The immigration authorities of Argentina ordered the expulsion from the country of the main accused of distributing the poisoned cocaine that since Wednesday has killed 24 people. Joaquin Aquino, alias the country, he must return to his country, Paraguay, “when the interest of the Justice on his person ceases,” explained the National Migration Directorate in an official communication. This Friday, the number of victims went from 23 to 24 after the death of a man who had been dying for two days in a hospital on the western outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires. It was in that area where the victims bought the drug, cut with a powerful opiate that caused their death.
Investigators suspect the presence of fentanyl, a synthetic drug 50 times more powerful than heroin, but 48 hours after the deaths began, the laboratory test is not yet ready. A source from the Ministry of Health clarified that “it is not a simple study.” Authorities know the contaminant is an opiate because those admitted responded to naloxone, its antidote, but they aren’t sure what it is. Carlos Damin, head of Toxicology at Hospital Fernández, doubts that it is fentanyl. “Fentanyl has a short half-life and we have seen that patients who were given naloxone woke up and went back to sleep. It had to be applied then by drip, and that speaks of an opiate with a longer life, ”he explains. In any case, fentanyl in Argentina is only used in hospitals as anesthesia, it is not available in pharmacies and it is not part of the drug traffickers’ supply.
The authorities still do not know why the drug was cut with a component that in the local market is more expensive than cocaine. First, an adjustment between bands was suspected, but hypotheses of a trial to introduce opiates in the local market or a simple manipulation error are also growing. The profile of the victims is striking: very poor people, from marginal neighborhoods and addicted to a drug who bought at less than half of its market value in Puerta 8, a small neighborhood of narrow corridors of land where the “kitchen ” where the poisoned drug was cut. 23 intoxicated are still admitted and eight survive connected to a mechanical respirator. Only three of the victims were women.
The day after the first deaths occurred, the police arrested a dozen people at Gate 8, located in the vicinity of the hospitals where the victims were distributed. Then Joaquín Aquino, 33, fell. In the house where he was arrested, the police seized 5,000 doses of narcotics packed in the same pink nylon that had the samples delivered by relatives of the victims.
The criminal gang to which Aquino belongs, according to the Police, is headed by Max Alicho Happy. He disputes the control of several slums in the western outskirts of Buenos Aires against another led by Iván Villalba, son of the historic drug trafficker Miguel Ángel Mameluke Villalba. Villalba is in prison and Aquino would be in charge of executing his orders on the street. He had been on the run for a year and a half from a four-year sentence; He also faced expulsion from the country and an eight-year re-entry ban. “Now the prohibition of re-entry is amplified permanently,” said the director of Migrations, Florencia Carignano, to the news channel A24. “He will have to serve a four-year sentence and it will be necessary to see how much more he is imprisoned [por esta nueva causa], but the day he wants to be released he will not be able to spend a minute in Argentina”, he clarified.
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