Roger Bardales, also called Mukanranko and Mokan Ranko, is a 39-year-old Shipibo shaman who presents himself as an “ambassador of the Shipibo-Conibo tribe.” He and his followers run ayahuasca ceremonies across Europe, and he invites attendees to train as shamans at his jungle camp near Pucallpa in Peru. We interviewed nine students who worked with him over the last 12 years, who say he has sexually assaulted multiple female students while they were under the influence of ayahuasca, both in Peru and at ceremonies in Europe.
Bardales claims his female followers can be initiated or healed through sex with him. This is not a legitimate practice in Amazon shamanism, according to plant medicine NGO Chacruna.
In Latvia, according to multiple accounts, Bardales engaged in non-consensual behavior with a woman after a ceremony and then told her she had to pay 30,000 euros for the special “healing” he had given her. He demanded 60,000 euros from another attendee to pay for a healing ritual the person had not asked for and wasn’t even present for.
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But it’s the students who work with him to learn shamanism in Peru who say they experience the most intense coercion, non-consensual advances, and financial extortion. According to their accounts, he receives tens of thousands of euros a month from students, which he uses to fund his attempts at a career in pop music and his growing political and commercial ambitions in Pucallpa.
However, he’s already on the radar of European government authorities. A government agency known as Sect Information Berlin tells me they have been investigating Bardales since 2021.
“We realized people were going to Roger looking for a new life, an alternative to life here in Germany, less of a rat race,” a representative from Sect Information Berlin, said. “They had this promise of something more natural and connected to nature. Then, it was reported to us what Roger was allegedly doing — people were being abused [and] ripped off. It was really tragic. We put these allegations to Bardales and to his senior students, but haven’t heard back.”
The First Disciples
Roger Bardales alleges he grew up as part of the Shipibo-Conibo tribe in the Amazon jungle around the Ucayali River and was initiated into ayahuasca shamanism at the age of five. Then, according to his website, he spent “the majority of his youth alone in the jungle.” In 2012, at 27-years-old, he took part in a tour of European countries organized and funded by an Austrian lady active in plant medicine culture. She invited two Shipibo shamans to facilitate ceremonies in several European countries — an older Shipibo maestra and Bardales.
One of the attendees at a ceremony in Vienna was Anton, who would become Bardales’ lead disciple. In 2012, Anton was 26, not very successful in his career or love life. He heard about ayahuasca and went along to a ceremony with Marko, his younger brother.
“It was the best thing I ever experienced,” Anton tells me. “I was very impressed by Roche [some of Bardales’ followers call him Roche]. I thought this man was doing something like Jesus; that he was some kind of enlightened being. Now, I understand that even in those ceremonies, he was approaching women.”
Anton and his brother followed Bardales on his European tour, driving to Germany for another three-day retreat. During the ceremony, Anton saw a glowing light coming from Bardales’ throat and stomach. Bardales pointed at four people in the ceremony — Anton, his brother Marko, their friend Stephen, and a young woman — and said he wanted to teach them to be shamans in Peru.
“It was such an honor [to be acknowledged], in front of everyone,” Anton told me. “We were the prototypes, his first students. Roger got a glimpse of the wealth of white people — there were 40 of us in a ceremony and we all paid 500 euros. And he is very intelligent, he thought, ‘this woman [the Austrian organizer] is making 20,000 euros a night and I’m getting 3,000 euros for the whole tour?’ He felt like a slave.”
Anton explained that Bardales behaved as if he was superior and had a “special calling on his life,” which he thought was best expressed by having white students do great things and change the world.
During the same ceremony, however, Bardales had sex with the female disciple. Anton knew but denied it to himself. “My conscience was telling me it wasn’t right, but I suppressed it.”
Despite this, the four disciples sojourned to Peru to stay with Bardales and begin their shamanic training. In December 2012, they arrived in Pucallpa, in the Peruvian Amazon, and stayed in Bardales’ humble home in the city. They each paid 5,000 euros for that first stay. Bardales said he would train them and build a camp in the jungle for their training, emphasizing that they should just trust him and “let go of all material things.”
“Meanwhile, he was driving around Pucallpa in his jeep with his Austrian girlfriend,” Anton said. “Roger said he was going to marry her — the same sort of game he played with other Western women later. He was often drunk. We didn’t do many ceremonies with him or get much actual training. But there were always more demands for money, more, more, like a bottomless hole.”
