drug traf­ficker from the Amam­bay area, al­though with­out any of­fi­cial in­ves­ti­ga­tion, showed once again that hired as­sas­si­na­tion is no longer an “Amam­bay” or “bor­der” is­sue, as was the re­lief of the cap­i­tal’s pop­u­la­tion re­gard­ing this type of crime.

Crim­i­nal groups in­volved in drug traf­fick­ing and who ha­bit­u­ally re­sort to con­tract killings as a way to set­tle their dis­putes, to­day are spread through­out the bor­der area (whether by land or that which sep­a­rates us from neigh­bor­ing coun­tries by rivers such as the Paraguay and Paraná), as well as in Asun­ción, the met­ro­pol­i­tan area and de­part­ments that do not form part of the bor­der.

Truth be told, the tra­di­tional ar­eas of drug traf­fick­ing ac­tiv­ity have long since ceased to have that macabre ex­clu­siv­ity, al­though the num­bers con­tinue to show that the hot ar­eas in terms of homi­cides con­tinue to be them, with the spe­cial case of the de­part­ment of Amam­bay, which also has the most vi­o­lent city in the coun­try, Pe­dro Juan Ca­ballero (PJC). This is vis­i­ble in Graph 1, which shows un­pub­lished data that cor­re­spond to the map of the hit­men in Paraguay, ac­cord­ing to a sur­vey of the episodes recorded through­out the year 2022.

To­tal hit­men at­tacks by de­part­ment 2022.

Source: Own cre­ation based on press sources.

In a se­ries of ar­ti­cles pub­lished last year, I com­pared data from the first four months of the years 2021 and 2022 re­gard­ing the ge­olo­ca­tion of the ac­tions of hired killers. In the first one, I con­signed the lo­ca­tion of these at­tacks by de­part­ment: Amam­bay, Con­cep­ción, Asun­ción and Cen­tral (con­sid­ered to­gether, since the cap­i­tal does not be­long to Cen­tral, but they form an al­most un­di­vided whole to­day), topped the rank­ing, with the first one com­fort­ably ahead of the fol­low­ing hot spots. To up­root the idea that Amam­bay is al­most ex­clu­sive ter­ri­tory of hired killings, here is some data: in the first four months of 2021 it con­cen­trated 47% of the cases, while in the whole of 2022, only 39%. Seen from an­other an­gle, last year more than half of the cases of con­tract killings were dis­trib­uted out­side the de­part­ment.

In an­other ar­ti­cle, where I also an­a­lyzed the same pe­riod of time, I stated the lo­cal­i­ties that reg­is­tered the high­est num­ber of cases: Pe­dro Juan Ca­ballero (PJC), Capitán Bado and Yvy Yaú, in that or­der, al­though in the to­tal of both four-month pe­ri­ods PJC far ex­ceeded the other two lo­cal­i­ties. An in­ter­est­ing fact: in this com­par­i­son, Asun­ción al­ready ap­peared in fourth place, with 3 cases, both in 2021 and 2022.

A first con­clu­sion is that Asun­ción has been a ter­ri­tory of hit­men at­tacks for some years now, im­me­di­ately af­ter cities and towns tra­di­tion­ally con­sid­ered “hot”.

If we con­sider the data on hit­men at­tacks by de­part­ment cor­re­spond­ing to 2022, we see that Amam­bay leads the rank­ing over­whelm­ingly, as shown in graphs 1 and 2. How­ever, what stands out is that 61.4% of the hit­men cases oc­cur out­side of Amam­bay. On the other hand, five de­part­ments con­cen­trate al­most 80% of the cases of hired killings: Amam­bay, Alto Paraná, Con­cep­ción, Itapúa, Canindeyú. The rest of the cases are dis­trib­uted among the re­main­ing eleven of the 16 de­part­ments that reg­is­tered cases last year.

An­other strik­ing as­pect of the analy­sis of these sta­tis­tics is that Asun­ción and the met­ro­pol­i­tan area con­cen­trate 10.3% of the cases, a phe­nom­e­non at­trib­ut­able spe­cially to dis­putes within the mi­cro-traf­fick­ing busi­ness. We can af­firm that, to­day, the cap­i­tal and its pe­riph­ery are al­ready “red” zones, if not “red”, at least or­ange in terms of con­tract homi­cides.

Rank­ing of de­part­ments by hit­men at­tacks 2022 in to­tals and per­cent­ages

Department	Total	Percentage
Amambay	82	39%
Alto Paraná	23	11%
Asunción	6	3%
Anchovy	1	0%
Caaguazú	5	2%
Canindeyú	19	9%
Central	16	8%
Concepcion	22	10%
Cordillera	4	2%
Guairá	1	0%
San Pedro	7	3%
Itapua	22	10%
Missions	1	0%
Caazapá	1	0%
Paraguarí	1	0%
P. Hayes	1	0%
	212	100%

Source: Own cre­ation based on press sources.

As can be seen in Fig­ure 3, Pe­dro Juan Ca­ballero is by far the city most af­fected, fol­lowed by Capitán Bado, also in Amam­bay. How­ever, there are some sur­pris­ing lo­cal­i­ties, such as San Pe­dro del Paraná, whose ap­pear­ance on the map of hired killings is in­dica­tive of high drug traf­fick­ing ac­tiv­ity to Ar­gentina from Ita­pua and the con­flict that this has been un­leash­ing lately in that area.

Rank­ing of 10 cities and lo­cal­i­ties with cases of hired as­sas­si­na­tions 2022

Location	Total	Percentage
Pedro J. C.	52	26.4%
Cap. Bado	20	9.4%
S. Pedro P.	13	6.1%
CDE	11	5.2%
Yvy Yau	11	5.2%
Asunción	6	2.8%
S.J. F. L.	5	2.4%
Itakyry	4	1.9%
P. C. Cora	4	1.9%
Yvy Pytä	3	1.4%

Source: Own cre­ation based on press sources.

If we consider the data on hitmen attacks by department corresponding to 2022, we see that Amambay leads the ranking overwhelmingly, as shown in graphs 1 and 2. However, what stands out is that 61.4% of the hitmen cases occur outside of Amambay.

In sum­mary, it is true that Amam­bay and Pe­dro Juan Ca­ballero are con­firmed, ac­cord­ing to these data, for one more year as the de­part­ment and the city with the high­est num­ber of hired killings, show­ing that they are the epi­cen­ter of in­ter­na­tional drug traf­fick­ing in Paraguay, but it is also an un­de­ni­able fact that high lev­els of this il­le­gal ac­tiv­ity are not lim­ited to that area of the coun­try.

These data show that the ter­ri­to­r­ial dis­per­sion of the hit­men has sev­eral no­table facets. First, the ar­eas near Amam­bay also suf­fer the scourge of drug vi­o­lence (Con­cep­ción and Canindeyú, es­pe­cially), as well as the bor­der de­part­ments, whether dry or rivers, be­cause they are ar­eas where traf­fick­ing to Brazil and Ar­gentina takes place. Fi­nally, Asun­ción and Cen­tral, for rea­sons prob­a­bly dif­fer­ent from those in the north­ern part of the coun­try (mi­cro-traf­fick­ing, drug re­tail­ing), are not im­mune to the ac­tion of hit­men.

*In­de­pen­dent re­searcher, for­mer di­rec­tor of the Ob­ser­va­tory of Co­ex­is­tence and Cit­i­zen Se­cu­rity of the Min­istry of the In­te­rior. Au­thor of the book of short sto­ries “Los sicar­ios”.

Im­age Source: In­fobae