As is so often the case in Brazil, the horror unfolds behind a paradisiacal landscape. The chef and convicted fraudster David Peregrina Capó, a 53-year-old Spaniard, and his partner Érika da Silva Santos, a 38-year-old Brazilian, lived in a dream corner, on a river island of hundreds of hectares that they bought years ago. There they built their home and opened an exclusive restaurant. They served paella with fresh seafood, white garlic or fish tartare, paired with a glass of white wine, champagne or caipirinha. Overlooking the river and in the middle of the jungle, business began to flourish. They had dreams and many plans: find investment partners to expand the business with a few bungalows, sell part of the land for 10 million reais (two million euros) or watch their son Pedro, 21, fly out of the nest. Four shots ended everything last week and brought to light an old story.
A cold-blooded murder that remains a mystery. He was found in his underwear in the kitchen. They shot him three times. In a desperate attempt to escape, she jumped from the upper floor. They killed her in the garden with a shot in the head. There was no one else on the island – her son was at his maternal grandmother’s house – but someone heard the shots and hours later, on Friday the 24th, a civilian police team arrived at the scene aboard a Navy boat.
It is a difficult place to access, customers could only arrive by boat. The 40-minute walk upriver from Porto Seguro in Bahia, one of Brazil’s most tourist destinations, was an added incentive to sample Spanish cuisine in an intimate and refined atmosphere in a beautiful landscape. They only welcome reservations, a maximum of 20 people.
“We are all in shock, they were a very charismatic couple who only wanted to please their friends and customers,” Ana remembers, still in shock. She has been friends with the couple since 2020 and chooses this name to protect her identity as the murderer is at large and the motives of the crime are still a mystery. Like many people close to the victims, he is afraid to talk about the case. Although the police investigation is shrouded in secrecy, it is known that it was an execution because the murderer or murderers did not steal anything. It is also known that there were surveillance cameras. Several people have been questioned, but there are currently no arrests. It is not known what could have motivated the crime, investigators have not put forward a hypothesis. Among the rumors circulating, one that stands out is that the couple or their plans may have clashed with the interests of a criminal gang that used this idyllic corner to transport drugs or hide weapons.
The Ilha dos Ribeirinhos restaurant, Peregrina estate, Porto Seguro, a tourist town on the coast of the Brazilian state of Bahia.Ilha dos Ribeirinhos
“What doesn’t occur to me is that he was a criminal,” says Ana, sitting in the shade of a manicured garden in Porto Seguro. The friends were still digesting the brutality of the murder when a second blow struck: a well-kept secret. Peregrina, that handsome, friendly man that those close to him knew and who smiles on Instagram with a chef’s jacket and a freshly made paella, was a fugitive convict. In 2012 he was convicted of two counts of fraud. The topic jumped from the Mallorcan press to that of the rest of Spain and Brazil. He defrauded a bank of two million euros with phantom mortgages that he devised while managing a branch in Muro (Mallorca), his homeland, and then confiscated another 200,000 euros while managing a restaurant in Palma.
His friend Barega Cangussu, a 61-year-old chef, had heard about the Spaniard’s past. “He said he was from Mallorca but didn’t go into details. I knew he had been in prison. No, I didn’t know for what crime. I never spoke to him about it. “I’m not a judge,” he explains in his pousada-bistro. Like the other victims’ relatives interviewed, he is happy to learn that the Spaniard’s prison sentences expired in 2020.
He emphasizes that Peregrina and Santos’ business was getting better and better. “He wanted to forget everything. He told me: “Everything will be different, I am very happy with Érika.” “I have a project for a hotel, we need it, we will live better with it.” “They asked for loans and wanted to sell part of the property, to build the hotel.” About six months ago, they put five plots of land, each 20,000 square meters, up for sale for two million reais ($400,000, 375,000 euros), according to the real estate agency, which is still advertising them online. He warns that “the owners have died.” It is unknown whether they will continue to be available for sale or not.
The river island of Pau do Macaco is a particularly convenient place to go unnoticed. Everything indicates that the couple took possession of it around 2008, during the Spaniard’s first escape to Brazil, when he was under police investigation. The woman bought it. The suspicion is that she used the money from her boyfriend’s scam on the other side of the Atlantic. He would be neither the first nor the last foreigner to land here with illegal money. The fact is that he returned to Spain, turned himself in, was tried, convicted and imprisoned. But it wasn’t long before Peregrina took advantage of the permission to return to Brazil, reunite with his girlfriend and reinvent himself as a paella chef. They built a house on the island and, starting in 2016, plunged into the adventure of offering what experts call experiential tourism. His friends believe he no longer normally traveled to Spain. But that is just one of the many unknowns that exist about her life and death.
Peregrina arrived in Brazil at exactly that time, as Santos was from a nearby town, Itagimirim, where the couple was buried the day after the bodies were found.