After a few weeks, Bardales sent the disciples on a boat down the Ucayali River to visit a new camp. On the way, they were robbed by bandits. They weren’t sure if the incident was pre-arranged by Bardales to fleece more money off them.
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“He was lying so much that you’d get confused and not know what to believe,” Anton told me. “Everything was a lie, except when he was drunk.”
After three months of “training,” Anton went back to Vienna with instructions to run ayahuasca ceremonies; the vine mixture would be sent to him by Bardales. Then, after the ceremony, Anton was expected to wire Bardales the profits. Other disciples would run similar operations in other European countries. They would also organize international tours for Bardales every two years, visiting Germany, Austria, Italy, Norway, Spain, the UK, Switzerland, Holland, the Baltics, China, Thailand, Australia, and Japan.
Bardales tried to seduce women during those ceremonies, according to witnesses who recall the evening taking on an uncomfortable tone.
“Two strange things happened,” said Trygve, who attended one of the ceremonies in Norway in 2012. “The first was, during the ceremony, Roger came and sang in front of me. And I saw some sort of snakes come out of him and attach to me, it was very frightening. Secondly, a female friend told me that, during every ceremony, Roger would come over to her and make sexual suggestions. She was very upset and found the whole thing surreal. That wasn’t the only time we had problems with male Shipibo shamans misbehaving with women in ceremonies in Norway.”
From 2012 until today, Bardales has created a network of students running ayahuasca ceremonies throughout Europe, charging up to 500 euros per attendee, and then sending him the money through Western Union bank. Estimates vary about how much these groups earn, but one student estimates that a single group might send Bardales tens of thousands of euros a month.
The European ceremonies are also a way for Bardales to recruit new students for the inner circle in Peru. Sometimes, his disciples recruit for him, and other times, he recruits by himself on European tours, telling people, “You’re a powerful shaman. Come to Peru to train with me.”
When they come to his camp in Peru, Bardales uses coercive persuasion tactics, including possibly black magic or brujeria, to control his students’ minds and make them his economic and sexual slaves.
He’s used the money he makes from ceremonies in Europe and teaching students in Peru to build a camp in the jungle, buy nice clothes, cars, and jewelry, and fund his dream of becoming an international cumbia pop star. His band, the Mukanranko orchestra (Orquesta Internacional Mukanranko), has its own stage in Pucallpa, a troupe of scantily clad dancers, and expensively made videos. In some of these videos, you can see some of his European students, gaunt and malnourished, dancing in the background.
Jesus in the Jungle
In 2014, Martha and Simon entered Bardales’ web. Simon worked in a head shop in Vienna and struggled with health and substance abuse issues. One day, Anton came into the shop and invited him to join an ayahuasca ceremony. Eventually, Simon agreed, and he persuaded Martha to join. She was impressed by the students.
“They acted like they were somehow special and important as students of this great shaman. And we felt special too,” Martha said. “We believed we could be God’s instruments on Earth, and that Roger was something like Jesus in the jungle.”
Simon adds: “It felt like a family. We were all damaged people, not very productive in our lives, some of us misusing drugs. We had the sense that, by following Roger, we were becoming better people.”
Simon and Martha got married and decided to go to Bardales’ camp for their honeymoon. Another new recruit named Tania, Anton’s 24-year-old cousin, was also there. She attended a ceremony in Vienna when she was struggling with depression. She suddenly felt connected to God and decided to leave everything and go to Peru.
New students were not always impressed when they met Bardales — he drank a lot, dressed like a narco, had gold teeth, and clearly liked shiny, material things. On the other hand, he could be funny and charming, and they all felt he was a powerful shaman.
“He was much better than other shamans we met,” Tania said. “That was the hook. We wanted to be as powerful as him.”
Nonetheless, many students say that the ceremonies at Bardales’ camp in the jungle were quite dark and now think they involved black magic. Bardales would conduct various rituals to bind the students to him, placing “crowns” on their heads and telling them they were his students for life. He would also baptize them in a nearby river.
Students were expected to follow strict rules — above all, a special diet of rice and fish, which the students grew sick of. They were also told to stay out of the sun and the sea.
“We were told if we went into the sea it would make us crazy,” said Martha. “If we eat pork, it will make us crazy. And one of the most important rules was never to say anything bad against the maestro.”
They became the victims of phobic indoctrination, Martha said. Bardales’ students became avoidant of people and experiences.
