“From your investment, we make your best version,” Aníbal Lotocki presented himself on his Instagram account.
In fact, although he admitted that
his patients knew that he is not a plastic surgeon
, he boasted on LinkedIn the endorsement of "more than 10,000 effective hours in the cosmetic surgery operating room."
Four of his patients ended up dead: Silvina Luna, Mariano Caprarola, Romina Vega and Cristian Zárate.
Others live with the ordeal of carrying in their body a substance that is poison:
methacrylate
.
Eduardo Fiuza is one of them
.
He went under the knife at Lotocki twice.
The first in 2016, with the aim of introducing a pectoral prosthesis into his body, when he convinced him to do his own treatment:
platelet-rich plasma mixed with methacrylate
.
In this way, in a period of 60 to 90 days he would be recovered.
Aníbal clarified to Eduardo that, since he was an athletic boy,
the implants could move
.
He explained that pectoral prostheses are not the same as breast prostheses, and that there may be slight movement over time.
But with this
own and “innovative” method
, that was not going to happen.
Without even a signed consent, Eduardo underwent anesthesia and entered the Full Esthetic operating room, located in the Belgrano neighborhood.
Fiuza says that, like him, many more of Lotocki's victims were in a
vulnerable situation
: he had arrived in Argentina very recently, at only 20 years old.
A model, who dedicated himself exclusively to his image since he was 12, when he joined the world of television in his native Brazil.
“I always worked with my image, I invested in myself, in my body, what I did is not a crime.
That's why we have plastic surgeons
,” she says.
In that first surgery, Eduardo got an infection with fevers of up to 40°, but he did not blame the doctor since he “cured him.”
For 22 days, he returned to Full Esthetic so that the doctor could inject him with corticosteroids, anti-inflammatories, and antibiotics;
to kill the bacteria.
In reality, Eduardo's body
was rejecting what Lotocki had placed in him
, but he was trying to heal with drains and ultrasound treatments.
Until one day, Lotocki injected something into his pectorals that caused liquid to come out non-stop.
In 2018 Eduardo returned to Lotocki's operating room.
This time, with the aim of doing
abdominal marking
, with liposuction.
This second surgery was a lipo transfer, the fat that Aníbal extracted was incorporated into the buttocks.
But when he woke up, it was not what he had asked the surgeon for.
"When I wake up he tells me that he didn't remove the amount of fat to fill my buttocks, that's why he had to
mix my fat with methacrylate
to do the intervention."
Once again, Eduardo was in the same Belgrano clinic, with something in his body that he did not ask Lotocki for.
“I signed a consent, but informal, Florencia or Gina, who worked with him only made you sign a common sheet, written by hand and then you lost track,” he describes.
Florencia, a surgical instrument technician, and Gina, an anesthetist, worked with Lotocki and operated on hundreds of men and women.
The two women appear in the complaints made by Gabriela Trenchi and Eduardo Fiuza, as part of
an illicit association
.
None responded to contribute data to this investigation.
At the moment, Justice has not determined whether it is an illicit association or not.
Florencia and Gina were part of an office that was disabled and raided twice, they were employees of a doctor who today has accumulated complaints and four of his patients have died.
According to the complainants, they knew well
where and who they were working for
.
They presented a simple sheet of paper as “consent”, one page long and handwritten, as detailed.
It is also not known if there is any qualification that endorses them as instrumentalists, anesthetists or nurses.
Lawyer Roberto Casorla, who sponsors more than 30 Lotocki complainants, assures that “
none have titles
. ”
Furthermore, the provision of any documentation will be for your right of defense.
If someone has the right to hurt people in this way with conscience, the right is not enough for them.
On the one hand, you have a doctor who, instead of curing, kills.
On the other hand, a group of people who, instead of being assistants,
are participants in an organization that kills
.”
Gabriela Trenchi also had surgery with Aníbal the same year as Fiuza, both at the Belgrano clinic.
Trenchi, who came to Lotocki due to the high publicity of celebrities, including Pamela Sosa – the surgeon's ex-wife – went with the aim of placing tension threads in her buttocks.
Like Eduardo, while she was under total anesthesia, she did whatever she wanted in the operation.
“
I didn't want him to put anything on me
.
At that moment I knew I was putting in methacrylate, but I just wanted to lift the tail with tension threads and my fat.
