The Global Hunt for ‘Narco Millennial’ Sebastián Marset

Rumors were rampant about the whereabouts of one of the world’s most wanted fugitives — Sebastián Marset—wanted internationally by Interpol since May of last year. Some said the baby-faced, soccer playing, concert promoter who allegedly moonlights as a transnational cocaine kingpin was in Brazil. Others believed he was in Mozambique. 

But in late July, when hundreds of heavily-armed cops finally tracked him to a luxurious house in Bolivia where he’d been living a lavish public life under a fake identity, Marset was in the wind again. Authorities would only catch a whiff of him in typical Marset fashion: via a video message sent to the press denying various allegations against him and mocking the police.

“I’m too intelligent for you. So as not to say that you are very stupid, it sounds a little better to say that I am more intelligent,” said the 32-year-old Uruguayan national, who has escaped court cases from Dubai to Paraguay in recent years. He claimed that he was no longer in Bolivia “so you can stop looking for me there, well, if you want, keep hunting me, but I’m telling you that I’m far away.”

Marset, who remains on the lam, was implicated in February 2022 as the top boss of a far reaching cocaine smuggling and money laundering ring allegedly spanning continents and involving everything from evangelical churches to politicians. He’s reportedly known by numerous pseudonyms: like the King of the South which has been found printed in Arabic on bricks of cocaine seized in container ships in Montevideo; or the Man of a Thousand Faces (Hombre de los Mil Rostros) for his ability to seemingly endlessly obtain fake identities and passports from different countries to evade arrest. Marset was also directly called out by name by Colombian President Gustavo Petro as the suspected mastermind of the highly publicized gangland hit of Paraguayan organized crime prosecutor Marcelo Pecci, who was assassinated beside his new wife while celebrating their honeymoon on a beach near Cartagena in May 2022.

But after the bungled capture in Bolivia on July 29, the extent of Marset’s activity—and infamy—in the region became apparent in the following days and weeks. He allegedly lived openly in the city of Santa Cruz and traveled using a false Brazilian passport under the assumed alias of Luis Pablo Amorín Santos. He also sometimes used a Bolivian passport with the name Gabriel de Souza Beumer. He reportedly engaged in real estate deals that the prosecution later claimed were money laundering fronts and even began playing as a forward for second division Bolivian soccer team Los Leones El Torno F.C., appearing in several locally televised games since April wearing number 23.

All this while he was on the run for allegedly playing a linchpin role in the global cocaine trade. Marset is a “broker,” according to Paraguayan security analyst José María Amarilla. “Someone who connects routes, organizes modes of transportation, but does not intervene directly in the production or selling at the end.”

Amarilla told VICE News that in recent years another name bubbled in South American security circles more than others, The Manager of the Hidrovía (El Gerente de la Hidrovía in Spanish), The Hidrovía is a massive waterway that stretches through the heart of South America, starting in Brazil, and flowing through Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina, before reaching Uruguay. For centuries it served as the highway between cultures and states for commercial and transit. This supposed Manager of the Hidrovía was said to have brought together crime clans from across the region in a plan to move cocaine principally to Europe. It is believed this mysterious cocaine magnate is Marset.

How Marset moved so quickly to the top of the international cocaine trade “despite being very young,” Amarilla said, is “the central issue.” However,  the decade-long trail of evidence he has left in his criminal wake illustrates his violent rise and continued ability to largely evade justice.

“King of the South”

Little is known about Marset’s early life. But by the age of 22, he was already on police radars when he was prosecuted on drug trafficking offenses in Uruguay related to the seizure of hundreds of kilos of weed in a joint operation by Uruguayan and Paraguayan authorities in 2012 and 2013. Juan Domingo Viveros Cartes, the uncle of Horacio Cartes, who was president of Paraguay from 2013 to 2018, also went to prison for being the pilot of a plane carrying cannabis destined for Marset. Just months after going to prison, marijuana was legalized in Uruguay. 

Marset spent roughly five years behind bars in Uruguay where it is believed he began making inroads with members of other organized crime groups. Although he faced other outstanding charges, due to a clerical error, Marset was released after finishing his drug trafficking sentence in 2018. But he was arrested again later that year after the August 14 murder of a man in a beachside suburb roughly 30 miles west of Montevideo. 

The victim, Alfredo Simón Rondán Silva, went with his brother-in-law to meet a childhood friend, according to the lead investigator. During a request that Marset be detained for 60 days as authorities investigated, the official alleged that the murder was related to a drug debt. The brother-in-law of Rondán Silva and principal witness reportedly said that he was asked to stay in the car by the victim, and when he was changing seats, he heard a gunshot. He claimed to have seen a man shoot Rondán Silva, but it was too dark to see the killer’s face. 

