Dorangel Vargas (born 1957), known as "El comegente" and the "Hannibal Lecter of the Andes", is a serial killer and cannibal in Venezuela. He was a homeless man who used to hunt passersby at a park in the city of San Cristobal, Táchira State. Once he was caught, he confessed to killing and eating at least 10 men in a period of two years preceding his arrest in 1999.

In a country with hardly any serial killer history, the self-confessed cannibal Vargas has become a Venezuelan media darling. Dubbed the "Hannibal Lecter of the Andes" by the local press, Vargas claims to have eaten up to 10 men in the last two years. He was arrested on February, 1999, in the city of San Cristobal, near to the Colombian border.

"Sure I eat people," the candid cannibal told reporters. "Anyone can eat human flesh, but you have to wash and garnish it well to avoid diseases... I only eat the parts with muscles, particularly thighs and calves which are my favorite ... I make a very tasty stew with the tongue and I use the eyes to make a nutritious and healthy soup." Vargas said he prefers the taste of men to women and will not eat hands, feet or testicles, "although I've been on the point of trying them on various occasions." He said he rejected overweight men because they had too much cholesterol, and the elderly were spared because their flesh "is contaminated and very tough."

However, notwithstanding the large number of bones found buried around his shack, many doubt the veracity of his story. Press reports claim that he preyed on homeless men and laborers whom he clubbed to death with a metal tube, but Vargas said he was "given" the bodies by various people, including the police. Some locals speculate that Vargas may be being used as a scapegoat for a ring of human organ traffickers. Congress said it planned to investigate reports that Vargas is a former mental hospital patient who was arrested on similar charges four years ago but released shortly afterward.

Wikipedia.org

Dorancel Vargas, the Venezuelan "Man-Eater"

Soulcast.com

September 29, 2006

In September, 2006, a Chilean reporter working for Megavision (a local TV channel) traveled to San Cristobal, Venezuela, to interview Dorancel Vargas, a man that at present is jail after having been accused of killing at least 20 men.

Dorancel has been diagnosed as a "paranoid psychopath" by psychiatrists that have examined him and so there is a dispute whether he is a criminal or a mentally ill person. Dorancel was raised in a peasant family that lived in a border area with Colombia.

Due to his strange behavior, the family believed that Dorancel was possessed by "evil spirits". Most of his family are members of a guerrilla group known as "Venezuelan Liberation Forces", that controls the jungle area where they live, and it is not clear if Dorancel was also a member of this group in his youth.

At fifteen years of age, Dorancel ended up in San Cristobal, one of the main cities in Venezuela, and it seems he began to take drugs and drink heavily. He began to live under an expressway bridge called "Autopista Libertador", an extremely dark place at night and frequently used by drunkards, drug addicts and beggars as a shelter.

During the decade of the 90´s, several people that lived near to the bridge complained to the Police that their relatives had gone missing, after which an investigation began.

As there was a bar near the bridge, many drunkards would wander late at night or fall asleep in that place, and this was when Dorancel would strike, and kill the people with a bamboo spear. Afterwards Dorancel would dismember the bodies, cut the meat that he wanted, bury the heads in the ground and throw the bones and remains into the river.

In 1995, police began to search the area under the bridge after a brother of one of the missing persons said that he had last seen him drinking and talking to Dorancel . During a search the police found the remains of several men and began to search for Dorancel, that lived in the nearby bushes.

That year during his first TV interview, Dorancel stated that "human meat is nice, but I eat all kinds of meat, dog, cats , lizards. I buried the heads and feet and throw the other bones into the river. I also stored some meat in containers. The heart and the liver must be spiced up, If I was hungry I used to kill men, never women because they do no harm."

Dorancel was arrested but after a bureaucratic mess up, (the judge had ordered that Dorancel be sent to a psychiatric hospital), he was set free and returned to the "Libertador Bridge".

Dorancel was arrested again in 1999, after more people denounced that their relatives had gone missing.

Juan Carlos Meneses was lucky, one night he was coming out from a motel with his girlfriend and at about 2:00 a.m. near the Libertador bridge had to stop to change a flat tyre. "I heard shouts and when I turned around I saw that Dorancel was about to hit me with a baseball bat, a motorcycle cop arrived and caught him just in time. I could have been another victim," said Juan Carlos.

Since he is considered neither a criminal nor a psychopath, Dorancel is now under solitary confinement in a police station, where he has been found to be wandering around with knives on several occasions. Even the murderers fear him. "He used to kill whoever got drunk with him , " said a policeman that guards Dorancel. Nowadays the "man-eater" is at the initial stages of Parkinson´s disease and spends his time sweeping floors and washing his clothes.

"I used to eat the thighs, not the nose ears or hands because they are too hard. If I saw a drunkard sleeping, I would kill him with my spear, cut his head off and feel happy, I want to go back there and dig a big hole to bury them I don't feel ashamed of anything. They have put me in this jail for nothing, " ended Dorancel.