The authorities of Peru approved this Monday the extradition to Argentina of Tony Janzen Valverde Victoriano, known as Pequeño J and considered the alleged mastermind of the triple femicide that shocked Argentina on September 19, 2025. Lara Gutiérrez —15 years old—, Morena Verdi and Brenda Del Castillo —both 20 years old— were tortured, murdered, and then buried in the garden of a house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in what is believed to have been a narco revenge.
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Pequeño J, 20 years old, was handed over to the Federal Police of Argentina at the Peruvian police airbase, located in Callao, a province adjacent to Lima, to be flown from Jorge Chávez airport to Buenos Aires. In Argentina, he will be tried for the crime of homicide with aggravating factors of premeditation, cruelty, treachery, and gender violence.
According to the reconstruction made by the local police, Lara, Brenda, and Morena left their homes on the night of Friday, September 19, heading to an alleged party that was actually a trap. They were deceived into getting into a van that took them to a house in Florencio Varela, in the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires, where they were murdered.
The police found the house after five days of searching by following the mobile phone signal of one of the victims. When they entered the house, located in a poor neighborhood, a couple was cleaning blood stains from the walls and floors. In the garden, they found disturbed soil; the women had been buried deeply, covered with blankets, stones, and cement in a hole dug before the murder.
According to the investigation, the criminals inflicted punches, kicks, and used sharp objects to “injure the victims in such a way that, prior to reaching the final criminal intent, their actions deliberately and inhumanely increased the suffering of the young women, causing agonizing injuries (amputations and luxofractures, among others).”
The crime was broadcast live by a closed group on a social network with the alleged aim of imposing respect within the narco universe through terror. According to prosecutors Adrián Arribas, Claudio Fornaro, and Diego Rulli, the act was part of a revenge for a drug robbery committed by associates of the victims against the narco gang led by Pequeño J.
The handover of the Peruvian narco was carried out under heavy security that began on Sunday, when he was transferred from the Cañete prison, 155 kilometers south of Lima, to the Ancón II prison, also known as Piedras Gordas II, where he spent the night before being taken early Monday to the airport. In the images, he is seen with a shaved head and thin, different from when he was arrested after fleeing the country.
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Valverde was captured on September 30 in the south of Lima, at the same time his alleged Argentine accomplice Matías Agustín Ozorio was arrested in another area of the Peruvian capital, after both had fled the country. According to Peruvian authorities, both were trying to reach the city of Trujillo, located on the northern coast of Peru, about 550 kilometers from Lima, where Pequeño J is originally from, a descendant of a family marked by crime and drug trafficking in that jurisdiction.
Ozorio, having entered the country irregularly and clandestinely, was immediately expelled to Argentina, also in a high-profile handover where he was shown chained by feet and hands. In contrast, Pequeño J, having Peruvian nationality, had to undergo a formal extradition process with the corresponding deadlines, as he did not accept being extradited and the request had to be approved by all the relevant instances of the Peruvian Justice system to be tried in Argentina for the crime he is accused of masterminding.
The background of Pequeño J goes back to his family. His father was Janzen Valverde Rodríguez, leader of Los Injertos de Nuevo Jerusalén, a gang that emerged in La Esperanza, a poor district on the outskirts of the city of Trujillo, on the northern coast of Peru. Janzen was arrested more than once for extortion and drug dealing. On December 16, 2018, when Pequeño J was thirteen years old, a hitman from a rival gang killed Janzen. The teenager then swore revenge. “I promise you this will not end here, because if no one does anything, I will do it myself with style and elegance,” he wrote on his father’s social media.
It was Janzen who charted his son’s criminal path: he nicknamed him Tony after the legendary drug trafficker Scarface, Tony Montana. The young man was renamed Pequeño J in tribute to his deceased father. His uncles, his father’s brothers, Luis and Manuel, have also been involved in legal troubles. Pequeño J arrived in Argentina in 2020, at fifteen years old.
Besides Pequeño J and Ozorio, there are ten other defendants in the case. Last week, the Justice ruled the lack of merit of the Peruvian Joseph Freyser Cubas Zavaleta, known as Señor J, as a participant in the triple crime. On the other hand, the Federal Appeals Chamber of San Martín changed the charge against Iara Daniela Ibarra and Maximiliano Parra, the couple found cleaning the house in Florencio Varela, who were accused of the crime of concealment and not as participants in the triple crime.
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