Madrid (EFE) practically impossible without help.
“Now it’s me again,” she says in her first television interview since she was found by the Peruvian police on July 4, 2018, alone and in the care of several minors, including her one-month-old baby, all of them malnourished in a House located in a dangerous area of the Amazon jungle, without running water or electricity.
Aguilar explains that at that time she was still under the influence of the man who captured her, Félix Steven Manrique, sentenced to twenty years for trafficking for the purpose of sexual and labor exploitation, but “little by little” she realized that she needed help.
“Realizing it was the first step, but there is still a lot to recover,” says the young woman, who is 24 years old today, has graduated in Social Integration and works in a foundation that helps people with disabilities.
“My story is a happy ending, but unfortunately many families and women have not been able to have this ending,” he warns in the series “548 days: Captured by a sect,” directed by Olmo Figueredo (“The State against Pablo Ibar”) and José Ortuño (“Where is Marta?”).
In 2020, Aguilar narrated in a book, written by the journalist Vanesa Lozano, how she was captured and torn from her family by a sexual sect that forced her to run away from home on January 7, 2017 to travel to Peru to settle with its leader and two other wives.
Internet and sects
Its purpose now is to warn about how “the influence of the Internet has triggered the number of people recruited by sects”, according to those responsible for the series, who use data according to which 1% of the world population (400,000 in Spain) are ” affected directly or indirectly” by sects.
In this sense, they demand “laws that penalize coercive persuasion” to prevent cases like that of Patricia Aguilar from continuing to be “invisible and silenced.”
In the documentary, Aguilar, her parents and a maternal cousin who turned to the search, tell how she was seduced and manipulated by the leader of the sect, but also the influence that the abandonment she felt in her own home had on her situation.
The expert report on the case pointed to “evidence of affective deficiency that makes her dependent on those who offer her affection” and “prone to being manipulated for purposes of emotional affectivity.”
With an absent father and dedicated to work, her uncle was a reference figure for her, but he died suddenly in 2015, which plunged her mother into a depression for which she stopped caring for her family. It was then that Aguilar began to be interested in esotericism and life after death.
How was your rescue from the sect in Peru
The series also shows the difficulties her family ran into to rescue her, since she had just turned 18 when she ran away. Finally, her father traveled to Peru on her behalf and found support at the Spanish consulate to file a complaint with the Peruvian prosecutor for human trafficking.
Aguilar describes the complete submission she showed to her leader, who convinced her and the other two women that he was sent by God with a mission to “repopulate the Earth after the apocalypse.”
He describes the “daily sexual work” that they had to carry out, without conditions of privacy, the sessions with ayahuasca and how little by little Manrique became more violent.
“We put him first, we would have died for him,” he confesses, “but there came a time when he asked us for things that went beyond our limits.”