Saturday January 21, 2023 | 3:30 p.m.
Marcos Vitor Aguiar Dantas Pereira had let his hair and beard grow, but that did not prevent the PFA agents from recognizing him. The 24-year-old Brazilian, sentenced in absentia in his country to 33 years in prison for the sexual abuse of his little sister and a cousin, had been on the run for more than a year when he fell in front of the Los Gallegos shopping mall in Mar del Plata .
For everyone, Marcos was a young man from the middle class, educated, respectful, intelligent and studious. A quiet medical student, with a partner, who never went out, never drank or caused trouble. “The ideal son-in-law”, they thought. But this facade collapsed in July 2021, two years after he left the city of Teresina, in the state of Paiuí, to go to university in Manaus. That distance was what gave two of his cousins the strength to denounce the abuse they had experienced.
One of the victims, now 13 years old, is the daughter of lawyer Priscila Karine Coelho Campos, sister of Marcos Vitor’s stepmother. She was abused by the young man from the age of 5 to 10.
According to what her mother told the newspaper O Globo, her daughter has received psychological treatment since she was 6 years old and was taking antidepressants. The little girl lived “sad and quiet” and she had behavioral changes that made her parents suspect some possible abuse, but when they asked her, “she didn’t say anything.”
The teenager “harmed herself, had dropped out of school, gained weight, wanted to shave her head, didn’t want to bathe so as not to attract anyone’s attention,” Karine explained to the GP1 site. “My daughter is the stereotype of the abused girl,” she summed up. According to what she said, she was one of her nieces, who was also a victim of Marcos Vitor, who told her everything.
“A cousin said that Marcos Vitor had raped my daughter since she was 5 years old, and she finally confirmed it to me, but she was only able to say it because he had gone to Manaus.” After opening up, her daughter began to improve, Karine said.
The abuse of his daughter would have started during a trip for the whole family to Uruguay. In court statements, the victims said that Marcos Vitor locked himself in the room with them and touched them. Also that he forced them to practice oral sex on him.
The first of the known victims of Marcos Vitor, S., now 23, told the newspaper O Globo about the abuse she suffered when she was 12 and he was 15, when he stayed at his uncle’s house. “I would throw off the sheet at dawn and touch my private parts a lot, it hurt a lot, I spent the night crying, scared, anguished. And he told me that if I told anyone, no one would believe me because he was considered a very good boy, ”she said. “Sometimes he would spend days in pain even to pee,” she said.
To avoid abuse, he found a way not to go to his uncle’s house anymore. “If she hadn’t been so afraid and ashamed, she would have said it and my cousins wouldn’t have gone through what they went through,” lamented the young woman, who is now a nursing student.
Upon learning what had happened to her nieces, Marcos Vitor’s stepmother suspected that the young man might also have abused his little sisters, although she was reluctant to accept it. “I always raised him as if he were my son. He wouldn’t do that to his own sister,” she thought. She had never noticed anything. But through tears, the girls, ages 9 and 3, confirmed the worst. “We had a monster inside the house,” he said.
The confession in a WhatsApp message
At first, Vitor deleted his entire Instagram account and left only one message in which he denied the accusations against him and stated that “whatever needs to be clarified would be done with the competent authorities.” But in an aberrational WhatsApp message to his stepmother, he confessed to what he had done.
“That was a dark part of my life that I am so ashamed of and never wanted to go back to. There is nothing to justify what happened, nothing to stop me,” wrote Vitor.
“I can only apologize to you and to the entire family that received me so well, I will do whatever it takes to try to reverse all the negative impact I caused, whatever it takes to put this past aside,” the young man said in a long message in which he said that he missed his sisters and dreamed of taking them to study in the United States.
“I understand if you don’t forgive me; I don’t know if I would forgive myself either, but I want you to know that this is not me, ”he wrote before going on the run.
A sentence of 33 years in prison
On November 8, 2022, Marcos Vitor was sentenced in absentia to 33 years, eight months, and seven days in prison. Although there were four complaints against him, the head of Teresina Criminal Court No. 6, Raimundo Holland Moura Queiroz, only found enough evidence to convict him of two cases of sexual abuse.
According to the lawyer for the victims’ family, Rodrigo Araújo, the student was sentenced to 23 years and 4 months for the rape of his sister and 10 years, 4 months and 7 days for the rape of his cousin.
In dialogue with the GP1 site shortly after the young pedophile fled, Karine demanded Justice and accused other relatives of Vitor of having helped him escape. “We want justice to be done, to pay for the crime that he committed,” she said. “Sooner or later they will find him and he will pay for what he has done,” she stated in October 2021. And it finally happened.
How Marcos Vitor fell in Mar del Plata
The Brazilian lived for more than a year in Argentina, under the identity of “Pedro Saldanha”. According to Matheus Zanatta, Superintendent of Integrated Operations of the Piauí Public Security Secretariat, the pedophile first crossed the border with Paraguay in the Foz do Iguaçu region and finally entered Argentina.
“We were initially able to verify that he was in Buenos Aires, had a normal life, worked in a restaurant in Palermo and later, when he was convicted and the case became more public, he went to Mar del Plata,” explained the police chief.
Investigators from the Piauí Civil Police tracked him down on the networks and found a house located in La Feliz in Almafuerte at 3400. Together with the Superintendence of International Police Cooperation of the Federal Police, they mounted an operation to catch him.
Vitor fell when he was walking near the Los Gallegos shopping mall. He was housed in the Mar del Plata Federal Operational Unit, awaiting his extradition to Brazil, which could take a few months, according to the Brazilian authorities.
They also opened an investigation to see if he had complicity to escape to our country. “There are indications that there was financial aid and the intervention of people to take him to Argentina, but we will have to question him to verify the veracity of the information and if it is confirmed, we will initiate the corresponding procedure,” Zanatta explained to GP1.
Zanatta also specified that a common cell awaits him in Brazil. “Since he did not complete a medical degree, Marcos Vitor will not have the right to a special cell. He should be transferred to a normal penitentiary, without privileges, ”said the police chief.