Marset was released when no charges were made, and promptly left Uruguay. He stayed on the move, at least between Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina, as well as potentially abroad. At some point in 2019 Marset began traveling under his Bolivian identity: Gabriel de Souza Beumer, according to Uruguayan newspaper El Observador who cited 500 pages of case files by Paraguay’s National Anti-Narcotics Department (SENAD for its Spanish acronym) about Marset’s movements between 2019 and 2022. The passport was reportedly issued through a government office in Santa Cruz, where Marset evaded arrest just a few weeks ago.

Authorities again caught wind of Marset in November of 2019, but it wasn’t that hard to track him down if you just googled his name. That month several odd promotional articles appeared in quick succession on four fishy news websites in Ecuador and Colombia about a company called Mastian Productions, with its star producer—you guessed it, Sebastián Marset—posing in a series of photos, sometimes with a smug smile, others with a serious look and his arms crossed confidently. 

“Sebastián Marset has become known throughout Latin America and the world, a concert producer with a high sense of creativity when it comes to impacting and presenting his events with the most advanced production elements,” one article claimed. 

It said that the then 28-year-old had 15 years experience putting on music concerts, and touted Marset as a talented musician in his own right. He reportedly began performing as a singer in the Urbano genre at 15, before playing guitar in the band of renowned Uruguayan folk rocker Jaime Roos, the article stated. Local media later proved the second claim was false. 

Over the next few years, the company and others linked to Marset reportedly worked with famous acts and produced events with artists like Romeo Santos, the lead singer of the popular New York bachata group Aventura, as well as other popular Spanish language acts like Rombai and Chichí Peralta. He also held a number of events related to Paraguay’s prominent evangelical church movement. His family didn’t hide their wealth as they had a high end vehicle garage and Marset reportedly personally owned a red Mercedes Benz GLE 350D, a souped-up white Toyota Land Cruiser TDI, and a white BMW X6.

But Marset’s most public affinity was surely soccer. By 2021, he began playing for a second division Paraguayan league team called Deportivo Capiatá. It was later alleged that he gave the team’s coach at the time a piece of land, a house, and two yachts for the opportunity to play. Marset played six games as number 10, reportedly arriving to practice in fancy cars, one time gifting his teammate Jului Irrazabal 10 grand in U.S. bills, which he used to go “out to parties” with other players. His teammates didn’t know who he was, El Observador reported, saying he was just called “El Uruguayo.” After the scandal, the vice president of the team said that Marset played his last game for the club on May 29 2021. Marset stopped showing up to practice without any notice.

Marset also had an interest in the business of soccer. He allegedly invested in two teams, Rubio Ñu and River Plate de Paraguay, and engaged in other business deals around remodeling one of the stadiums. He also reportedly brought four players to Rubio Ñu that were later sold to a team in Greece called Atlético Trikala. Authorities later said that they believed Marset’s dealing in the soccer world were actually money laundering fronts run through a Uruguayan man named Federico Ezequiel Santoro Vasallo, the alleged financial brains of the plot. Some of the Marset family allegedly joined the business too, including his wife, younger half brother, brother-in-law, and his sister’s partner, according to authorities, although Marset continuously denies in his videos that they are engaged in any wrongdoing. 

Regardless, for the Marsets, business seemed to be booming, but where exactly all that money was coming from is still not entirely clear.

It’s believed that Marset forged connections on each step of the cocaine trade, from Bolivian producers to overseas buyers, as well as being involved in laundering the money after. He reportedly had some sort of connections to the Brazilian-based Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) or First Command of the Capital in English, arguably the largest organized crime syndicate in South America. “It is very unlikely that anyone could operate on a large scale without a relationship with the PCC,” said the security analyst Amarilla.

Marset is also known to work closely with the Paraguay-based Insfrán clan, headed by Miguel Ángel Insfrán a.k.a Tio Rico, the other alleged conspirator in the Pecci murder. He’s been rumored to have connections with other organizations in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, Amarilla said, but “we don’t know precisely what degree of connections these kinds of much stronger organizations have with Marset.”

The First Uruguayan Cartel?

Marset is said to have a tattoo of the acronym for the Primer Cartel Uruguayo (PCU)—The First Uruguayan Cartel. Hundreds of kilos of coke were also found plastered with stickers of the initials of the upstart organization in 2019.

