Text: Evelyn Arach Photos: Marcelo Manera*
Many of Rosana Gambacorta’s clients can barely read and write, and are malnourished. They are mostly young people caught with a few grams of cocaine in the city of Rosario, in the epicentre of Argentina’s criminal map. The majority come from families that endured poverty for generations.
But Gambacorta says that putting people in jail does not solve the underlying problem.
Gambacorta says she represents the people no one cares about. She has worked in the criminal courts for 36 years and is the only female public defender in the federal courts of Rosario. It’s a tough job. As of December 2023, each public defender in Rosario’s federal justice system was working on more than 2,000 cases.
In Rosario, the vast majority of people arrested on drug-related charges tend to be users or dealers with small amounts of cocaine or marijuana and know little about those at the top of the distribution chain.
Gambacorta seems to have a special sensitivity to the situation of women deprived of their liberty and their particular circumstances. She says that only a few decades ago women involved in drug trafficking represented two or three percent of the total of women in prison. “Now the figure is closer to 40 per cent,” she says.
Gambacorta is worried. “Society is going backwards. People are getting worse because of malnutrition and the filth they consume and the only solution the State proposes is punitive. It seems that everything is going to be solved through criminal law, putting people in prison. But this is not the case. I have assisted people who have been angry about being released from prison ‘in jail, at least I eat twice a day,’ they have told me on more than one occasion,” she says.
Why are so many women arrested for drug trafficking in Rosario?
In a city where 50% of the people live in poverty, there are women who, in the best of cases, have four or five children and the father is in prison. How do these women support themselves? I am not justifying them committing a crime.
What types of vulnerability do your defendants face?
All of them. Shall I give you a list? First of all, they are usually young women with little or no formal education. Many come from families who have suffered malnutrition for generations. I have been here for thirty years, and often I have to assist the children or granddaughters of people I have defended. These people don’t speak, they make guttural sounds, they don’t have the language of people who have had the opportunity to be educated. Because they live in an appalling reality of malnutrition, abuse and neglect.
Why has the number of women involved with drug trafficking networks increased significantly in recent years?
Firstly, because women used to be less involved in everything, even less involved in crime. And then because of social disintegration. A woman who lives alone with several children is offered something along the lines of “if you sell 30 bags of cocaine, I’ll give you that much money”. And it turns out that, with that money, she is able to buy milk and bread for the children. Go and tell her not to do it. Also, once you get into it, you can’t just walk away. Criminal gangs recruit people to sell drugs and demand that they keep selling. Retaliation can include violence against them or their children.
Between 2016 and 2021, women represented around 10% of homicide victims in the department of Rosario. In 2022, this doubled to 22.1% of the total.
Do judges take gender-sensitive approaches to their work?
They usually don’t, even though it is mandatory. One of the offences we see most frequently is women taking drugs into prison for their husbands, sons, brothers or friends.
For years, I have been saying that these are women whose will is diminished because they are psychologically abused. It’s not that they don’t understand what they are doing, but they can be retaliated against if they refuse and they have virtually no choice.
Moreover, most of these women have no chance of finding a job. Judges have only listened to us when we have been able to prove that these women had reported the violence they suffered.
Are there any stories that stood out to you?
There are many terrible stories. I heard a woman say that her father sold her for a crate of beer. And then the man she married made her work as a sex worker. Being hungry and not having enough money to buy food for their children makes them do anything, like selling drugs on the streets.
They know what they are doing, but they practically have no choice. It is very difficult for a person with zero skills to get a job. They live in places with no toilet, no water. When I see them after they are arrested many give off a terrible smell because they have nowhere to bathe or wash their clothes. And I don’t say that pejoratively, quite the contrary. It once happened to us with a family that we took turns to go outside to breathe. I had a boy who was imprisoned several times in three years, always wearing the same jumper. People live in places with only one room with no door, no window and inside everything is full of soot because they make fires on the floor to be able to sleep in the winter. How can these women be domestic workers if they don’t know how to use a stain remover? How can they know how to iron if you’ve never seen an iron in their lives? How can they how to use a washing machine if they never had power at home? How can they know how to clean when they never had fresh water?
You said society tends to only want to put people in prison…
Yes. They ask for more judges and prosecutors, but not more defenders. Nobody wants us. And we are an essential part of the process. Here in Rosario we prosecute nearly 87% of drug trafficking cases.
We defend people and the rule of law, that is, that the person goes through a criminal process and receives a fair trial.
Of the people you defend, how many have problematic drug use?
There is a figure that does not exist legally, they are the people who sell drugs to be able to afford their own problematic use. When you say drug trafficking, you think of astronomical amounts of money. That is money these kids will never see. There are days when I had fifteen cases, and they were all for selling three or five grams of cocaine or marijuana.
Do you think there are any drug offences that should not be criminalised?
Yes, substance abuse. Because it is measured from a criminal point of view and the fact that it is a health issue is not taken into account. With this approach, this is an issue that will never be solved.
*Evelyn Arach wrote this report with the support of the Federal Network of Judicial Journalism. The interview is part of the investigation ‘Women and drug micro-trafficking, a blind spot in the Argentinean justice system’. It is a project of the Network supported by the Fund for Research and New Narratives on Drugs (FINND) of the Gabo Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.
