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'Organized crime has infiltrated the Prosecutor's office': The killing of a journalist and the rot in Paraguay's justice system
On February 12, 2020, Brazilian journalist Leo Veras was murdered by gunmen in the Paraguayan border town of Pedro Juan Caballero. Internal documents accessed by Forbidden Stories and partners of international consortium of journalists ‘Alianza Paraguay’ reveal how the Paraguayan Prosecutor’s Office failed to properly investigate the kingpin of the drug trafficking organization suspected of the murder, despite repeated requests for collaboration from their Brazilian partners.
- Paraguayan prosecutors charged with investigating organized crime and journalist killings repeatedly ignored or delayed responding to urgent requests to cooperate with neighboring countries
- Brazilian and Paraguayan authorities signed a joint investigative agreement to look into the case of drug kingpin “Minotauro,” believed to be behind the murder of journalist Leo Veras, but Paraguay stalled the investigation, leading the Brazilian side to consider dropping the collaboration
- Paraguay has responded to just 12 percent of Brazil’s international legal requests, and sidelined a number of key extradition cases
By Phineas Rueckert (Forbidden Stories)
July 8, 2025
With OCCRP
It was summer in Paraguay and the heat of the day had finally broken when crime reporter Lourenço “Leo” Veras sat down to dinner with his wife, son and father-in-law in the city of Pedro Juan Caballero. In this humid district abutting the border with Brazil, even family dinners aren’t safe.
Minutes after the family had started eating, two armed men entered the dining room. The gunmen chased Veras, firing 12 bullets into the journalist’s body and killing him instantly before fleeing the scene in a vehicle driven by an accomplice.
Veras’s wife, Cintia González, will never forget that date: February 12, 2020. Over five years later, she still gets emotional when she speaks about her late husband – and the fact that his alleged killers haven’t been found guilty for his assassination.
A Brazilian transplant to Paraguay, Veras was in his 50s at the time of his murder, with curly hair and a graying beard. He was one of only a handful of reporters in the area covering organized crime and drug trafficking gangs, publishing short dispatches in Porã News, the online news outlet he ran.
Veras’s death sounded alarm bells – not just about the state of press freedom in Paraguay, but also about the flaws in the justice system tasked with solving these crimes. “Everybody knew who was [behind the murder], but they shut their eyes,” González told Forbidden Stories. “I don’t know if this is how things work in other places, but this is how [the justice system operates in Paraguay.]”
In a little over five years, only one arrest has been made in relation to the case, and the individual was later released for lack of evidence. The Prosecutor’s Office was also slow to bring witnesses in for questioning; according to González, nearly a year went by before they summoned her. She says she was never given a lawyer, and despite temporary police protection in front of her house, she has since left the country for fear of reprisals.
The shoddy handling of the investigation into Veras’s killing is no outlier. In fact, Paraguay is a black hole for justice, as an investigation coordinated by Forbidden Stories alongside the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), reveals.
Lourenço “Leo” Veras in a photo he shared on Facebook in 2010. (Credit: Facebook).
According to internal documents accessed by this investigative team, Paraguayan authorities regularly failed to investigate organized crime, ignoring requests for cooperation from neighboring countries and stalling investigations into key corruption cases. They even appear to have hampered an investigation by Brazilian authorities into the man suspected of ordering the hit on Veras: a drug baron known by the alias “Minotauro.”
“I’m not saying that all prosecutors are corrupt, nor all judges, but the vast majority are,” Marta Ferrara, the director of the Paraguayan anti-corruption watchdog Semillas, said.
“Organized crime [has] infiltrated the police [and] the prosecutor’s office,” Juan Martens, an expert on organized crime in Paraguay and professor at the National University of Pilar, told Forbidden Stories. “There are people who want to do their job well, but those who are at the service of organized crime have more power.”
“It’s the conscious use of state power to produce impunity,” he added.
(The Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Paraguay did not respond to our specific questions. They provided a general statement, in Spanish, arguing that “they [lacked] the authority to request sensitive data concerning ongoing criminal cases.” The national police and individual prosecutors and former prosecutors cited in this story did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
This impunity has led to Paraguay becoming one of the most crime-ridden countries in Latin America, and journalists are on the front lines. Veras is one of roughly 19 journalists to have been killed there since 1991 – about half of them along the country’s 1,365-kilometer border with Brazil.
Nearly all of their killings are still unsolved. Yet the work of these journalists remains critical in a country that ranks fourth worldwide in the global index on organized crime – below only Myanmar, Colombia and Mexico.