Nicolás Centurión, an Uruguayan organized crime researcher and analyst at the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE) in Montevideo told VICE News that he doubted whether the PCU is a real thing, per say, in the way other organized crime “cartels” exist in countries like Mexico, El Salvador, and Brazil.

“Now we see that also as an organization—or at least what he does—has great scope. Of all the stages that he carries out in drug trafficking, not just the issue of production, collection, transportation, export, and then also money laundering,” he said. “It cannot be said that there is a Uruguayan cartel in Uruguay, but it can be said that one of the most renowned people lately and who was in all sections of the production chain, let's say, for a cartel, so to speak, is a Uruguayan.”

But as quick as Marset and the so-called PCU seemed to take root, the first few hatchets chopped at its trunk. In August 2019, German authorities seized a record 4.5 tons of cocaine in Hamburg that arrived on a container ship that left from Montevideo, believed to be connected to Marset. Then, the arrest of Paraguayan congresswoman Cynthia Tarrago on November 21 later that year in Newark. Tarrago laundered hundreds of thousands of dollars of undercover money, as part of an extensive investigation into an illicit money laundering network, as well as offering to sell the undercover U.S. agents cheap cocaine from her contacts in Paraguay. Tarrago pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 33 months. 

There were also three European seizures in Antwerp, Belgium and Rotterdam, Netherlands of more than 17 tons of cocaine between June 2020 and October 2021 that were linked to Marset. The two coastal cities account for the vast majority of ship traffic to Western Europe each day. Only a small fraction of the millions of containers that pass through the ports are checked. 

In November 2022, Belgian authorities announced that they’d seized a record breaking 90 tons of cocaine that year, and were worried that criminal groups would try to steal it back because the vast amount of coke was too much to incinerate quickly. Rotterdam and Antwerp have both reeled from violence in recent years as ground zero of a seemingly ongoing battle for control between various European-based crime syndicates.

There’s also been “a considerable rise in cocaine shipments” busted in Uruguayan ports, Centurión said. One massive bust of 444 kilos of cocaine in the capital of Montevideo in November had some bricks stamped with the YouTube logo, while others had stickers labeled with the words ملك الجنوب — “the King of the South” in Arabic.

The Man of a Thousand Faces

Marset’s jet setting lifestyle was working wonderfully, until it wasn’t. He’d used a false naturalized Paraguayan passport under his own name in and out of Dubai three times since it was dated February 2021, but on the fourth attempt that year he was detained, reportedly on a layover to Turkey. He remained in a United Arab Emirates cell for roughly five months until a series of events in quick succession began in the first months of 2022 that would add to Marset’s infamy.

On February 22, 2022, authorities announced that “the largest operation against organized crime and money laundering in Paraguay is underway.”

The 27-month-long Ultranza PY operation targeted a criminal network connected to more than 16-tons-of cocaine moved to Europe and over 24 people were charged with crimes of drug trafficking, money laundering, and criminal association, including Marset who authorities claimed orchestrated the scheme. The plot allegedly involved a sophisticated system of clandestine flights between Bolivia and Paraguay, container ships along portions of the hidrovía waterway that would pass through Uruguay and Argentina to the Atlantic Ocean. It also focused on the wide ranging ways that the group laundered money through international transfers and bank accounts around the globe using everything from luxury properties to martial arts tournaments.  

Marset’s network also allegedly laundered money through the Centro de Avivamiento evangelist church run by self-proclaimed pastor José Insfrán Galeano, the brother of the aforementioned Insfrán clan boss Tio Rico, real name Miguel Ángel Insfrán Galeano. Tio Rico was arrested in Brazil in February and extradited to Paraguay in May for his role in the scheme. José Insfrán remains at large.

The investigation was also linked to several of Marset’s moves in the world of soccer, including to the former president of the Deportivo Capiatá team where he played, Erico Galeano, a senator in the longstanding Colorado Party and a close associate of former president Horacio Cartes. It is not believed that Galeano is related to the Insfrán Galeano family, but he was accused of various crimes in the Ultranza PY investigation, including taking a million in cash from the Insfrán clan. He was charged with money laundering and criminal association in May.  Galeano maintains his innocence. 

Although Marset rang in the 2022 New Year in a Dubai jail on a passport violation, he disappeared again just a few weeks before the Ultranza PY investigation landed. Whether or not he suspected that the investigation was coming is unclear, but ever since his September detention in the UAE his lawyers had worked furiously to try and obtain a new Uruguayan passport. By the time authorities announced they were looking for him, Marset had somehow received the passport, and was once again, in the wind.

