Peru kidnapping gangs build bunkers and price ransoms against families' borrowing power

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Bunkers, ransoms and threats of mutilation: Peru’s kidnapping surge english.elpais.com

A rented house in a residential neighborhood of Trujillo concealed a bunker — eight feet long, three wide, a steel door with a digital lock, no light and no ventilation, and two oxygen tanks left inside to keep whoever was caged there breathing. Jenss Lara, a 31-year-old gold trader, spent almost 36 hours inside it, according to a statement he gave to Peru's Attorney General's Office that EL PAÍS has obtained. Men posing as police intercepted his pickup after a night out, beat him, taped his mouth and nose, and drove him blindfolded across the city. When he begged for looser handcuffs, they cut small incisions into his chest. The voice on the phone held to his ear had done its arithmetic: "For me, this job is worth $2 million." When Lara insisted he had left the mining business years before, the caller said he had been tracking him — and that whether his family had to borrow the money "is not my problem." A proof-of-life video gave his father a deadline of 8 p.m., after which the kidnappers promised to begin mutilating him. Trujillo, a northern city of about one million, has been under a state of emergency since 2024, plagued by contract killings and extortion rackets run by gangs like Los Pulpos. The kidnapping wave has moved the protection economy down from bus companies and mining firms into ordinary households, with ransoms now sized against what a family can borrow. President Keiko Fujimori, elected in June on an anti-crime platform, announced a Unified Command in early October merging the armed forces and national police against organized crime. Peru signed onto Washington's Shield of the Americas security pact weeks earlier. The caller told Lara the ransom was worth $2 million; the bunker he was kept in measured eight feet by three.