“We learned to avoid all kinds of people and their energies, and to be afraid of them, because you might get infected by people’s demons,” she said. “So even when we came back to Austria, we were trying to keep ourselves clean by being home alone or staying within the group.”
Simon adds: “Roger told us if you ever leave the group or stop being a shaman, you won’t survive; you will go crazy. There were a lot of lies planted to manipulate us.”
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Students also firmly believed Bardales had supernatural powers and could read their minds, whether they were in Peru or Europe. They also believed he could harm them with spiritual attacks if they disobeyed him. Through this type of hypnotic manipulation, leaving the group becomes literally unimaginable.
Students were told to give as much money as they could to Bardales — even to borrow money from friends and relatives. One German in their early 20s gave their entire inheritance to Bardales, according to government agency Sect Information Berlin.
Bardales would sometimes shower students with love and compliments, and other times humiliate them in front of the group. He would also seek to separate the pairs. Anton and his brother Marko were rarely at the jungle camp at the same time. Bardales also told Simon and Martha to come separately. He claimed this was for their benefit, but they now believe it was so he could try and have sex with Martha.
“He was trying to convince women that they were going to receive some kind of supernatural power from having sex with him,” Martha said.
In Tania’s first ceremony in Peru, Bardales kissed her on the mouth. “I had a vision on the ayahuasca that we should be together,” she said. “He raped me multiple times. I think he slept with all the women in the camp. It was a secret, you didn’t talk about it.”
Bardales would use senior female students to groom new women to sleep with him by getting them to say what a great honor and blessing it was to work with him. Male students would also become instruments of his will — making sure everyone obeyed the maestro and gave as much money as they could.
A high-control group is like a web in which people are trapped like flies, and then fed off of by the spider. “I sometimes get the impression that Roger is some kind of energetic vampire,” Martha said.
And, in a high-control cult, everyone becomes complicit. “That’s the worst part of it,” Tania told me. “You become an abuser, too, because you’re in the cult and so obsessed with the idea of being special. So you are complicit in controlling others.”
Dragged Into Hell
All of Bardales’ students were drawn in by the promise of healing, spiritual growth, and service to the world. But, according to the ex-students we interviewed, their lives became considerably worse after following him. Tania found herself living in Pucallpa alone, with just Bardales’ Shipibo wife for company. They were jealous of each other but also looked out for one another when Bardales came home drunk and beat them up. “He’s a violent alcoholic narcissist,” Tania said.
She became suicidally depressed and experienced severe psychological distress. At the jungle camp, other students would avoid her and not talk to her, as they thought she had bad vibes and would lower their spiritual vibration. She developed bulimia and body dysmorphia.
Finally, Tania managed to get out and go back to Vienna.
“I felt so bad, so worthless. And so betrayed by this ‘family’ that wasn’t really a family at all,” Tania told me. “I finally got some distance, I got into a relationship, I had a baby. And I started to think, ‘What the fuck?’ It was when I watched some Netflix documentaries that I realized I was in a cult.”
Anton and Simon were also not doing well back in Vienna. At one ceremony, Anton took too much ayahuasca and felt he’d been dragged into hell.
“I understood what the concept of hell really was — separation from God forever, and this state of loneliness, fear, depression,” Anton said. “It was horrible. I almost died, it took me four days to recover and the only thing that brought me back was not wanting to leave my daughter. And I realized Roger couldn’t help me. It was then I made a decision that this group was over for me. But, I still could not picture how to leave.”
Simon, who was running ceremonies with Anton, got sucked into a similar type of hell.
“It was like somebody grabbed my soul and was trying to violently pull it out of my body and travel with it through the universe into a very dark place,” Simon told me. “I was being tortured, choked. I begged God to help me and swore I would stop doing this forever, and the darkness blew away. We sent the guests for the ceremony home, and we knew we couldn’t do it anymore.”
A few months later, both Anton and Simon found liberation and deliverance in a Christian church. Anton found God first after attending a Christian festival.
“People laid their hands on me, the demons were pouring out of me, I was manifesting, and then I felt filled with God’s love, like a new creation,” Anton said. “And I was healed like never before — and without taking any drugs.”
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Simon had been in Bardales’ group for seven years. Then, he went to a prayer meeting.
“A day before [the meeting], I gave everything to God and asked Him to rid me of everything — all the shamanic crowns and spells, whatever power I was given by Roger,” Simon said. “I said ‘I don’t want it anymore, I just want what You want.’”
