2023-08-13 12:00:00
By Oscar Quispe and Alvaro Reyes
The first time that a colonel of the Peruvian Police interrogated a leader of the Aragua Train, he was surprised by the subject’s coldness and psychopathy. “What we had seen before was that the kidnappers or assailants repented when they knew they would lose their freedom or their wives were also targeted, but with those from the Tren de Aragua there was no remorse,” the high-ranking officer told this newspaper. .
The first records in Peru of this crime locomotive that originated in the Venezuelan prison of Tocorón, in 2005, date from August 2018.
That year, Migrations reported that 411,000 Venezuelans had entered our country. Of these, 80% did so with a passport and 20% with identity cards.
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Edison Agustín Barrera, alias ‘Catire’, entered with this last document, but usurping the identity of another person. From that fact, a passport began to be required of all Venezuelan migrants. This generated the appearance of clandestine routes to enter the country.
‘Catire’ was the first leader of the Aragua Train in Peru and commanded the first cell. On August 3, 2018, he was detained by the PNP in the Plaza Norte de Independencia shopping center, hours before carrying out an assault on a bank in Callao.
Every time the National Police managed to capture a leader of the Tren de Aragua, another appeared in his place. It started in 2018 with ‘catire’, who was captured that year but his arrest opened the doors to ‘Machelo’. The latter was also arrested in Colombia in 2019 and extradited to Peru, and, despite being behind bars, his place was taken by ‘Mamera’, today a fugitive. Being in hiding, ‘Mammoth’ appeared in 2022 to take his place, but he too has already fallen. Now, the new boss is alias ‘Juancho’.
Weapons, a grenade, ski mask and a car were seized from ‘Catire’ and his accomplices. His first operations in Peru were related to kidnapping, extortion and armed robbery.
The police investigation revealed that he was a heartless criminal. He would pose in photographs with the severed heads of his victims.
Although he was sentenced in 2019 to eight years in prison, the Chilean newspaper La Tercera pointed out in 2022 that this criminal was in charge of “operations on the Pacific coast of South America” from the Ancón I prison. Even the leader of the Tren de Aragua in Chile, ‘Estrella’, reported to ‘Catire’.
drugs and hash
The retail sale of drugs in Northern Lima was a business that, for the first half of 2019, was controlled by Peruvians and some Venezuelans.
However, the Aragua Train wanted to take over that criminal plaza. And, to show his power, he applied the terrifying practice of ‘the hash’.
The person in charge of this operation was the Venezuelan Freddy Romero Sulbarán, alias ‘Machelo’, and his actions shook Lima on September 9, 2019.
The newscasts woke up with macabre images. Early in the morning, in a raffia sack, the torso of a young man was found. Minutes later, the Police detected a suitcase with a head and, hours later, another dismembered body. They were the Peruvian Jafet Torrico and the Venezuelan Rubén Matamoros, both linked to retail drug trafficking.
‘Machelo’ was the intellectual author of the crimes and had to flee to Colombia because the material authors betrayed him. However, he was captured and in July 2022 extradited to Peru.
But he got his job. The retail sale of drugs in North Lima was left in the hands of another cell of the Aragua Train called Cota 905, alluding to an area of the city of Caracas.
According to data from the National Police, assassinations for hegemony or supremacy in the form of hit men have left, so far in 2023, 357 victims.
The districts with the highest incidence are San Juan de Lurigancho, Ate, San Juan de Miraflores, San Martín de Porres and Comas. 328 dead have been men and the favorite day of the week for hitmen is Friday and, against all odds, during the day.
lynx square
On January 9, 2020, a new event shocked Peruvians. This time the setting would be a well-known fast food joint.
A hitman entered Risso’s McDonald’s, on Arequipa avenue, and killed Peruvian Isaac Hilario Huamanyalli, alias ‘Cholo Isaac’. Hilario was accompanied by three women of Venezuelan nationality at the time of his murder. Why did they kill ‘Cholo Isaac’?
This man, a native of Huancavelica, lived in the United States, but was the ringleader of a pimping network installed in Lince and San Juan de Miraflores.
“Cholo Isaac” had already contacted the Tren de Aragua so that they provide him with women for his illegal business. However, that position was desired by the Venezuelan organization.
Just like in Colombia, they wanted their main income in Peru to be generated from prostitution, and ‘Cholo Isaac’ was an obstacle. Those from Tocorón took advantage of a bad move by the Peruvian pimp to accuse him of treason.
The Aragua Train appointed Luis José Rodríguez Rodríguez, alias ‘Mamera’, to make the Peruvian boss disappear and create an empire of sexual exploitation. And they did it.
‘Mamera’, since then, is the ringleader of the cell that dominates those areas. This criminal is still free —possibly in Colombia— thanks to a judicial decision despite the fact that the Police captured him in February 2020.
His criminal business begins on the border between Colombia and Venezuela. Human trafficking has become endemic.
