Few cities better exemplify Argentina’s struggle to contain rising levels of crime and drug-trafficking than the port city of Rosario, some 300km north-west of Buenos Aires. Homicides rose 76% from 2012 to 2013 as fighting over the drug trade intensified. Last year the head of the city’s police force, and its anti-drug czar, were arrested over their links with traffickers. Three lynchings by civilian mobs, including one which ended in the death of a teenager, had put the city in the media spotlight again in March this year. On 9 April, in a massive show of force that bore many of the hallmarks of the pacification programme being implemented in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, some 3,000 federal security agents carried out the country’s largest ever drug raid in the city, resulting in the arrests of 20 people.End of preview - This article contains approximately 702 words.
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