They had been looking for him since November, when
he disappeared from Asunción
.
Almost three months later, they found and detained him in the province of
Córdoba
.
Known as
the
"Lord of Arms",
Diego Hernán Dirisio was the largest arms smuggler in Latin America
and supplier to powerful narcocriminal groups such as the Brazilian First Capital Command (PCC) and the Red Command.
The
Argentine businessman
-one of the
most wanted fugitives in Brazil and Paraguay, where he was involved in operations worth
250 million dollars
- he fell into a joint operation by the
Federal Police and Interpol
along with his wife, a
former model
, also wanted by Justice.
Both were arrested this Friday on Hugo Wast Avenue, in the
Cerro de las Rosas
neighborhood , eight kilometers north of Córdoba Capital.
They investigate if someone sold them.
The arrests occurred days ago following an anonymous complaint filed with the Federal Crime Reporting Division.
Quickly, the news of the arrests reached Brazil, more precisely to the ears of the Police Superintendent in Bahia, Flávio Albergaria, responsible for the investigation and who discovered the
international arms trafficking
scheme that supplied criminal factions.
Interpol also contacted the Supreme Court of Paraguay, a country where an
extradition request
is pending to face criminal proceedings.
The "Lord of Arms" emporium
Dirisio and his partner
Julieta Vanessa Nardi Aranda
were listed as owners of the
International Auto Supply (IAS)
gun store , based in Asunción.
He is accused of triangulating with his Paraguayan company pistols, rifles, machine guns and ammunition that he acquired from manufacturers in countries such as
Croatia, Turkey, the Czech Republic and Slovenia
.
"He coordinated all the company's actions, he made direct arrangements for the sale and resale of weapons knowing that they had to be scrapped and destined for organized crime," Albergaria revealed, in statements reproduced by the
GloboNews
network .
According to the investigation,
the "Lord of the Guns" - that's what they called him - imported up to 43 thousand weapons
from Europe to South America to resell the material to criminal gangs.
First,
he filed the
identification number of the weapon.
Afterwards, he resold them to groups that operate on the border between Paraguay and Brazil and these, in turn, offered them to the main Brazilian criminal groups such as the PCC and the Red Command.
Thus, through his company, he moved merchandise worth 1.2 billion reais, about
245.9 million dollars, for three years.
Dirisio found out that they were looking for him.
And he managed to escape in time with his partner.
It was before December, when twelve people - including a former head of the Air Force - were arrested in Paraguay in an operation against arms trafficking, which included 20 raids, one of them at the country's
Directorate
of War Material .
Because?
The Argentine businessman
bribed the military
who controlled Dimabel with million-dollar bribes to authorize his weapons purchases.
General Jorge Antonio Orué Roa, former head of the Dimabel, ended up surrendering to justice and was prosecuted as an alleged perpetrator of influence peddling, while Colonel Bienvenido Fretes -former director of the Dimabel National Arms Registry- was charged. for alleged aggravated passive bribery and criminal association.
The operation was called
"Dakovo"
,
a
Turkish city
where part of the weapons were acquired, and spread to Brazil and the United States.
It was directed against an international arms trafficking scheme investigated since 2020, with support from Dirisio's company and his partner, leaders of the criminal structure.
At the time, the then president Lula da Silva had spoken of the "largest operation in the history of Brazil against arms trafficking."
D.S.