Prosecutor cites two suspects in murder of community leader Santiago Guardamino
A police officer and the son of a condemned former leader received fiscal citations after calls to the victim were found hours before the crime on 1 April 2024.
Telephone calls hours before the crime point to two suspects
Prosecutors' technicians who analysed the phones of Santiago Guardamino González, president of the rural community of Quipán (Canta, Lima), detected that the victim received several calls from numbers attributed to PNP senior technical non-commissioned officer Elar Minchán Sánchez and citizen Rony Mosquera Sánchez, according to larepublica.pe. Those same numbers also communicated with each other during the hours prior to the murder, which occurred on 1 April 2024.
The call records establish three key contacts: the first at 7.41 a.m., seventeen hours before the homicide; the second at 3.23 p.m., approximately nine hours before; and the third at 11.56 p.m., when Guardamino was being murdered. On the basis of that analysis, prosecutor Ronny Chamorro Yalico cited both of them to explain the circumstances of those communications.
The leader who halted fraudulent land sale
Guardamino was murdered by a hired assassin when returning to his house in Carabayllo after a meeting in his community. Before dying, he had discovered that his predecessor in office, Abel Mosquera Ortiz, and businessman Aniceto Argüelles Loayza, owner of Industrias Argüelles and Servicios Generales, had engineered the sale of 10,000 hectares belonging to the Quipán community.
The leader initiated criminal and civil proceedings, and succeeded in proving that Mosquera and the company manager, Karen Pasco Flores, falsified community records to authorise the transaction for 600,000 soles. In parallel, Argüelles constructed a landfill on the fraudulently acquired land, which allowed him to obtain million-sol contracts with Lima district municipalities for waste collection and disposal.
Guardamino was murdered whilst conducting judicial proceedings aimed at returning that property to the community.
The cited individuals' link to the land dispute
Both suspects have direct connections to the judicial dispute between the Quipán community and Argüelles's company. Elar Minchán Sánchez is brother of Jaime Minchán Sánchez, who was a lawyer for the community. In 2025, La República reported that the Homicide Division was investigating an alleged dispute between Guardamino and lawyer Jaime Minchán, whom sources suspected of maintaining clandestine dealings with Argüelles's company. Police theory indicated that the leader suspected Minchán of leaking information. Jaime Minchán denied that version in an interview and maintained that he had withdrawn from the process for reasons of safety.
The Minchán family's history adds relevant background to the case. According to a news report published by La República in 2023, another brother, Elthon Minchán Sánchez, known as 'Viejo Elthon', was detained that year for hiring an assassin and participating in a homicide in the context of a dispute over control of clandestine centres in Los Olivos. A fourth brother, Daigoro Minchán Sánchez, was also detained in 2023 for impersonating a public official and demanding money under threat of shutting down businesses.
The other cited individual, Rony Mosquera Sánchez, is son of Abel Mosquera Ortiz, the former community president condemned for the fraudulent sale of the land to Argüelles. Five weeks after Guardamino's murder, the Supreme Court confirmed that conviction. One of the numbers that repeatedly contacted the leader is attributed to Rony Mosquera.
One suspect failed to appear; the prosecutor expands the search
According to fiscal sources cited by larepublica.pe, non-commissioned officer Elar Minchán Sánchez did not appear for questioning, whilst Rony Mosquera Sánchez did respond to questions from prosecutor Chamorro.
The communications detected do not constitute the only front of the investigation. The Public Ministry also ordered the identification of the owners of nine other numbers that maintained contact with Elar Minchán's phone, and of eleven additional numbers linked to Rony Mosquera's mobile, all during Monday 1 April 2024.
The prosecutor considers that identification of the intellectual authors of Santiago Guardamino's murder is imminent.
Source: Google News CL — Santiago