At the prayer meeting, he fell into a trance and felt lifted to another dimension. He felt a deep healing and deliverance from demons. “It really was the best moment in my life.”
The next day, Simon texted the entire group, including Martha, telling them that Bardales was a brujo who practiced black magic and had enslaved them in a cult.
“We were shaking, it was like a bomb had gone off,” Martha recalled about that day. She felt relief, “like, finally it’s over.” She went back to Austria, and their marriage started from a new place, as if they’d met each other for the first time. Simon and Martha are both Christians now, and both are wary of psychedelics and shamanic culture.
“When you decide to use those drugs, you willingly step into the spirit realm where you’re not supposed to go,” Simon said. “You’re not given authority to go in there. There are spirits, demons, and all kinds of creatures in this spirit realm. They can do whatever they want with you.”
It took Tania a long time to recover. She had been so mind-controlled that she thought she was cursed. She still sometimes wakes up in terror, thinking she’s back in a ceremony. “I never thought I’d say this, but I can’t wait for Roger to die so that all the people trapped can be free.”
Blowing the Whistle on Mukanranko
Roger Bardales’ group has been in existence for 12 years. In all that time, there have been regular “world tours,” a stream of new student victims, and hundreds of thousands — probably millions — of euros pouring his way. In that time, his ego has expanded along with his empire. He now presents himself as the international ambassador for the Shipibo-Conibo people, has cultivated a relationship with the governor of the Ucayali region, and reportedly has dreams of becoming president of Peru. But, these grand ambitions received a blow in the last few months, at least in Europe, when three Baltic women blew the whistle on his abuse.
In 2017, Bardales’ European tour visited the Baltic states in northern Europe. Viktorija, who was 26, and her husband, who was two decades older than her, had been on the fringes of Bardales’ group for a few years and was considering becoming a disciple.
When Bardales came to the Baltics in 2017 to facilitate some ceremonies. Viktorija’s husband said that seeing as he was embarking on this arduous path, she should meet his maestro and attend a ceremony. During the ceremony, Bardales gave Viktorija a symbolic crown.
“Afterwards, he said to me, through one of his students translating: ‘Because your husband has chosen to be my student, this automatically means that you have to be my student. I gave you a crown. That means that you are connected to me forever. You’re not allowed to swim in the sea for five years. You’re not allowed to sit in the sun. Your husband is my student, if he takes all the money from your home to fund this path, you have to accept it because you’re his wife.’ And I was like, what the fuck? I just met you, and you’re saying these things to me?”
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On a later visit to the Baltics, Bardales went to a mansion where a friend of Viktorija’s was staying. It wasn’t his mansion; he was just house-sitting, but he got the impression that Viktorija’s friend was very rich. Bardales called that friend, saying he’d done a special distance healing for him, and he now owed Bardales 60,000 euros, and it would be bad if he didn’t pay (the friend didn’t pay). On that same visit, Bardales sexually assaulted a woman after a ceremony. This woman didn’t want to talk about it, but a friend told me the following:
“We participated in a ceremony Roger organized, three nights in total, during a summer weekend in 2022. He invited my friend for a personal conversation. On our way home, my friend told me that he invited her to the next weekend’s ceremony and that there were many things in her life that only he could fix. She also told me that he asked for 10,000 euros, and the transfer had to be made immediately upon returning home. Of course, I advised her not to do it. The following weekend, she went there alone without me, and he manipulated her in such a way that she transferred 30,000 euros to him. The day after the first ceremony, he performed a sexual ‘healing’ on her. She was so influenced that she couldn’t grasp reality; everything felt like a dream. When this story came to light, half of the amount was recovered, though not by him personally, but by his disciples.”
When Viktorija heard about these stories, she realized that Bardales was a brujo, a bad shaman dedicated to his own gratification. A friend of hers, Ieva, had become besotted with him and wanted to go to Peru to become his student. Viktorija tried to warn her not to go, but she did.
Ieva’s Story
Ieva is a 37-year-old spiritual coach and influencer in the Baltics. She became fascinated by Bardales’ students and attended some of the ceremonies they ran. She was a bit put off by his double career as a wannabe pop singer, but his students said this was just a mask he was wearing to hide his power.
One day in 2022, Ieva went to a ceremony Bardales was facilitating on his European tour. She was in a vulnerable state, having just left an abusive relationship. “Roger sang during the ceremony and it was so powerful,” She said. “I decided I’m going to be devoted to this man.”