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The “minotaur” of the border
A single road separates Pedro Juan Caballero (or Pedro Juan for short) from its Brazilian sister city Ponta Porã. Cars pass across the border as seamlessly as the locals alternate between Spanish, Portuguese and the Indigenous Guarani language.
Images captured on location in Pedro Juan Caballero in 2024. (Credit: Phineas Rueckert / Forbidden Stories).
It’s this interconnectedness that gives Pedro Juan the feel of an international hub. There’s a shopping center funded by Dubai, trucks carrying merchandise with license plates from different countries, and several high-rise hotels. But for all the trade and sense of proximity between the two countries that this porous border has brought, it hasn’t all been positive.
Pedro Juan is a major transit point for illegal trafficking of all kinds: drugs, weapons, counterfeit goods and human beings. This provides a cash bonanza for organized crime syndicates like the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), the largest drug gang in South America, whose ranks have swelled to tens of thousands of members since its founding in 1993. In turn, these gangs have brought a wave of violence to the city, accelerating with the 2016 murder of drug kingpin Jorge Rafaat. In 2020, Pedro Juan accounted for less than 2 percent of Paraguay’s population but roughly one-third of the country’s murders.
For journalists seeking to expose criminals and pursue justice for the families of murder victims, the dangers are extreme. “Exercising freedom of speech and doing journalistic work in Paraguay is a high-risk activity, especially along the border,” Pepe Costa, the director of the Mesa para la Seguridad de Periodistas, a press freedom watchdog in Asunción, told Forbidden Stories.
Since 1991, there have been more than 400 recorded attacks against the press in Paraguay. The majority of them came from organized crime groups such as the PCC, Costa said. And it is this group that is thought to be behind the murder of Veras.
His wife, González, believes that what made Veras an assassination target was his journalistic reporting on organized crime in the region, and his work unmasking key PCC traffickers. In one such case, Veras allegedly informed the police of the real identity of one of the group’s members who was apprehended in a routine traffic stop with a Brazilian document.
While the PCC has a relatively flat organizational hierarchy, one of its leaders – Sergio de Arruda Quintiliano Neto, also known as “Minotauro” – is suspected of having ordered Veras’s assassination from prison.
Legal documents seen by Forbidden Stories reveal the extent and structure of Minotauro’s criminal empire. According to one Brazilian document, shared with Paraguayan prosecutors, Minotauro was responsible for “multi-million-dollar cocaine transactions, including to Europe,” as well as targeted assassinations, building clandestine airstrips and purchasing explosives such as C4.
Pedro Juan was Minotauro’s playground and the center of his power structure – but the drug kingpin’s reach extended far beyond the borderlands. In 2019, Minotauro was arrested in Brazil and, the next year, sentenced to 40 years in prison. From a high-security detention facility in Brasília, he nonetheless sought to expand his influence over Paraguay’s organized crime investigations.
Minotauro allegedly bribed two prosecutors – Hugo Volpe Mazo and Armando Cantero – going as far as to slip the officials lavish gifts. According to journalistic investigations published over the course of 2020 to 2022, an 18-carat gold-plated Montblanc pen, a first-edition of The Little Prince, and $10,000 USD in cash were enough to convince the prosecutors to archive investigations into the drug dealer. (Forbidden Stories was unable to get in contact with Cantero; Mazo did not respond to our requests for comment.)
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Justice delayed, justice denied
The case of the corrupt prosecutors rocked the country and embarrassed Paraguay internationally. On paper, the justice system committed to investigating Minotauro’s empire and addressing the bribing of top officials, internal documents accessed by Forbidden Stories show. But, in practice, these commitments were only superficial.
Façade of Paraguay’s Public Ministry (Prosecutor’s Office). (Credit: Courtesy of ABC Color).
In 2020, Paraguayan and Brazilian officials began the process of renewing a Joint Investigation Team (referred to by the Spanish acronym ECI) to investigate cases related to drug trafficking and organized crime, and opened a special file in the Minotauro case.
As the agreement was negotiated, however, Paraguayan prosecutors appeared to push Brazilian investigators to tread lightly on certain subjects, asking Brazil to remove “certain references… that would be politically inappropriate” according to a draft document from October 2020 accessed by our consortium. “There are no radical changes, but rather more generic expressions that refer to authorities and former authorities in my country,” Paraguay’s Chief Prosecutor of the Directorate of International Affairs of the Public Ministry of Paraguay, Manuel Nicolás Doldán Breuer, told a member of the International Cooperation Unit of Brazil’s Attorney General’s Office.
