Content note: this story includes scenes some readers may find distressing

The torture and murder of Brenda del Castillo, Morena Verdi, and Lara Gutiérrez were streamed on social media by the leader of a drugs gang to terrify his subordinates into submission, Buenos Aires Province security minister Javier Alonso has confirmed.

The killing of the three young women has horrified Argentina, with feminists emphasizing the role of gender and poverty in the crime. Organizations including Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less) have defined the murders as femicides — the killing of a woman or girl by a man because of her gender.

The bodies of del Castillo (20), Verdi (20), and Gutiérrez (15) were found dismembered in the backyard of a house in Florencio Varela, on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires. They were identified on Tuesday.

Alonso told TV channel TN that the women used to go to the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Flores, where authorities believe they got to know members of a drug gang. 

On Friday, they were invited by an individual they trusted to attend an event, Alonso said. It was a setup: when they arrived at the house in Florencio Varela, they were killed. 

“All that session of murder and torture was transmitted live on social media, and apparently 45 people who are on an Instagram account saw it,” Alonso said. He claimed that the drug gang’s leader chose to do this to discipline the members. Police learned of the live stream after those they had arrested told them what had happened.

The leader of the gang reportedly told the people watching: “This is what happens to anyone who steals drugs from me,” according to Alonso.

“It’s common in narco gangs that if someone steals their drugs, they can’t be left looking useless, so it triggers a fury of discipline so that nobody else even thinks of it,” he said — emphasizing that it is not clear whether any of the girls had in fact stolen drugs, and that nothing would justify their killings.

Class, gender, poverty

Verdi’s mother told the authorities that the three women were sex workers. They lived in La Tablada, a deprived area of the La Matanza, a department immediately to the south west of Buenos Aires city. 

“People have said awful things about these girls, who were young girls trying to find a path forward however they could,” Alonso said. “Some did so in one way, others in another, but by no means did they deserve everything that happened to them. Nobody deserves that.”

Feminists have argued that the girls’ killings demonstrates the need to consider how poverty exposes women to risks that better-off women are highly unlikely to face.

“We have to take responsibility for the fact that this doesn’t just happen to any woman,” said Georgina Orellano, Secretary General of sex workers’ union AMMAR during a protest on Wednesday evening. “Stop repeating that classist discourse that this could happen to any woman. It happens to poor women!”

Raids and arrests

Eight men were arrested on Wednesday night, in addition to the four people who were arrested earlier in the day. The police plan to question the suspects on Thursday.

Police believe that the leader of the gang is a man known as “Pequeño J” or “Julito,” and have described him as a Peruvian national aged around 23. He is currently at large.

However, officers have raided drugs bunkers believed to be associated with the network, finding money and around 50 portions of food prepared as if it were an industrial canteen, suggesting that a large number of people operated there.

They are still looking for other people who participated in the killings, and the people who masterminded the attack.