During the second ceremony, he French-kissed her and put an energetic ring on her finger, as if they were getting married.
“I was really fascinated,” Ieva said. “In my mind, there were some visions about a wedding, being his bride, being chosen, getting this knowledge about shamanism. I felt like I didn’t need to struggle for anything anymore, everything was taken care of, this was the teacher of my life, the man of my life, the God of my life.”
Ieva decided to go to Peru for three months to begin her training as a shaman. When she arrived, she was shocked by how poor Bardales’ home was in Pucallpa. She immediately decided not to stay for three months, but just for a month’s “healing retreat.” She agreed to pay 10,000 euros for the month. When she traveled to the jungle camp, she noticed how unwell the students living there looked.
“One of the students, it was quite devastating to see him, he was very skinny and it seemed like he didn’t have his own clothes,” Ieva said. “He had borrowed so much money to give to Roger, that he didn’t have enough left to go back to Europe. He was stuck there.”
Bardales arrived at the camp and gave everyone a talk about how he impressed women everywhere he went.
“It was ridiculous,” Ieva said “The students put him on a pedestal — in their eyes, he is very special, like a saint. So it’s a feedback loop to the point where he really believes he’s going to be the next president of Peru.”
Ieva fell ill after arriving in Peru, and Bardales did a massage for her. “He touched my breasts in front of everyone,” Ieva told me.
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That night, Ieva participated in her first ayahuasca ceremony in the jungle. Bardales didn’t take part, he sat in a hammock outside. And one by one, the women would be invited outside to see him, all except a woman in her 50s. Eventually, it was Ieva’s turn to be invited outside. It was her birthday, she felt euphoric. She was taken to see Bardales, he hugged her and led her through the jungle to his house, and his bedroom. As if in a trance, she started taking off her clothes. Suddenly she woke up out of a trance, and thought what the hell am I doing?
“I understood it was bullshit and started putting my clothes back on, before he could touch me intimately,” Ieva said. “Then Roger said, ‘go back and invite your friend Maria here.’ I was walking through the jungle, back to the maloka, feeling in shock. I said to my friend Maria, ‘he’s inviting you to his room, but I don’t want you to go.’ Then, a student came, and said, ‘Maria, he’s inviting you.’ She said, ‘I’m not going.’ They invited another girl, she went and came back. No one talked to each other.”
Later that evening, one of Bardales’ senior students asked Ieva what happened.
“I explained to her, and she said ‘but this was happening in your vision?’ And I said, ‘No, it was happening for real.’”
The next morning, Bardales and his students tried to convince Ieva that he had offered her a healing blessing, and she was almost convinced.
“But then I heard a message from my higher self — pack your things and go tomorrow,” Ieva said. “It was hard to go through all the conversations with the students, including a girl who came with me from the Baltics. They were saying ‘this is your issues, work through it’. But I knew I had to leave.”
Ieva demanded Bardales give her money back. Meanwhile, Santa, who had been at the camp for a month, saw that Ieva was about to leave.
Santa’s Story
Santa is a 32 -year-old sound healer from the Baltics. She’s been immersed in the world of plant medicine for five years and was interested in becoming an ayahuasca healer. Santa went to one of Bardales’ ceremonies in the Baltics. She had a panic attack immediately, but told herself it was a good sign. “I ignored so many red flags,” she says. She told Bardales her intention was to become a shaman.
He smirked and said, “‘Let’s see in the ceremony if you could become a maestra.’ And then in the first ceremony, he sang a special song to me and was touching my head, like putting a spiritual crown on me. I was sitting next to a friend who was obsessed with Roger, he said ‘wow you’ve been initiated.’ The next morning, two of his students came to me and said ‘Welcome to the family.’”
Bardales told Santa he was traveling the world and would take her with him and have her sing in his ceremonies. In the next ceremony, he groped her breasts.
“I remember thinking, he shouldn’t do this. But that was for just a second, and then the thought was washed away.”
The next day, Bardales invited her to Peru to train to be a shaman. Santa arrived at the camp in October 2022. She was told to hand over her credit card and pin number. She agreed to pay 7,000 euros, which was all there was in her bank account. It was emptied out within days. “The other students said they handed over their cards and pins as well,” she said. “They said if you want to be a maestra you need to give up all your possessions.”
During one of her first ayahuasca ceremonies, one of the senior female students came to Santa and told her to come with her.