Manuel Nicolás Doldán Breuer, Chief Prosecutor of the Directorate of International Affairs of Paraguay’s Public Ministry, made this statement, according to documents obtained by our consortium
Later that month, both sides signed the ECI. Nonetheless, less than a year into the collaboration, Brazilian prosecutors found that assistance from the Paraguayan side was sorely lacking.
In August 2021, the Deputy Attorney General of Brazil, Hindemburgo Chateaubriand Filho, asked Paraguayan authorities to inquire into the progress of the Minotauro investigation. He questioned whether it was appropriate to continue with the ECI given that they had not received any responses from their counterparts. “The attempts by the Brazilian coordinator of the ECI to obtain evidence and information from the Paraguayan authorities have proved fruitless, even after repeated requests,” Filho said.
Several months later, Alexandre Aparizi, the chief Brazilian prosecutor on the case, expressed concern that Paraguay had failed to act decisively on information from Brazil in the corrupt prosecutors’ case. He referred to a document he had requested in August 2021 – which in October had still not been received by Brazil. (In an email to Forbidden Stories, Aparizi referred us to the federal prosecutor’s press office. As of this writing, we still have not received a response.)
Forbidden Stories was able to consult with a high-placed Brazilian source familiar with the case, who confirmed the challenge of working with Paraguay. The Minotauro case was “difficult,” the source, who we are not naming for security reasons, said. This sentiment was echoed by a former prosecutor on the Paraguayan side, who stated: “All the cases that come to light regarding the fight against organized crime, which are very few at this point, are the result of a great deal of pressure.”
Sergio de Arruda Quintiliano Neto, also known as “Minotauro,” and his two fake identity documents. (Credit: Courtesy of ABC Color).
By early 2022, though, it appears that Paraguayan prosecutors had begun to cooperate with their Brazilian counterparts, planning a face-to-face meeting to address the Minotauro case. It’s unclear whether the meeting ever happened. Just months afterward, in May 2022, the lead Paraguayan prosecutor on the case, Marcelo Pecci, was killed in a military-style execution while honeymooning with his wife on a remote island off the Colombian coast.
The Minotauro case appears emblematic of a broader pattern whereby the Paraguayan authorities systematically impede investigations into organized crime. Data obtained by the Forbidden Stories consortium through a Freedom of Information request reveals that just 12 percent of Brazil’s international legal aid requests to Paraguay between 2014 and 2024 received any response, with around 7 percent being adequately addressed. (The prosecutor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, saying only that they had transferred our request to the Transparency and Access to Public Information Department.)
Other countries seem to also have struggled to get information out of the Paraguayan Prosecutor’s Office when it comes to key criminal cases, our partners at OCCRP found; among them, Argentinian prosecutors who tried to alert Paraguay about the activities of a Bolivian drug trafficker with ties to an Argentinian cartel.
This extends to investigations into the deaths of journalists, only a handful of which have been resolved to date. Since the assassination of organized crime prosecutor Pecci, Cintia González has all but given up hope that the Prosecutor’s Office will make progress on her husband Leo Veras’s case. “Nobody investigates, because that’s just how it is,” she said.
COMANDO: The Paraguayan policeman who tracked and tried to assassinate Minotauro
While Paraguay’s investigation into Minotauro following his arrest in Brazil hit roadblock after roadblock, a Brazilian Prosecutor’s Office document obtained exclusively by Forbidden Stories and its partners suggests that one Paraguayan cop had previously attempted to take justice into his own hands.
The 2019 document reveals how an individual with the codename “Comando,” identified only as a “Paraguayan public security agent,” used sophisticated surveillance tools to zero in on Minotauro’s network. His end goal? Assassinating the drug kingpin.
According to the document, Comando, who Forbidden Stories and its partners were unable to identify, accessed “restricted” Brazilian federal police intelligence information and tools, and shared the information with Jonathan Giménez Grance, nephew of the notorious drug trafficker Jarvis Pavão. The two also sought to “publicly reveal” Minotauro’s drug trafficking network in Bolivia, including farms and airstrips used for narco-jets, and were ready to pay for the capture of other drug traffickers in the region, including members of the armed group the Paraguayan People’s Party (known by the Spanish acronym EPP).
For several weeks in late 2018, the mysterious Comando and Grance watched Minotauro’s associates quite closely. The scheme was simple: Grance would send Comando phone numbers, social profiles and other information associated with Minotauro’s associates; Comando would then monitor their locations using interception tools.
Until now, the overreach of this Paraguayan policeman had not yet been publicly revealed. The National Police of Paraguay did not respond to our requests for comment.
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