Argentinian police have recaptured three fugitive prisoners convicted of drug-related killings, a security source said, ending a 13-day manhunt across the country’s vast farm belt.
The search has gripped Argentina and shone a light on the country’s growing role as a transit point for narco gangs smuggling South American drugs to the US and Europe.
In an operation carried live at times by television channels, hundreds of security agents, including police commandos and sharpshooters, hunted down the men in the grains province of Santa Fe, north of the capital Buenos Aires.
Víctor Schialli and brothers Martín and Cristian Lanatta had been on the run since escaping from a maximum-security jail on 27 January. Martín Lanatta was taken mid-morning outside the town of Cayasta, 354 miles north of the capital, after the vehicle the three were travelling in flipped over. The other two men escaped on foot.
“They’ve got the other two as well,” said the security source who was unauthorized to speak publicly before an official statement from the interior ministry.
Police officers borrowed horses from a farmer to pursue Schialli and Cristian Lanatta through waterlogged fields and cornered both in the early afternoon, the official said. State news agency Telam also reported the three men had been seized.
The trio were convicted over the 2008 killing of three businessmen in the pharmaceutical industry who were allegedly linked to an ephedrine trafficking gang, in a high-profile case dubbed “the triple murder”. Ephedrine is used for the production of methamphetamine.
Their escape came two weeks after President Mauricio Macri took office. The daring prison break raised suspicions of outside help and a blame game erupted between Macri and officials in the government of the former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
“Drug-trafficking has grown in the last decade like never before in our country because of the inaction or complicity of the last government,” Macri said this week, vowing to take on the traffickers.
In August, two months before the presidential election, Martín Lanatta alleged Fernández’s cabinet chief, Aníbal Fernández, was involved in the ephedrine trade and ordered the triple murder.
Aníbal Fernández has rigorously denied the accusation and prosecutors have not investigated the claim. The then ruling party said the allegation was designed to hurt its presidential candidates and derail Aníbal Fernández’s bid to become governor of Buenos Aires province.
The manhunt intensified on Thursday, when TV footage showed commandos snaking through swaths of cornfields and searching outhouses as federal and provincial security forces closed the dragnet on the fugitives.