The manhunt for Marset reached a fevered pace a few months after when Paraguayan organized crime prosecutor Marcelo Pecci, who was involved in the Ultranza PY operation, was murdered on his honeymoon in Colombia. Soon after, an international Red Notice was placed on Marset’s head by Interpol.

How exactly Marset received the passport and fled Dubai while being investigated by various agencies, including Interpol, continues to engulf high-ranking politicians and people connected to the president’s office of Luis Lacalle Pou in Marset’s native Uruguay.

“There’s a lot of gray areas in this whole story,” said Centurión, the crime researcher. “They lied by saying that they did not know who Marset was, that he was simply a Uruguayan, a soccer player who was in Dubai with a passport issue and simply that.”

Various Uruguayan officials denied knowing Marset's criminal history after his release became public knowledge in the wake of the Ultranza PY investigation and Interpol Red Notice, claiming everything was done through proper channels. Text messages later released would suggest otherwise. Foreign Ministry vice Chancellor Carolina Ache was twice asked about Marset’s passport, in September and November of 2022 by the sub-secretary of the Uruguayan Interior Ministry Guillermo Maciel. In the second of which, Maciel called Marset “a very influential and dangerous narco. To know if he is still detained or if they released him, the latter would be terrible.” Ache resigned from her position in December 2022 in the wake of the incident.

Centurión said that the way the Marset scandal has touched presidents from Colombia, Paraguay, and Uruguay, while embarrassing countries like Bolivia and Brazil, “generates suspicions regarding the security of all these countries. Obviously we know that drug trafficking has long-range tentacles, firepower, economic power, the power to threaten. So then adding corruption, creates a very dangerous cocktail.”

“Narco millenial”

Perhaps the most infamous of Marset’s videos was sent just six days after Colombia President Petro accused him of the Pecci murder in August 2022. A man—believed to be Marset—wearing a plain light blue face mask and large sunglasses sent a video from a South African phone number to Uruguayan news network Canal 4, denying a litany of allegations against him. 

The authorities “do not have proof of anything that they say,” Marset said in the video.

“I want to see the proof. Where is it? That everything is Sebastián Marset,” he said adamantly. He blamed Petro for using his name in a game “between the left and the right” and said “I have nothing to do with politics…kill between yourselves. I’m not interested in that stuff.” 

He then unleashed a long tirade about drug legalization, sarcastically mocking politicians who think that “narco traffickers are the problem, not narco trafficking,” especially his native Uruguay where he was sentenced to five years in prison for trafficking marijuana, shortly before it became legal. 

While no official charges have been laid against Marset in relation to the Pecci murder, six people were officially accused of the crime by Colombian authorities. A Venezuelan man named Wendre Still Scott Carrillo was sentenced in June to over 23 years in prison for being the trigger man in the assassination. Three others were also sentenced after pleading guilty to being involved in the planning, while one person who was detained in Venezuela has yet to face trial. The former Colombian soldier who allegedly orchestrated the murder and was also arrested, Francisco Luis Correa, pleaded not guilty and alleged that the hit was actually ordered by Marset and Miguel Ángel Insfrán, according to his testimony leaked to Colombian newspaper El Tiempo. 

“[Marset]’s a narco millennial and he is very aware of what the deal is with social networks,” said Jessica Echeverría, a former Bolivian politician and criminal lawyer who specializes in cases related to organized crime in Santa Cruz, where Marset had escaped in July. “He skillfully knows how to take advantage of this whole situation and begins to send messages via video, just as he did at the time.”

She would know. On August 2, days after Marset’s getaway, she received a video from Marset too.

“Hola hola hola,” said Marset, looking directly into his camera phone, briefly showing his face, before panning towards the sky and ranting about his “very complicated situation” resulting in what he considered false accusations towards people in his orbit. He claimed he was able to escape because the director of the special forces unit who tried to capture him, “pocketed a bit of cash and told me to leave.” 

Echeverría told VICE News that she “felt goosebumps” when she first received the video, which was also sent to local media. She quickly realized that these were “really strong accusations” with “political connotations”, but didn’t know whether to believe them. She said that “at no time can we deny that he has received protection from some police officers,” but after “further analyzing Marcet’s personality,” that the accusation “reflects annoyance” at the unit that attempted to capture him.

The director of the anti-narcotics special forces (FELCN for its Spanish acronym), Ismael Villca, denied the allegations and told local media that it was “disinformation” aimed at sowing distrust in his unit and the Bolivian police. He called his 30-year career “impeccable” and that “it will not be tainted simply by lies and statements from a drug trafficker.”