It turns out that he, who is not an anesthetist, anesthetized me (because he wanted to anesthetize my instrumentation and couldn't) and when I come out,
I come out stuffed like a matambre
,” she said.
When Gabriela woke up she found a scene of horror.
Without signed consent, without the necessary controls, Aníbal changed his life forever: “she behaved like an animal, he didn't even discharge me, a nurse gave it to me.
She sent me home two hours later because she had a lot of operations.
He only had two beds, I was passed out and bloody, and they told me that he couldn't see me."
Eduardo was also not satisfied with how his body had turned out in the 2018 operation, he did not notice much of a change.
In this intervention, he passed a laser over her abdomen, and also injected platelet-rich plasma into her buttocks.
In this case, the plasma is extracted from the patient himself and centrifuged for re-injection.
Eduardo did not see if Lotocki centrifuged it, but what he did know is that
he had mixed it with methacrylate
.
Eduardo's ex-partner was a friend of Lotocki, so Fiuza felt safe having surgery with him: "I never imagined that a person I considered a friend, with whom I shared birthdays or events,
could harm me
."
This is the same case as Cristian Zarate, who died in 2021 after an intervention with Lotocki.
At those events and birthdays, in private, Lotocki blamed the other patients who complained about him publicly.
Regarding Trenchi,
he said that he already had pathologies and other health problems
.
Therefore, Fiuza did not distrust his “friend.”
Cristian Zárate did not distrust either.
Zárate, despite being a friend of Trenchi and his lawyer, despite arguing endless hours with his partner, did not change his mind.
According to his partner, Romina, he was
“infatuated” with having surgery with Lotocki
.
The businessman, with two teenage daughters, with a wedding planned in Italy and two mansions under construction, decided to undergo surgery for slight excess fat through a
dermolipectomy
, and lost his life that same day, April 15. of 2021, at the Cemeco clinic in Caballito.
At that time, in the middle of the second wave of Covid, Lotocki rented an operating room at the clinic to operate, even though only life-threatening operations could be performed.
After the businessman's death, Lotocki was arrested at the clinic and later released.
What did Zarate's pre-surgery say?
He had had Covid, diabetes and for years he was a smoker.
Despite these
signs of risk
, Lotocki decided to go ahead with cosmetic surgery.
A pattern of behavior repeated in several victims: friendships, emotional vulnerability and strong manipulation and convincing power.
This was also detailed by Virginia Gallardo.
Almost reaching 2010, she was one of his first patients from the entertainment environment.
The Corrientes girl who dedicated all her time to beautifying her body
sought to increase the volume of her buttocks
and today she fears for her life.
Although it will soon be 15 years old, Virginia wants this issue to remain in the past.
For this reason,
she did not decide to make the corresponding complaint
and chose to heal her pain privately, as she stated in her program Socios del Espectáculo, on El Trece.
The panelist said: “I had never gone through an operating room, I had no idea what it was, what measures and what prevention it should have.
The first intervention I had was that, I was 20 years old.
I was alone, I lived alone with my sister.
Every time I went to visit María José – Lotocki's secretary and wife – he drove me crazy.
She convinced me at all costs, 'You're going to walk out, baby,' she told me in order to persuade me that it wasn't going to be anything, 'Come on, she's stupid.'”
Then,
no one wanted to treat Virginia
: the surgeons saw strange things in her body and preferred not to intervene in it.
Eduardo says that he can no longer remove the product because it is encapsulated, and he contributed to this investigation an image of his MRI, where it is seen that the product has not spread at the moment, therefore, other doctors prefer to leave it there, to prevent .
"Hunting" in clubs and the first deceased patient
Romina was Lotocki's first patient to die.
In 2007, she met the doctor at a bowling alley in Posadas, Misiones.
She then went to him to have liposuction on her arms, abdomen and buttocks augmentation.
Vega could not endure the procedures on her body and ended up losing her life from a “fat embolism.”
The case generated so much commotion that the missionary justice discovered that the clinic where Romina had been operated on
was not enabled for these types of procedures
.
Norma Sosa, her mother, reported that the surgeon not only refused to perform an electrocardiogram on the patient, but also did not comply with any of the first consultation.
She assured that she even told her not to worry because Romina was “going to walk away” after her intervention.
“She had liposuction on her abdomen, what Lotocki had told me was that they were going to remove fat from her abdomen to mix it with methacrylate and apply it to her buttocks.