Hector Prieto Materano “Mammoth”
Many Venezuelan girls and adolescents have left their cities of origin due to hunger, agreeing to be transferred to Lima by the criminal network with the promise of work, but ended up being enslaved (see interview).
The Ombudsman’s Office and the NGO CHS Alternativo consider that human trafficking is one of the illegal businesses that generates the highest profits of illegal origin in the world. They estimate that, in Peru, this illegal activity moves the sum of US$1.3 billion a year.
The arrival of ‘Mammoth’
Héctor Prieto Materano, alias ‘Mamut’, already weighed 170 kg when he left Tocorón prison to flee to Brazil in 2017 and then arrive in Peru at the beginning of 2022, after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Aragua Train aimed to control the prostitution places in Lima Norte, exactly in the Fiori area, in San Martín de Porres, and the vicinity of the Megaplaza in Los Olivos and Independencia.
By that date, retail drug trafficking was already in the hands of those from Aragua thanks to the work of ‘Machelo’ in 2019.
The business was going so well that just a few months later it allied with another cell from Aragua that had control of the Cercado de Lima, in the Zepita street. And so, by the middle of last year, ‘Mammoth’s’ empire of sexual exploitation, hitmen and extortion had spread to as many as four districts.
By the end of 2022, the factions of the Tren de Aragua that dominated the lucrative business of prostitution entered into a dispute.
A war started between ‘Mamut’ and ‘Mamera’ for Risso. Already in 2023, the news of murders of women in areas of sexual exploitation were daily bread.
Last January, the police team of Colonel PNP Víctor Revoredo managed to capture ‘Mamut’. However, with his fall the war did not end.
At the beginning of April, ‘Mamut’ ordered an attack with firearms on one of the safe houses —in the middle of the residential area of the Santa Beatriz urbanization— of the faction of the Tren de Aragua that dominates Lince.
That would be the last order, because, at the end of that month, the INPE, on the recommendation of the Police, transferred “Mamut” to the maximum security prison of Challapalca, in Tacna.
the new kingpin
Already in Challapalca, the leadership of the areas of Lima Norte and Zepita had been abandoned. Control remained in the hands of ‘Mamut’ hitmen. That is why, from Tocorón, the Tren de Aragua decides to send another heavyweight of the organization: ‘Juancho’.
This character —of whom there are traces of his existence but his identity is unknown— also had the mission of putting an end to the confrontation between the factions of Aragua.
It was precisely the well-known hitman ‘Maldito Cris’ who was in charge of ensuring the safety of ‘Juancho’ upon his arrival in Lima.
On June 11, just a week before his death, Cris and girlfriend Wanda del Valle were at “Juancho’s” 34th birthday party in Canta, Sierra de Lima.
But, according to the investigations, that meeting was not only to celebrate another year of life of the newly arrived Venezuelan criminal, but also an important convention so that the plans for the Aragua Train in Lima continue their course without confrontations.
The Police continues to make its effort to capture the most seasoned Venezuelan criminals who have proven to be unrecoverable elements for society.
‘Satanás’, hitman who fled from Peru, will be prosecuted in Chile
A silent police deployment was recorded on July 3 in Chile. It was not a capture operation or the protection of some dignitary, but the transfer of a dangerous member of the Tren de Aragua to the maximum security prison in Santiago. A hitman who passed through Peru. His name is Hernán David Landaeta Garlotti, but he is known as ‘Satan’.
‘Satanás’ was imprisoned in Lima, but after the judiciary ordered him to appear with restrictions, he fled to Chile.
The southern country learned who Landaeta was in 2022, when he was arrested in Iquique, along with six other people, for engaging in the illegal entry of foreigners.
According to the newspaper La Tercera, the transfer of “Satanás” was by land from the Alto Hospicio prison, in Iquique, to the Chilean capital.
During the 1,800 km journey, police officers from the Special Operations Group were mobilized in three vehicles, two of them guarding the one that was transporting the prisoner.
Eight officers surrounded the offender, who was wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet, and was handcuffed by hands and feet. In Santiago he was held in a cell where he remains alone, with access to a bathroom and shower.
He stays in Chile
Peru suffered ‘Satan’ in his most ruthless form. In 2018, at just 21 years old, the criminal shot to kill the largest PNP Albert Grajeda Puma.
Grajeda was trying to stop the Venezuelan criminal and his three accomplices, after they robbed a warehouse in San Martín de Porres, in Lima. The officer was injured.
For this fact, the Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office requested the extradition of Landaeta Garlotti to be prosecuted, and the request reached Chilean hands last May.
However, Chile has decided to prosecute the 25-year-old criminal. Last February, the Public Ministry of that country even managed to have the repatriation request sent by the Venezuelan government rejected.
According to Peruvian tax sources, the attempted murder will be shelved momentarily and Hernán Landaeta will become a stubborn prisoner until his extradition is made possible. Although it is healthier for the country to get rid of this ‘Satan’ once and for all.
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