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The first bottle—the one with the Inca Kola label still affixed—was filled with something thick and yellow-brown. The other bottle contained a dark fluid and some grainy bits. An evidence table had been carefully arranged for the cameras by the Peruvian National Police: The pair of one-liter soda bottles, a half-dozen small canisters, some coils of safety fuse, and a few sticks of dynamite—each labeled with display cards in block print. Gen. Eusebio Félix Murga, director of Peru's criminal investigations unit, balled his hand into a fist as he spoke to the gathered crowd. "We have broken up a criminal gang," he said, "which traffics human fat."
Three suspects were in custody; at least one had confessed. Police said the gang had been operating out of the highland jungle region of Huánuco, about 160 miles from Lima. There they would confront strangers on country roads and lure them into the jungle with the promise of employment. In a remote makeshift laboratory, a victim would be bludgeoned to death, his head and limbs hacked off with a machete, and his eviscerated torso hung from metal hooks. Votive candles warmed his abdominal flesh from below, so its rendered fat would drip through a funnel and collect in a basin on the floor. Reporters at the Nov. 19 press conference were shown a sketch of how all of this was supposed to work.
There was video footage, too. Twenty-nine-year-old Elmer Segundo Castillejos, who had been arrested a few weeks earlier at a bus station in Lima, was leading a column of police officers through a valley of coca plants. Gesturing with his cuffed hands, he points them to a trove of human remains—ribs, thigh bones, and the decomposing head of Abel Matos Aranda, who'd been murdered somewhere in the Andes in September.
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