The livestreamed torture and killing of three women at the hands of a drug gang has rattled Argentina and underscored the country’s vulnerability to extreme drug-fueled violence, though such events are likely to remain rare.
Police discovered the bodies of two women and a teenager buried in a garden in Buenos Aires suburb Florencio Varela on September 24. The victims, Brenda del Castillo, Morena Verdi, and Lara Gutiérrez, had been lured into a van five days before under the pretext of attending a party before being executed by members of a drug gang, according to local law enforcement.
Gang members tortured the young women, removing their fingernails and hitting them with blunt instruments before killing them, an autopsy revealed. The murders were filmed and shared on social media to a private audience of 45 people, according to Buenos Aires provincial Security Minister Javier Alonso.
During the broadcast, a gang member said, “This is what happens when you rob drugs from me,” Alonso told local media.
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During initial raids, security forces detained four people, two caught while attempting to scrub bloodstains from the floor and walls of the house where the women were buried. Investigators believe that the graves were dug before the arrival of the victims, suggesting that the murders were planned, and that the vehicle that transported the victims used a false number plate to obfuscate the efforts of law enforcement.
The brutality of the murders triggered outrage in the country and underscored long-simmering class and gender issues. The Buenos Aires Ministry of Women and Diversity described the crime as “the most extreme expression of gender-based violence,” and prominent human rights groups denounced the murders as an example of “narco-femicide.”
“The feeling is that if they had been men, they would have killed them with bullets,” Marcelo Bergman, an expert on organized crime in Argentina told InSight Crime. “Here there is an attempt to make them suffer.”
Nine suspects have been arrested, including the alleged mastermind of the crime, 20-year-old Peruvian national Tony Janzen Valverde, known as “Pequeño J.” He had fled Argentina and was detained on September 30 in Pucusana, a coastal fishing town and beach resort about 60 kilometers south of Lima.
InSight Crime Analysis
While broadcast killings are rare in Argentina, drug trafficking groups in other Latin American countries have used them to inflict terror and impose control.
The targeted assassination of civilians with killings recorded and shared online by criminal groups is a tactic used more frequently in Mexico and Brazil. Criminal groups there regularly broadcast torture and murders on social media to send messages to rivals, terrorize populations living in areas under criminal control, and punish those believed to have broken rules set by certain criminal organizations.
Sophisticated groups also prowl social media accounts for signs of disloyalty. In September 2024, members of the Red Command (Comando Vermelho – CV) kidnapped, tortured, and killed two sisters from a rural hamlet in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. The killings were allegedly triggered by an Instagram photo in which one of the victims made a seemingly innocuous gesture claimed by a rival gang. The execution was streamed to the group’s leaders inside a local prison, according to investigators.
Though the Florencio Varela murders were extreme in their brutality for Argentina, early evidence suggests that they were perpetrated by a less sophisticated criminal group, compared to powerful criminal groups in Mexico and Brazil, which are rarely caught in these cases. Police easily tracked Pequeño J, for example, because he continued to use his cell phone as he fled Argentina into Peru.
“We’re seeing new cohorts of criminals who use excessive violence that no longer bears proportion to the goals they are pursuing,” said Esteban Rodríguez Alzueta, a researcher at the National University of Quilmes and author of a book on youth crime in Argentina. “We saw this in Rosario a few years ago, and we’re seeing it now in Buenos Aires.”
The women, one just 15 years old, engaged in sex work “to survive,” a family member of one of the victims told local media. Investigators believe that they encountered members of the criminal group led by Pequeño J while frequenting Villa 21-24, one of the largest informal settlements in the province of Buenos Aires, where the gang had its logistical base.
Gustavo Vera, director of La Alameda, a non-profit that works with trafficking victims, including in Villa 21-24, said that a governance vacuum caused by funding cuts had allowed local criminal groups to expand their power in the poorest peripheries of Buenos Aires.
In these areas, drug networks have “become a micro-state that paves the streets, buys medicines for neighbors, and pays for funerals … But their favorite prey are young people, particularly women and girls, whom they capture for prostitution and drug distribution,” said Vera.
Bergman told InSight Crime that while he didn’t believe the murders presaged a paradigm shift in the levels of drug-fueled violence in Argentina, the country’s ability to contain such incidents has depended on their rarity combined with strong civil society pressure that pushes authorities to resolve these crimes.
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“If we had one a week, we would be close to what would happen in Mexico.” Bergman said, referring to the triple homicide. “At least for now, [violence] hasn’t spread.”
Investigations continue, and Argentine law enforcement seems determined to leverage the high prominence of the case to deter other criminal groups from committing similar acts of violence.
“We need to leave a message,” Alonso told local media. “This is very serious, and we either resolve this together, or no one resolves it.”
Featured image: Paula Fabero, center, the mother of victim Brenda del Castillo, grieves as she marches with the relatives and friends of the two women and a teenager who were tortured and killed, during a protest rally in Buenos Aires. Credit: Cristina Sille / Reuters
*Creusa Muñoz contributed to reporting for this article.