He never told me that she was going to do other surgeries on his arms or legs.
When I got there, I found out everything she had done to him,” she told TN.
As
Clarín
published , Lotocki "hunted for patients" in the clubs at night in Corrientes, where he even managed to avoid surgeries.
A “snake charmer,” Eduardo calls him.
He not only does what he wants with the patients' bodies, he says, but he also erases them from his life.
“They blocked me from WhatsApp, they blocked me from Instagram and Facebook, why?” asks Fiuza.
In 2020, he was hospitalized for
acute kidney failure
, in the midst of the pandemic.
Already in intensive care, he performed dialysis every day, until he had a venous thrombosis in his right armpit.
Thus, he faced a long month intubated, anemic and hypertensive.
Fortunately, it was only 30 days: in the case of Silvina Luna, it was 13 years with the same complications that Eduardo details.
The model died on August 31, 2023.
“Lotocki chose for me” were the words used in a report by Stefi Xipolitakis, who confessed to María Laura Santillán that it is an issue that destroyed her.
“
I couldn't stop having pain because of the slightest bit of oil that I put on
because I was very skinny.
She made mobiles in Mar del Plata in the middle of the season and two shows at night.
The body, four months like this, does not accompany you without sleeping and without eating.
They told me that I was rickety and one is not just content, it is image.”
Stefanía came to Lotocki because she was going to spend a season in Mar del Plata and she was very skinny.
Since many celebrities had had surgery with him, including her sister, she thought it was something serious.
In the same report she added: “
I am very ashamed to talk about this
, all of Argentina and neighboring countries know my situation and I did not want it to be known.
I went for something else and I found a bomb on my body.
Nobody told us that they were going to give us such a thing.
We did not choose, he chose for me, he took away my right to have physical and mental health.”
Eduardo agrees with Stefanía.
And he says that the doctors assured him that she is miraculously alive
.
He also doesn't know how long he will continue taking antidepressant medications because of the horror he experienced at Full Esthetic.
“When Mariano Caprarola died in August of this year, I realized that I had to know what he had in his body,” he points out.
The case of Caprarola, who died in August, is almost the same as yours: “You trust a friend who tells you that nothing is going to happen.”
But in an interview Mariano gave before dying, he stated that the doctor has strong protection: “If I say who protects him, I end up dead in a ditch.”
Fiuza also assures that “someone very big protects him since every time they were about to close the clinic, Lotocki was aware and avoided it.”
Lotocki was detained in October of last year, when he turned himself in after the Justice Department ordered his arrest for the death of Cristian Zárate.
Eduardo assures that he was not afraid to report and turn to a lawyer, but
he is afraid to walk on the street
: “When someone is arrested, fear begins.
"It scares me because of everything he has behind him."
In this investigation it was discovered that not only the people who were operated on by Lotocki are victims.
Milagros, who was his receptionist for a year, also reported him.
A teenager who was alone and vulnerable, grieving the death of her mother, came to Full Esthetic in 2020 with the aim of working.
After a few months, she resigned but contacted Roberto Casorla, who sponsors more than 30 complainants, provided documentation that she collected at that time in the clinic and decided to stay aside.
Milagros never communicated with the media and did not respond to this reporter's calls.
Casorla assists Fiuza and also Trenchi, Beatriz Verger, Raphael Dufort, and Sandra Domínguez, among others.
He assures that the matrix of his intervention was
identical with all patients
.
“Lotocki starts from a base where he says that he performs plastic surgeries without sutures or wounds, so the procedure in all cases is an injection of different substances.
Furthermore, he creates a kind of formula that grants him as a creator, which is even more toxic,” says the lawyer.
In a recent television interview, the doctor stated that he had been a victim.
And that he denounced the laboratory that produced the methacrylate that he used and the ANMAT.
Lotocki's new argument, who changed lawyers, is that he was deceived and that the problem was not in the procedure but in the fact that
the methacrylate was defective, but he was unaware of it
.
Eduardo Fiuza is a witness case that is repeated and reflects what other patients operated on by Lotocki experienced.
The common factors are: manipulation in moments of vulnerability, the power of conviction that he had over them, the false trust that he tried to grant to those who supposedly believed they were friends.
Then, they share the same consequences: hypercalcemia, thrombosis, kidney failure, dialysis, which they also shared with the patients who are dead today.
Candela Folguerá. Clarín Master's Degree / University of San Andrés
ACE