Police shootings and cosmetic operations: Criminal and institutional reaction after Ryguasu’s murder

By Juan A. Martens Molas.

The murder of Ederson Salinas, AKA Ryguasu, in the parking lot of a supermarket in Asuncion on Saturday, February 25, 2023, shocked locals as well as the National Police and is generating a reaction from criminal market actors. It put the police leadership up against the wall as it exposed the close ties between a sector of the uniformed officers and organized crime, whether through the sale of privileged information or through inaction to allow criminals to act with peace of mind.

The media and institutional pressure was constant during the days following the murder. However, over 10 days have passed since the murder and there has been no news about the assassins or their route. Not even the getaway car has been located.

It is surprising that there is no further information, considering that the execution took place in a middle-class neighborhood, where there are hundreds of video surveillance cameras. The lead prosecutor, Patricia Sanchez, stated that she was requesting warrants to collect the images of the surroundings since the early morning of the murder, but so far, she did has not provided any news on the matter.

Therefore, to decompress the pressure, the police resorted to an old strategy: to divert public attention with successful operations, where the last links of a criminal structure are arrested, so that the business is not affected, and everything remains the same.

The cosmetic reactions of the National Police, as happened in Capitan Bado and San Lorenzo, (with the clear intention of deactivating citizen pressure), as well as the executions carried out in Pedro Juan Caballero on Sunday, March 5, are expressions of criminal governance and the continuous flow of drug money into the coffers of some officials.

In the early hours of Thursday, March 2, the Police Anti-Kidnapping Department released a video to the media showing the arrest of a Brazilian man operating in Capitan Bado. He was presented as one of the major suppliers of drugs and weapons to the Comando Vermelho, the largest drug trafficking organization in Brazil. In the images, Araújo de Abreu can be seen with 10 other people as they were arrested. They also leaked images of ammunition and some weapons. The truth is that only de Abreu was expelled, the others were released because they had not committed any crime.

Andres’i (as Abreu was known among the police in Bado) was just a pira’i mensualero, that is, a small-time criminal who paid the local police about 500,000 guaranies a month to move around and carry out his activities without anyone bothering him. He was far from being the boss of a narco structure. Precisely for this reason he was the perfect candidate to become the scapegoat in situations where the police are pressed for results.

Two major criminal structures operate in Capitan Bado with institutional acquiescence. The first is linked to Felipe Baron Escurra and the other to Danilo Gimenez, Ederson Salinas’ compadre and brother-in-law. In January of this year, Rene Ramirez, a non-commissioned officer assigned to the main police station in the city, was arrested and accused of providing data and weapons to Escurra. Judge Rosarito Montanía, specialized against Organized Crime, ordered his preventive detention. The arrest of Ramirez not only confirms the institutional infiltration, but also shows that the intervention reaches the lowest links of the structure and only exceptionally, the leaders.

In the local police imaginary, these bosses are the untouchables because they negotiate “above”, at the top of the police. When their assistants are detained at the police checkpoints, it is enough that they report this situation so that they are not bothered, regardless of whether they are carrying weapons or drugs. Nande pu’aka moãi hesekuera (you won’t be able to fight them) and it is better to avoid problems, explained a local police officer when I asked him why they acted this way.

The day after the operation in Capitán Bado, three people were arrested in San Lorenzo linked to a scheme of extorting peddlers for the sale of contraband merchandise; among them, the sub-commissioner Rodolfo Martínez Molinas, head of Intelligence of Economic and Financial Crimes of the Police. The fact would not attract attention and could even be understood as part of a scheme to fight institutional corruption, were it not for the fact that the case in which the arrests were made dates to September 2022, that is, six months ago.

In an unusual event in Pedro Juan Caballero, this Sunday, March 5, 2023, two rampage attacks occurred, both in the home of each victim. In the first case, six men armed with rifles entered the house and room where Alberto Medina (aged 34) slept with his wife and son, in the Jardín Aurora neighborhood. They handcuffed him, tortured him, and then killed him with rifle shots, just as had happened to Carlos Rubén Sánchez, aka Chicharõ, in August 2021. A few hours later, around 11 a.m., this time in Barrio Obrero, Diego Antonio del Valle (aged 26) was riddled with bullets in his backyard, where he was spending Sunday morning with his family.

According to Sánchez’s wife, the attackers were looking for something. She said they ransacked the entire house and insistently asked “where is it? where is it?”. These two executions would be linked to the briefcase that was removed from Ryguasu’s apartment in Asunción after his murder. “They are after the briefcase,” said an intelligence police officer. It is easy to fit up to 5 million dollars in those bags, he added.

The cosmetic reactions of the National Police, as happened in Capitan Bado and San Lorenzo, (with the clear intention of deactivating citizen pressure), as well as the executions carried out in Pedro Juan Caballero on Sunday, March 5, are expressions of criminal governance and the continuous flow of drug money into the coffers of some officials. The objective, as I described in a previous article, is to trade political merchandise that ensures impunity for the buyer and personal enrichment for the operators, all to the detriment of law enforcement.

* Executive Director of INECIP-Paraguay. PhD from the University of Barcelona-Spain (UB). Master’s in Criminology, Criminal Policy and Security (UB) and Criminal Guarantees and Procedural Law, National University of Pilar (UNP-INECIP). Lawyer-UNA. Research Professor at UNP and INECIP-Paraguay. Professor of Criminology-School of Law UNP and UNICAN. Researcher categorized Level II PRONII-CONACYT. Executive Director-INECIP-Paraguay.

Image source: Author’s file. These are people arrested and some of the evidence presented after the raid in Capitán Bado, where de Araújo was also arrested. In the end, the other detainees were released.