The vice minister of the Bolivian security branch, Jhonny Aguilera, later also denied that Marset was tipped off. He claimed that police previously planned to arrest him the following day at a soccer match but Marset saw police drones in the area of the house where he was staying with his wife, three kids, and other associates. Three police officers monitoring the house were kidnapped by armed guards, then tortured at times in front of Marset, the officers later alleged in a court hearing about the botched operation. 

While Marset and his family fled, 12 of his associates were arrested in the raid, including two players for the Los Leones El Torno soccer club where Marset suited up. Although still active, attempts by VICE News to reach the phone number that sent the video to Echeverría were not answered.

The Narco Neighbors Next Door

After the botched capture, Bolivian Interior Minister Eduardo del Castillo declared that the group was still in the province of Santa Cruz and “in the next few hours we will accomplish the capture of Mr. Sebastián Marset.”

They didn’t. 

Police searched eight properties allegedly connected to Marset, numerous vehicles were seized during the raids, along with 17 automatic rifles, and $400,000 USD in a black bag in a closet. They later tracked down the property where Marset filmed the video that Echeverría and others received to the town of La Guardia just outside of Santa Cruz because of the sound of roosters in the background. But the Marsets were gone again. 

Questions about when Bolivian authorities knew Marset’s whereabouts appear damning. Paraguayan authorities alleged after the bumbled capture that they alerted the Bolivian government that Marset was in Santa Cruz in February. Del Castillo also later said that they informed Uruguayan authorities at a Mercosur summit in Argentina in June that they believed Marset was in Bolivia.

Echeverría said that Marset’s connections to the region first popped up on her radar when his name surfaced as a potential associate of those implicated in the triple murder of three police officers in the village of Porongo a few miles outside of Santa Cruz on June 21, 2022. Echeverría represented the families of the three slain officers.

A local business man named Misael Nallar Viveros was arrested and is awaiting trial as the principal suspect in the murder. During the course of the investigation, it was found that the alleged killer had connections to a woman named Reina Mercedes Duarte who is a known associate of Marset and was also implicated in Ultranza PY. As early as June 21, rumors appeared online that Marset could be in the area. 

Echeverría never expected that if he was in Santa Cruz, the audaciousness of the life he established there. 

A neighbor of Marset in Santa Cruz told local media that “I practically never saw them” but when they did, the Marsets “were very ostentatious people” and that “the first thing you think is that they are drug traffickers.”

The wanted fugitive was also clearly caught on camera during a tournament in Santa Cruz by a Bolivian influencer named Erwin Vaca, aka Pikilú, who was interviewing members of a team he sponsored called Pichiroses Junior. He sits between two players chatting in the bleachers, introducing the two as his team’s forwards, one of which is Marset under his Brazilian alter ego Luis Pablo Amorin Santos, wearing a white, pink, and teal jersey. Marset appeared somewhat uncomfortable at first, laughing awkwardly at Pikilú’s jokes with the other player. When asked to give the camera a message: “may the Pichiroses win,” he said smiling. 

Pikilú was later arrested. His brother told local media that “there is no relationship with Mr. Marset. My brother doesn't know him, he has never spoken to him in person.”

Where Are the Marsets?

The Marset affair continues to cause uproar in several countries. Uruguayan authorities are still investigating the depths of the country’s illicit passport industry, and announced in late August that 10 important emails related to Marset were erased by the foreign ministry. In Bolivia, an alleged recording of a police officer tipping off Marset to his capture has led to four officers being investigated as potential moles. Authorities also arrested the previously mentioned Federico Ezequiel Santoro Vassallo, the alleged top money laundering chief for Marset, on August 24. 

But eight weeks after his getaway in Santa Cruz, Marset remains elusive. He’s believed to be on the run with at least his wife and three children, but no one really knows.

Most recently, Bolivian authorities still believed that Marset was within their borders, and on September 7 conducted raids in the Beni department, which borders Santa Cruz. Chilean authorities also announced that they are hunting within their territory for Marset. Interpol Paraguay boss Carlos Duré reportedly told a local radio station that he believed Marset may be in Africa. Duré denied interview requests when contacted by VICE News.

Echeverría lamented that even with regional police forces “operating internationally in exchange of communication, their whereabouts are still unknown.”

Rumors abound once again, she said, “that he is in Bení, he’s gone to Argentina, to Venezuela. So it's very difficult to know where he might be.”

He’s known by many nicknames, but now perhaps Marset is also becoming a mononym, like Beyonce or Pele, but for much more heinous reasons. 

“He is a person who easily knows how to deceive,” she said. “And unfortunately, the fact that none of the countries give us answers about where he is must still leave us very worried.”