Relationship between Economic Crisis and Crime

    Barracas, where an 88 year old woman was beatent to death.

I pride myself in having a different take on survival and preparedness in this website.   Here we go beyond the best gun, the bets knife and the best whatever (even if we do that too) but we go beyond into the finer details of how disasters and SHTF events go down.

In this case yet again Argentina is a source of valuable information, like a lab rat of what happens when societies go to hell. Unfortunately for the people living there, it’s as if there’s a crisis every 5 years and a collapse every decade or so.

I recently wrote about yet another financial crisis taking place in Argentina. The currency devaluated sharply after investors fled en masse and panic spread across the society. There were rumours of “another 2001”, when banks closed the doors, froze accounts and stole people’s money.  Truth is that this time the situation is pretty different and objectively speaking the conditions aren’t there to expect a bank run and liquidity problem.
Still, people remember and they feared another “corralito”. Of course the opposition, led by the leftists Kirchnerists that used to be in office do their best to spread these rumors and fuel panic as much as possible.

Because of this a lot of people closed their bank accounts and took their money home. What happened then?
Crime and robberies. A lot of them. In recent days there’s been a clear spike, fueled by this opportunity for criminals to get that cash no longer kept in banks.

There was a woman in Mar del Plata who closed an account and when she left the bank, she got mugged and they took her life savings. Seems it was an insider job by someone in the bank, which is fairly common. Another woman, 88 years old, was beaten to death in Barracas, Buenos Aires. Beatings and torture are fairly common practices so as to make sure the victim gives up any cash they may keep hidden.
So, unfortunately that’s whats going on right now in Argentina. Sad to see how little things have changed and how while history may not be repeating itself this time, it sure does rhyme.
FerFAL

Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”