“She said, ‘all the women who want to take this path with the maestro received this gift. This gift comes from the plants, it’s a protection and an initiation. It’s very special.’ Then she said, ‘This gift is received by having sexual intercourse with the maestro.’ And at that moment, she looked evil to me. I said, ‘no way, my body is a temple and no one is touching it.’ She said, ‘Suit yourself’, not in a friendly way, like a ‘fuck-you’ way.”
Santa felt shocked by this conversation, but she told herself perhaps it was a test. Meanwhile, her visions became more and more sexual, of Bardales wanting to marry her.
When Santa had been there a month, Ieva arrived. They took part in another ayahuasca ceremony, in which Ieva was invited to Bardales’ house, and came back obviously distressed. Then Santa was invited out to see Bardales.
“When I stood up, I felt like a queen,” Santa said. “But, also, all these sexual visions. A senior student guided me to the maestro, he was lying on a hammock. He looks at my belly and says, ‘You have a seed in you and it can grow mighty.’ I don’t understand what he means. I said, ‘I will always protect this seed.’ He looks at me and says ‘OK, ask the next girl to come.’ So, I went back to the maloca and told the next girl, and she was gone for much, much longer. I heard she was taken to the main building.”
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The next day, Santa saw Ieva crying. She said she had been sexually abused the night before. Meanwhile, another new student asked to have a chat with Santa, and said she had slept with the maestro, and believed it was an initiation. “At that point, I understood I need to get out of here” said Santa. “This is not a safe place.”
She saw Ieva leaving and wanted to leave with her, but a male student told her, “If you leave you will regret it.”
She decided to write to a friend of hers, a female Shipibo shaman. She asked her friend if shamanic initiations could really happen through sex.
My friend replied, ‘No, get out of there as soon as you can. These people are predators. Don’t take any more medicine.”
Then I got even more scared. The next morning Santa packed and insisted on leaving. Bardales drove her to Pucallpa, she smiled and acted natural the whole journey. In the city, she met up with Ieva in the hotel and felt relieved to be out. She still experienced what felt like spiritual attacks for some days afterward.
When she got back to the Baltics, she told some people what happened. She emailed Chacruna, the plant medicine NGO, to say that this shaman had “initiated” at least 10 women through his unethical sexual practices. She didn’t receive a reply, unfortunately.
Viktorija, Ieva, and Santa decided to publish their stories about Bardales. He sent Viktorija’s husband a message saying ‘What evil done against yourself and your family?’ which they interpreted as a threat, although one of Bardales’ present students says he meant, “What evil have I done against you and your family?”
What Happens Now?
We have been contacted by family members whose loved ones suddenly told them they were moving to the jungle for years to follow the shamanic path with Bardales. They can see thousands of euros going out of their loved ones’ bank accounts and into Peruvian or German accounts controlled by Bardales or his European students.
You can trace Bardales’ international network, and how he uses his Western students to build connections to other New Age institutions. For example, two of the present students, Finn and Laura, presented at the annual conference of Cherryblossom (Kirschblüten Gemeinschaft), the alternative healing community in Germany, and at other New Age and esoteric festivals. Bardales uses his students in Europe to attract new victims and to raise funding for his schemes in Pucallpa. In Peru, he uses them to make himself look internationally connected — he presented some of his students as “representatives of Germany” to the governor of Ucayali last year, pledging their support for a new cultural center.
His ambitions keep growing. Not only has he appointed himself an international ambassador for the Shipibo-Conibo people, but he’s also appointed himself the “leader” of the Santa Martha native community in Pucallpa. Last November, in a public ceremony, the governor of the Ucayali region, Manuel Gambini Rupay (who is under investigation for corruption), presented Bardales with a property title for the entire Santa Martha neighborhood, “providing legal security to more than 450 families.” Bardales set up a Facebook page for the Santa Martha community, promoting him as the jefe, or “boss,” of the community. He says he will build a new football stadium, a new shamanic hospital, and so on. Given his political connections, it seems unlikely there will be any legal investigation into Bardales in the Ucayali region. It remains to be seen if European investigations into his activities will bear fruit.
The ex-students we spoke to generally felt pity and affection for the people still in the group, who they described as idealistic people.
“Truly, I feel very sorry for them, most are really nice people,” Santa told me. “Roger is feeding their vulnerabilities and pains, they don’t see any other life.”
*This story originally appeared in the newsletter Ecstatic Integration.
