In a wing reserved for members of Rosario’s most violent gang, the Monos, InSight Crime watches a “pigeon” moving back and forth between cells. Made up of torn sheets, plastic bottles, and whatever else is on hand, pigeons are improvised messaging devices used to communicate during lockdowns in the Piñero prison, located just outside Rosario, one of Argentina’s crime hotspots.
Everyone in this wing has been holed up in their cells after a woman linked to the gang was caught trying to smuggle a smartwatch to a prisoner during a visit.
And as tech continues to advance, organized crime continues to adapt, and the government keeps playing catch-up. With the advent of ever-smaller devices, authorities installed scanners for prison visitors similar to those at airports. People tried to toss smartwatches through the bars of the roof, so the government put up narrower metal mesh to keep them out. Signal blockers to make this kind of technology useless were put in, but some messages still make it through.
But morale in the Monos wing seems high. Pigeons are tossed from the balcony as inmates watch the FIFA Club World Cup. Boca Juniors are up one-nil over Auckland City. One of the inmates yells “selfie, selfie” and poses for a photo with his cellmate.
The mood is less jovial in the wing for the Alvarado Clan – the Monos’ fiercest rival, also on lockdown, but because of a fight between inmates. Garbage is strewn across the floor, and a thin layer of white dust coats everything after guards used an extinguisher to put out a fire the inmates started.
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A guard nervously fingers his shotgun and makes sure InSight Crime puts on body armor before entering the wing. On leaving, a banging starts up throughout the module.
The government of Santa Fe, the province in which Rosario dwells, launched a new push against organized crime in December 2023, investing heavily in policing and prisons. So far it seems to be working. Homicides on the outside have dropped to a ten-year low, and prisons like these are more tightly controlled. But as more people are rounded up and flung in jail as part of the punitive attempts to keep crime low, the population behind bars is continuing to balloon. Can the authorities keep up?
Revolving Doors
Many of Piñero’s inmates come from the poverty-plagued outskirts of Rosario, where organized crime is headquartered. As the government continues to build more prison cells, the ecosystems that tend to funnel people into the ranks of petty and organized crime that land them in jail are being ignored.
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For those currently locked up in Piñero, there is a little promise of rehabilitation. Some 90% of prisoners never finished secondary school, according to the province’s latest report. Around 95% are not currently in any kind of education program. And over two-thirds of Piñero’s inmates did not have full-time employment when they got arrested, according to the latest prison census, conducted in 2024.
“Resources for [work and education] are always going to be scarcer than resources for security—at least at a time when the focus is on lowering levels of violence on the street,” explained Santa Fe’s secretary of penal affairs, Lucía Masneri.
She estimates that around 90% of the people who leave Piñero will be back in prison.
In other efforts to gain control, the local government is trying to silence communication and inhibit cooperation between members of criminal groups in prison and beyond.
Leaders have been placed in separate cells, and are allowed no physical contact during visits, separated from loved ones and lawyers by plexiglass and cinderblocks. Top-level leaders of Rosario’s gangs have all been transferred to federal penitentiaries.
The number of prisoners in Santa Fe has been mounting since long before the current administration’s security reforms, but the uptick in arrests now is accelerating overcrowding.
It is common for three or four people to be held in one of Piñero’s two-person cells.
The solution? A new facility, dubbed “Hell” by the government, is already in the works not far from Piñero. Four companies were contracted to work on the new facility simultaneously, in the hope of getting it finished in record time.
With arrests and recidivism so high, the new prison is likely to fill up quickly. Asked if there is a solution to overcrowding, Masneri was frank: “Yes. Build more prisons.”
Featured image: The broken glass of a window in Piñero’s Module-B in Rosario. Credit: Christopher Newton / InSight Crime