It looked like any other house in a residential neighborhood in the city of Trujillo, in northern Peru: a three-story structure, with iron railings and varnished wooden doors. But inside, it concealed a cell.
The property had been rented in July by a man who said his name was Joyce. Later, other occupants arrived. They bricked up part of the basement entrance and built a bunker, which measured eight feet long and three feet wide.
It had a steel door with a digital lock. To fit through the entrance, you had to crawl inside.
There was no natural light or ventilation. To keep whoever was locked inside alive, the kidnappers left two oxygen tanks. It was the closest thing to a tomb.
Jenss Lara, a 31-year-old gold trader, would spend almost 36 hours there. His captivity — reconstructed through the statement he gave to Peru’s Attorney General’s Office, which EL PAÍS has obtained — offers an inside look at the methods used by gangs that kidnap people to collect million-dollar ransoms in Peru.
For years, Trujillo — a city with a population of a million inhabitants, on Peru’s northern coast — has been plagued by contract killings and extortion. Gangs like Los Pulpos (The Octopuses) emerged there. They have turned the act of extorting “protection money” from merchants into a criminal enterprise.
Since 2024, the city has been under a state of emergency. The fight against crime was a central theme of the campaign that helped Keiko Fujimori win the presidency this past June. Early in October, the president announced the creation of the Unified Command, which will bring together elements of the Armed Forces and the National Police to combat organized crime.
In the early hours of August 30, Lara was returning home in his pickup truck with four other people, after a night out drinking in Trujillo. Men posing as police officers intercepted his vehicle and beat him into submission. They handcuffed him and covered his mouth and nose with duct tape before forcing him into another car.
During the drive, Lara, blindfolded, tried to estimate how long he had been in the vehicle. It was the only thing — as he would later say — that he could still control.
At the bunker, the kidnappers shoved him down the basement steps and tore off his clothes until he was left in nothing but his underwear. When the duct tape began to choke him, one of the captors inserted a device into his nose so that he could breathe. Lara begged them to loosen the handcuffs. In response, the kidnappers made small cuts on his chest to silence him.
Random
Hours later, they held a phone to his ear. The person on the other end asked if he had any ties to a criminal organization. Lara denied this. Then, the man on the phone threatened to kill him.
“Look, I don’t have a problem with you and I don’t have a problem with your family. What I need right now is money. For me, this job is worth $2 million.”
Lara tried to convince him that he had been out of the mining business for years and that such an amount was impossible to come up with. But the man didn’t believe him. He assured Lara that he’d been tracking him for some time.
“Unfortunately, your family has to pay,” the voice warned. “Whether they have to part with their money, borrow it, whatever, that’s not my problem.”
In the basement, Lara’s captors loosened his handcuffs. His feet were tied and he needed help to get up. Later, they forced him to record a proof-of-life video. He had to warn his father that the deadline was 8 p.m. that night. If the money didn’t arrive, they would begin mutilating him.
At 7:58 p.m. — two minutes before the deadline — a kidnapper asked Lara which hand he used more. When Lara asked why, he replied that they were going to start cutting off his fingers and demanded that he choose one, or they would do it for him.
Since his left hand was numb from the pressure of the handcuffs, Lara chose his pinky finger: “I told him: cut the little finger off, on my left hand.” He thought that, having lost feeling in it, there would be less pain.
That night, the threat was not carried out. The captors extended the deadline until midnight. If his family didn’t pay, they would cut off two of Lara’s fingers. It was then that they forced him to record a second video, in order to prove that his hands were still intact.
Later, one of the guards told him: “Your family loves you very much. It looks like you’re going to get out of here alive.”
Lara felt relieved. He used his knees to pull down his blindfold and saw the place where they had locked him up. There was a blue inflatable mattress, two oxygen tanks, a bucket and a tiny door, barely one and a half feet wide. He understood that there was no way out.
Escape from the bunker
His father, Eleuterio Lara, negotiated directly with the gang and ruled out going to the police, for fear the kidnappers would cut off his son’s fingers. The ransom was paid on August 31.
Before releasing him, the captors gave Jenss Lara a tracksuit and a T-shirt. They warned him that he would get out alive, so long as he didn’t do anything “stupid.” Lara was dragged from the cell and put in the trunk of a car. During the drive, he heard one of the kidnappers say that they were “making sure the coast was clear.”
