Prosecutor’s death harks back to dark days of cartels

THE head of Colombia’s police has said it was likely a “transnational hit”. The victim, Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci, known for fighting organised crime, was gunned down on the island of Baru near the Caribbean city of Cartagena last Tuesday while on his honeymoon with his wife, the prominent Paraguayan journalist Claudia Aguilera.

In a scene that could have come from a movie, the two assassins arrived either by boat or jet ski at the resort where the couple were staying before shooting Pecci.

While the motive for the attack remains unclear, Pecci reportedly investigated some of Paraguay’s most high-profile organised crime cases, where local criminal groups often work with larger Colombian and Brazilian cartels.

General Jorge Luis Vargas, head of Colombia’s national police, told reporters the “big hypothesis” is that Pecci’s killing was likely related to his prosecutions in Paraguay, which often focused on high-stakes, anti-money laundering and anti-drug cases.

“We’re talking about a transnational crime system, highly planned, in which it’s probable that a large amount of money was spent to carry out the murder,” said Vargas.

Paraguay is South America’s largest marijuana-producing country and is an important transition hub in the smuggling of cocaine around the world. That Pecci had recently participated in operation Ultranza Py against drug trafficking in Paraguay leaves criminologists to conclude that this was the kind of activity that would make him a target.

“It is difficult to establish a link as to why, although everything points to the fact that he harmed the interests of the criminal cocaine-trafficking market that operates from Paraguay and uses the entire Paraguay-Parana waterway to take the drug out through the ports of Buenos Aires or Montevideo on its way to European, Australian and Asian markets. It is the strongest hypothesis as to why he was murdered,” Juan Martens Molas, criminologist and director of Paraguay’s Comparative Institute of Social and Criminal Sciences, told the Spanish language newspaper El Pais.

Whoever was behind Pecci’s shooting, it is one of the latest in a surge of contract killings of Paraguayan officials. Many Colombians, meanwhile, likewise fear it could mark a return to the darkest moments of their own country’s history when drug lords such as Pablo Escobar could order brazen murders of public officials.