Police and prosecutors in Colombia continue to investigate who ordered the assassination of one of Paraguay’s top anti-mafia prosecutors in May last year.
Police in Colombia, Venezuela and El Salvador have arrested 10 alleged participants in the plot to assassinate Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci on May 10 last year.
Police and the Prosecutor General’s Office claim that associates of the Medellin mafia took a week to recruit an assassin squad and plan Pecci’s assassination in the Caribbean city of Cartagena.
Who ordered an financed the hit has yet to be clarified, however, especially after the extradition of one of the main suspects from El Salvador on Saturday.
The Colombo-Venezuelan hit squad
Margareth Chacon (Image: El Salvador’s Justice and Public Security Ministry)
Following the extradition of Margareth Chacon, nine of the members of the Colombo-Venezuelan hit squad are in jail in Colombia and one in Venezuela.
Chacon arrived in Bogota almost a week after the arrest of her husband, Andres Perez, and her brother-in-law, Ramon Perez.
The Perez brothers plead guilty to homicide after seeing compelling evidence indicating that they coordinated the 10-day operation that ended Pecci’s life with Chacon.
The latest detainee denied her involvement in the assassination plot.
The intelligence operation
The Perez brothers (Image: Prosecutor General’s Office)
Chacon and the Perez brothers were arrested after a six-month intelligence operation by police intelligence unit DIJIN and the prosecution’s Technical Investigation Unit.
The three weren’t considered suspects until the arrest of the assassination squad’s alleged logistics chief, Francisco Luis Correa, in June last year.
The Perez brothers knew Correa because they used to be members of the now-defunct paramilitary group “Los Paisas,” according to the prosecution.
Shortly after his arrest, Correa told investigators that Ramon Perez called him about a “job” on April 30 last year and specified that the job was killing Pecci during a meeting in Medellin two days later.
Pecci had to die “because the prosecutor was being a nuisance for their boss” in Paraguay, according to Correa’s testimony.
He imprisoned his brother for four years and the prosecutor was going after his assets and drug trafficking, they told me.
Correa testimony
Following Correa’s accusations, DIJIN had a second look at CCTV footage from Cartagena, which allegedly confirmed that Chacon and the Perez brothers were in Cartagena on the day of Pecci’s assassination.
In the meantime, intelligence officials began tracking the movements of Chacon and the Perez brothers.
Migration Colombia’s registry showed that Chacon had traveled to El Salvador more than 100 times and had traveled to Venezuela and Panama on multiple occasions.
According to DIJIN, Chacon frequently wired money from El Salvador to her husband in Bogota, suggesting that she may not be the housewife that she claimed to be.
The leads abroad
The evidence and testimonies against Chacon and the Perez brothers suggest that they are part of an drug trafficking network that doesn’t just operate in Paraguay, but throughout Latin America.
Two days after the assassination, former National Police director Jorge Luis Vargas said that the PCC, an organized crime group from Brazil, was suspected of ordering the assassination of Pecci.
In August, President Gustavo Petro said that fugitive Uruguayan drug trafficker Sebastian Marset had ordered the murder.
Marset, an alleged boss of the First Uruguayan Cartel (PCU), rejected this allegation.
Last week, newspaper El Tiempo reported that authorities suspected Miguel Insfran, a fugitive PCU boss from Paraguay. of having ordered Pecci’s assassination.
According to El Tiempo, its intelligence sources believed that Insfran may be hiding in Colombia’s northern La Guajira province.
The latest narco who allegedly ordered the Cartagena hit may just as well have fled to Venezuela or El Salvador, the newspaper reported.
Meanwhile, authorities have yet to speculate about the origin of the $320,000 the Perez brothers allegedly gave Correa to finance the assassination.