About 20 minutes later, they pushed him out of the car. They ordered him to stay put on the ground. It was 3 p.m. Lara waited 15 minutes before ripping off his blindfold. Shortly after, his father and brother arrived to pick him up.
When he got home, Lara received devastating news: his four companions had been murdered the same morning of his abduction. He was too drunk when he was kidnapped to realize what had happened.
The court ordered pretrial detention for nine members of Los Pulpos for Lara’s kidnapping, but several of the people involved remain at large. While authorities captured the organization’s leader, Jhonsson Cruz, in Bolivia this past September, the gang continues to operate on the northern coast of Peru, according to police.
Keiko Fujimori’s administration celebrated the initial arrests as a major police victory. But Lara was only released after his family negotiated and paid the ransom.
The kidnapping business
Lara’s captivity was by no means an isolated incident. Kidnapping for ransom has become a lucrative business for criminal gangs in Peru, which are now finding new victims among merchants and small business owners. “It’s a very large illegal industry,” says former deputy interior minister Ricardo Valdés.
According to Valdés, the gangs’ targets include mineral traders who operate informally and who, in some cases, prefer to negotiate and pay a ransom, rather than reveal the origin or extent of their income.
According to Peru’s Attorney General’s Office, reports of kidnappings in Peru rose from 2,199 in 2018 to 4,918 in 2025, representing an increase of 124%. Between January and September of this year, another 3,910 reports were registered, or more than 14 per day. The records don’t distinguish between kidnappings for ransom and those motivated by other reasons, such as reprisals or personal conflicts.
The profile of the victims has also changed. Julio Corcuera, a lawyer and expert on organized crime, explains that, in the 1990s, kidnappers targeted prominent business owners, bankers and members of wealthy families. Now, they choose restaurant owners, merchants, moneylenders and miners — Peruvians who are beginning to prosper. To be a viable target, all you need is enough money to pay a ransom. “Extortion kidnapping has become democratized,” Corcuera sighs.
A review of 21 kidnappings that occurred in Peru between 2025 and 2026, conducted by EL PAÍS, using official reports and journalistic accounts, supports this assertion. The victims include small business owners, mine workers and even teenagers. In some cases, the ransom demanded was $10,000. In others, it exceeded $1 million.
One such case is that of Hemerson Carrasco, the owner of a bakery supply company, who was kidnapped on September 23 as he left his business in Lima. His wife alerted the police, who found him the next day after tracking his cell phone. “My brother was in shock. What we know is that a large sum of money was stolen from him,” his brother, Eddie, explained.
Held captive for 11 days
When Iván Díaz saw the news of Jenss Lara’s kidnapping on television, he was reminded of his own past horror. In 2023, this 59-year-old moneylender from Trujillo was held captive for 11 days by the same gang. To force Díaz’s family to pay the ransom, his captors sliced off two of his fingers and slashed his ears.
Three years later, Díaz still feels trapped. He dreams of demons that torment him. Every noise makes him tremble. In 2025, he suffered a stroke. He continues to undergo rehabilitation therapy.
He is a man with a strong jaw and gray hair. He speaks about the torture that was inflicted on him with a surprising nonchalance, while having breakfast in an office with white walls and metal shelves. “They made a cut here and another here. One day, on one ear… and another day, on the other,” he says. “As the days went by, and since the payment was taking too long, they cut off two of my fingers.”
He hasn’t forgotten the date: October 23, 2023. That day, criminals wearing police vests dragged him out of his business in downtown Trujillo and locked him in a room with a cot and a sealed window. He spent two days there in darkness, blindfolded.
The kidnappers contacted one of his cousins and demanded three million soles (about $800,000). When the money didn’t arrive, they began mutilating Díaz with a box cutter. After cutting him, they poured alcohol on the wounds and photographed them, sending the pictures to his family as an ultimatum.
In the end, they paid $260,000. The authorities later determined that Los Pulpos were behind the kidnapping. Three years later, the same gang murdered Jenss Lara’s four companions and imprisoned him in a bunker.
Iván Díaz continues to run his business, but now, he travels with security. “At any moment, they can jump you and drag you away,” he says.
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