Brazil was born in this area of the state of Bahia, known as the Coast of Discoveries. The first Portuguese conquerors settled here and millions of slaves were sold in Salvador de Bahía, who laid the foundation for this country with their forced labor in sugar cane. Porto Seguro – a municipality of 170,000 residents and 85 kilometers of coastline – is a bubble of prosperity thanks to tourism for almost every budget, from the basic to the super-luxury, arriving by private jet. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva chose a farm on this coast for his last vacation before donning the presidential suit for the third time.
David Peregrina Capó cooks paella on the Ilha dos Ribeirinhos.Ilha dos Ribeirinhos
The miles of beautiful coconut tree-lined beaches, straight out of a travel magazine, are an oasis of calm that contrasts with some very violent inland cities. With 6,600 murders in 2022 in an area like Spain and 15 million inhabitants, it is the second most violent state in the country. Bahia has suffered a security crisis in recent years due to increasingly powerful organized crime gangs. Porto Seguro and its two million tourists are an economic engine and a juicy market for cocaine and marijuana arriving by road or river.
As a continental country with porous borders, Brazil is a fertile ground for refugees, as demonstrated by the Nazi criminal Josef Mengele, who died in São Paulo without being discovered; the Glasgow train robber Ronald Biggs or Carlos García Juliá, one of the murderers of Atocha’s lawyers. The fact that there are Brazilians who look like Italians, Germans, Koreans or Mexicans also makes it significantly easier for those trying to hide from local or foreign authorities. At least a few examples come up in the conversations in Porto Seguro, such as the neighbors who were caught with more than 300 kilos of coca on board a sailboat in a Mediterranean port, this nice hotel receptionist who turned out to be a bank robber in São Paulo or this neighbor who had a synthetic drug factory in her house, went to prison and was released again. Things that happen behind the backs of tourists enjoying the sun, swimming, beach bars with live bossa nova or electronic music until dawn.
The news of the crime reached Maria via a WhatsApp group. “Barbaric crime, Spanish chef and his wife shot dead,” read the headline from a local media outlet. She froze because “this is still a quiet place,” sighs the tourism industry veteran, who doesn’t have that name either. She helped Peregrina and Santos set up their gastronomic business. “They were a warlike, fighting family. First the two and the son.” This is Pedro, a boy who called the Spaniard father because he also raised him, even though he was only her biological son; He had two other daughters in Spain. The young man studies abroad and returns to the island at weekends to help out. While the Spaniard cooked, Baiana was responsible for the desserts and cocktails. The closed menu with the boat, but without drinks, cost 240 reais (45 euros). The couple never had permanent employees, but instead hired kitchen assistants or waiters on a daily basis, depending on the reservation.
After overcoming the devastating effects of the pandemic and the flooding that inundated the island, “business started to flow,” emphasizes Maria. The restaurant became famous thanks to word of mouth. The couple made a name for themselves. They bought a boat. They were invited to gastronomic events to make friends. “They started to become visible, there was no one who went out to eat there and didn’t come back happy,” adds Maria. The tourists were also joined by residents of Porto Seguro who chose this incomparable setting for birthdays or company celebrations.
“At five in the morning they went out to buy fish, seafood and ice cream, they offered very good service and welcomed customers at the dock when the appetizer was already on the table,” says Ana. They led a very simple life. In order to rebuild the house after the flood, they had to hold a raffle. At the same time, animal protection organizations took part.
Spanish chef David Peregrina Capó and his wife Érica da Silva Santos in Porto Seguro, Brazil, in 2023. Ilha dos Ribeirinhos
Ana says that she asked her friend some time ago: “Don’t you think this place is too isolated? “You’re alone here.” And she laughed and said to me, “‘Alone? … We actually have two dogs!’” After the crime, the dogs that the son wanted to collect and the 15 chickens were left behind next to the swing.
Behind the façade of happiness offered by the Instagram account of the restaurant called “Os Ribeirinhos” (the people on the riverbank), the challenges were many. They only opened if there were 6-8 people with a reservation the day before. Since there is no electricity on the island, they used solar power for internet and everything else, including charging. They didn’t accept cash, only a popular instant payment called Pix. The payments, on their behalf. At the fish market in this coastal town, it is said that it was always Ms. Santos, not him, who paid for the shrimp, lobster, tuna and sea bream. According to some friends, the family estates were also in her name.
For several months they have been receiving help from the official Brazilian body that advises small and medium-sized companies. They dreamed of this cash injection to build some cabins and offer an even more special experience on the island. Selling the properties would have meant parting with a small portion of a huge, isolated piece of land that for years was the perfect escape and the realization of a dream for the Spanish chef and con artist and his Brazilian family.
Follow all international information on Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.