The cousin of a key witness against Peru’s jailed cocaine kingpin Fernando Zevallos has been identified as one of two men found butchered in a dump close to Lima’s northern fringes. Óscar Benites, a jailed former drug trafficker for Zevallos turned U.S. DEA informant, told police his cousin’s murder was likely ordered by Zevallos or another drug mafia intended to intimidate him, daily La República reported.
Johnny Linares body was found on Thursday in the dump located on the edge of the Chillón River, in Lima’s Puente Piedra district. Daily Correo reported his body was cut into pieces with an electric saw and lodged into five or six plastic bags. His hands and feet were reportedly tied and his eyes covered, leading police to believe he was tortured by sicarios, or hit men, before he was murdered. The body of Linares’s friend was found in similar condition.
Benites learned about his cousin’s fate hours after he testified Thursday in court against Zevallos in a cocaine trafficking and racketeering trial.
During the court procceedings, Benites told Zevallos: “You lost man. You have to accept your crimes. The times when you were untouchable are over. Remember… we trafficked together, we took many shipments of drugs to the United States.”
“A family member called me in prison on Tuesday to tell me that my cousin Johnny Linares and a friend of his had disappeared,” Benites reportedly told police. “It then crossed my mind that Johnny had been killed to intimidate me,” he added. “Now I fear for my children.”
Linares’s wife, Rosa Panduro, told La República she last saw her husband on Saturday before he went out to meet friends. “Johnny was a quiet and sociable person, he never received threats, not even because he was Óscar Benites cousin,” said Panduro. “I don’t know who could have killed him like this.”
Zevallos, also known as “Lunarejo,” was arrested in November 2005 — a year and half after U.S. President George W. Bush added him to a list of international drug kingpins. That designation signaled the downfall of Zevallos’ airline, AeroContinente, which over the course of 15 years drove competing airlines out of business with artificially low fares. Prosecutors say the airline was flush with laundered cocaine profits. Benites was a key witness in the money laundering and cocaine trafficking trial against Zevallos that landed him a 20 year sentence. Before he testified, Benites survived an assassination attempt in 2004 when his food was poisoned while he was an inmate at Ancón prison.
That same year, Jesus Flores Matias, a longtime criminal underling of Zevallos’, was murdered by a gunman on a motorcycle while he waited in his car at a red light after he had repeatedly threatened publicly to expose Zevallos.
The following year, José Aguilar Ruiz (aka: “Shushupe”) was gunned down in prison in the jungle town Pucallpa. He had testified before a congressional committee that Zevallos’ operations were linked to Peru’s former intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, and warned that Zevallos would try to have him killed.
