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Peru - Gang Members Arrested for Harvesting Human Fat

by Barbara McPherson | November 22, 2009 at 05:08 pm

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Three gang members arrested for harvesting human fat have confessed to killing five people. They claim that they harvested their bodies for fat which they then sold for high prices. When the gang members were arrested they were in possession of liquid human fat which they expected to sell for about $60 000 per gallon on this very black market. Gang members claim that the human fat eventually ends up in cosmetics made in Europe. Medical experts say that there is no market for human fat.

Elmer Segundo Castillejos, one of the suspects in the fat harvesting gang, described in grisly detail how the gang went about their business.

At a news conference, police showed reporters two bottles of fat recovered from the suspects and a photo of the rotting head of a 27-year-old male victim. Suspect Elmer Segundo Castillejos, 29, led police to the head, recovered in a coca-growing valley last month, Mejia said.

Mejia said Castillejos recounted how the gang cut off its victims’ heads, arms and legs, removed the organs, then suspended the torsos from hooks above candles that warmed the flesh as fat dripped into tubs below.

Six members of the gang remain at large, Mejia said. Among them was the band’s alleged leader, Hilario Cudena, 56, who Castillejos told police has been killing people to extract human fat for more than three decades.

While the gang members under arrest have confessed to murdering five people, there are reports of at least 60 people missing in Huanuco Province alone.

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Pythiian1

at 17:38 on November 22nd, 2009

It's barbaric and gross.

Hugh Askew

at 18:39 on November 22nd, 2009

i hope not.

Roy C

at 18:59 on November 22nd, 2009

This is the tragic reality of that scene in Monty Python's "Meaning of Life" where they come to "harvest" the organs of organ donors.

I am reading From Darwin to Hitler. The book tells the tale of the development of eugenics from Darwinian thought and the subsequent use of this by Hitler.

So, for me, this story is very timely. The devaluing of human life is a result of a core principle of what I consider Darwin's overreach. He went too far in terms of his apparent understanding of the relation of evolution and the "survival of the fittest" to human ethics.

I don't think that Darwin is the problem here in the immediate sense that these gangs got this way from reading about evolution. These people are primitive psychopaths and sophisticated psychopaths who have succumbed to greed.

This story grabs us because it is such a combination of primitive horror show and high-tech use of body parts for the benefit of other individuals, a kind of high-tech cannibalism going on in a fallen world.