On February 12, 1999, police in San Cristóbal, the capital of Venezuela's Táchira state, went to a shelter built under the Libertador bridge over the Torbes river, where a homeless man named Dorángel Vargas lived, after civil defense workers found human remains nearby. Inside they found body parts, viscera and cooking pots. Vargas, forty-one, confessed at length, on camera for the RCTV network, to killing and eating at least ten men over the previous two or three years. He said he did not eat women or children, that women were like flowers, and he discussed which parts of a man were worth cooking. The Venezuelan press named him El Comegente, the people-eater, and the case became the best-known crime story in the country's modern history.
He was born José Dorángel Vargas Gómez on May 14, 1957, to poor farming parents in Mérida state, in El Vigía by one account and Caño Zancudo by another; his name is also written Dorancel. He finished third grade. He drifted into Táchira, was arrested twice for stealing chickens and cattle, and by the mid-1990s was sleeping under bridges around the Parque Metropolitano in San Cristóbal.
In 1995 he killed a man who shared his sleeping place, Cruz Baltazar Moreno, and ate most of the body. Another homeless man, Antonio López Guerrero, reported him. Vargas was arrested in May 1995, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and committed to the Peribeca psychiatric rehabilitation institute. About two years later the institute released him on the ground that he posed no danger to the community. There was no follow-up treatment and no supervision. He went back to the river.
By his own account, after his release he found López Guerrero, the man who had informed on him, and killed and ate him too. The killings the investigation could trace were concentrated between November 1998 and January 1999. Vargas hunted along the riverbank with a tube-shaped spear and with rocks and pipes, choosing men of about thirty to forty, laborers and joggers, whose disappearances were slow to be noticed. He cooked what he could and buried hands, feet and heads. He said he managed about two men a week because he had no refrigerator. At his shelter police found remains that they said pointed to at least twelve victims; his own confession was to ten or eleven, and some later accounts say fourteen.
What followed the arrest is the other half of the case. Psychiatrists confirmed paranoid schizophrenia and found that his judgment and understanding of his acts were entirely abolished, which made him unfit for criminal punishment under Venezuelan law and in need of prolonged medication and constant supervision. Venezuela had no secure psychiatric hospital to hold him. He was never tried and never sentenced. A court placed him in the cells of the Táchira state police in San Cristóbal, the only place, it found, where his safety could be guaranteed, and in February 2010 a judge ruled that the police station was not the right place for a man with his diagnosis. He stayed there anyway. For years his medication was brought by a single relative traveling from Monagas state. In 2016 he was accused of dismembering two men inside the police lockup on the orders of other inmates. Reports in 2020 that he had been freed were false; he remained in custody, more than two decades after his arrest, without a verdict.