Los Pelacaras / Face Peelers of the Amazon

In July 2023, residents of an Ikitu community in the Alto Nanay district of Loreto, Peru, began reporting frightening nighttime encounters near their homes and along the Nanay River. The first widely circulated complaints were dated to about July 11. Families described tall figures appearing after dark, and the repeated disturbances led residents to organize watches while children and adults remained inside. Witness descriptions emphasized unusual movement and protective-looking clothing. The figures were said to stand roughly seven feet tall, wear dark hoods or armor-like equipment, and rise or float above the ground. Some residents claimed that shots fired toward them had no visible effect. The community associated the attackers with the regional “pelacaras” or “face peelers” tradition—a longstanding fear involving outsiders who kill or mutilate people for skin, fat, or organs—but the 2023 accounts added modern details such as reflective armor and apparent flight. One of the most serious reported incidents involved a fifteen-year-old girl who was said to have been grabbed or attacked and cut on the neck before escaping. Reports said that she was taken for medical treatment. Community representatives asked Peruvian authorities and the military for protection, saying that the nightly fear was disrupting sleep and normal life. Police and prosecutors traveled to the area as images, interviews, and short videos circulated through Peruvian and international media. Investigators publicly proposed a human explanation. Prosecutor Carlos Castro Quintanilla said criminal groups connected with illegal gold mining may have used advanced equipment or thruster-like devices to frighten residents away from areas of mining interest. News reports repeated the idea that the figures were miners using jetpacks. That explanation accounted for the intimidation motive but did not produce a publicly documented recovery of the alleged equipment, nor did the reporting establish a single verified identity for every figure described by residents. The case spread quickly because it joined several different realities: the Ikitu community’s immediate reports of threatening intruders, genuine illegal-mining pressure in the Peruvian Amazon, older pelacaras folklore, and extraordinary claims about armored figures moving above the ground. The Atlas keeps those strands separate. It records what residents said they experienced, the reported injury and request for intervention, and the prosecutor’s mining-gang hypothesis without converting any one of them into a proven final explanation. The Case Portrait is therefore an explicit reconstruction of the reported nighttime scene, while news photographs or videos of uncertain origin remain links rather than displayed evidence.