Fernando Pérez Algaba, in an image of his social networks.
Police in Buenos Aires found the remains of a man they had been looking for for a week early Wednesday. Fernando Pérez Algaba, 41, had been missing since Wednesday, July 19, when the owner of an apartment he had rented on the southern outskirts of the Argentine capital reported that he had not returned the keys and did not answer the phone. On Sunday, Buenos Aires police discovered his arms and legs in a suitcase abandoned in a creek in the city of Ingeniero Budge, in Buenos Aires province. On Wednesday, he found his torso and head after searching the scene. Pérez Algaba, nicknamed Lechuga, had nearly a million followers on Instagram, where he promoted luxury car rentals and cryptocurrency investments. The main hypothesis of the investigation is that he was the victim of a settling of accounts for his debts.
Pérez Algaba had come to Buenos Aires from Barcelona, where he had moved after spending time in the southern United States. The main Argentine media have dedicated the morning to reconstructing his story from the traces he left on the internet.
Last March, Pérez Algaba had been interviewed by several news portals that spread his story as that of the migrant who leaves a country in crisis to succeed elsewhere. They defined him as a trader – trader of financial assets – who had made his fortune in Miami dedicated to the rental of luxury cars. "I started working at the age of 14, I started with a bicycle and a box and I started selling sandwiches," said Pérez Algaba, who said he had dedicated his life to climbing in business: as a teenager he had delivered pizzas and sold ice cream in Buenos Aires; he had emancipated himself at age 17 to coordinate high school trips in the city of Bariloche; And at the age of 24 he began to dedicate himself to the sale of cars after selling the motorcycle that he had bought with his savings.
At least four of those articles are still anchored in his social networks, where Pérez Algaba boasted of a life of luxury cars, trips around Europe and two French bulldogs. He had nearly 920,000 followers on Instagram, but very few comments from friends.
His story was different. According to the Telam agency, Pérez Algaba accumulated debts with the Argentine tax agency, which had described them as "irrecoverable"; his company, "Motors Lettuce S.R.L.", started bouncing checks just 10 months after being incorporated in January 2018. According to judicial sources cited by the newspaper La Nación, Pérez Algaba had left a note written on his mobile phone in which he explained that he had lost a lot of money invested in a cryptocurrency business. He had also exchanged threats with the son of one of the main leaders of the Boca Juniors barra brava, who demanded a loan of $ 40,000. Lechuga had spread a long message in which he explained his situation to some contacts. "If something happens to me everyone is already warned," he wrote. Perez Algaba said he had four other witnesses who had also been threatened. None have come to light.
The only person arrested in the case, according to the Minister of Security of the province of Buenos Aires, is a woman whom the police found following the trail of some documents found in the suitcase in which they found the remains. "From what we have investigated, he did not have a fluid relationship and there were short circuits with the family," Minister Sergio Berni told the C5N news channel. "But those are personal issues. What I can say is that it is a difficult half-life to explain, linked to scams."
Berni said the investigation was moving quickly and that the criminals had acted "quickly and almost crazy." "A more professional criminal does it differently, not like this. The situation was very spectacular, a half-macabre event," he said.
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