Colombia’s narco-influencer Bendito Menor built a 700,000-strong following before his death
Naim Pérez had all the qualities a Gen-Z influencer could ask for.
With an easy smile and thick black hair cut into a stylish hi-top fade, the 27-year-old Colombian built a huge following on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok by sharing eye-catching images of a high-flying lifestyle: fast motorcycles, big cars, and a beautiful girlfriend known as “Bebecita.”
But behind the romantic snapshots and aspirational memes was a darker reality: Pérez, who went by the alias Bendito Menor (“Little Blessing”), also openly broadcast his role as a rising member of the Self-Defense Forces of the Sierra Nevada, an illegal armed group better known by its Spanish abbreviation ACSN.
Although he wasn’t the most powerful member of the ACSN — one of several armed groups in Colombia that profit from crimes like drug trafficking and extortion — he was easily the most famous, with a huge fan base that hung on his every move.
Thanks to dozens of social media pages dedicated solely to Bendito Menor content, fans could watch him fighting in the jungle, splashing through a river at the wheel of an SUV wearing fatigues, and patrolling in a boat with his men, all to the strains of rousing Spanish-language music. But there were also glimpses into his personal life: romantic walks with Bebecita, selfies with dogs, and rambling musings on life and destiny.
In recent weeks, Colombians also followed along as Bendito Menor publicly tangled with the country’s new hard-line right-wing president, Abelardo de la Espriella, who has cultivated a confrontational online presence of his own.
Then, in the early hours of September 4, Bendito Menor and Bebecita, whose real name was Rosa Angélica Tarazona, were shot and killed in a dramatic late-night operation personally ordered by the president, who had declared him a “high-value target.” (In the three weeks since, the government has also targeted other ACSN leaders, leading to a major eruption of street violence in their stronghold of Santa Marta and the deployment of troops there earlier this week.)
Their deaths have made waves in Colombia, where drug traffickers are run-of-the-mill but narco-influencers are still a relative novelty.
“Bendito Menor was a viral phenomenon on social media,” said Lerber Dimas Vásquez, a research professor and expert on violence in the Sierra Nevada area, in Colombia’s far northeast.
“His videos ranged from gruesome clips to others showing him distributing food or sailing in a speedboat. He projected an image of apparent success, a lifestyle that is incredibly alluring to impoverished, marginalized youth.”
Many teenage boys also became his real-life followers, attracted by the illegal motorcycle races he organized on the streets of Riohacha — and the gifts of phones, weapons, and bikes he distributed, according to locals.
The phenomenon underscores the difficulty of combating organized crime in an increasingly digital world. It also raises serious questions about the role social media sites play in enabling figures like Bendito Menor to conduct what are essentially PR campaigns for criminality, reproducing glamorous images of narcocultura, as it’s known in Spanish, with algorithmic speed.
Narcocultura isn’t a new phenomenon: Songs and telenovelas glorifying the drug trade have been popular in Colombia and other parts of Latin America since the cocaine-trafficking heyday of the 1990s, while television series about kingpins like Pablo Escobar have captivated audiences in the U.S. Poems and stories telling tales of bandits and outlaws have an even older history, from Robin Hood in England to the gaucho Martin Fierro in Argentina.
But while they might once have been passed down orally, or through bootleg recordings, today they can be instantly disseminated by the criminals themselves, or shared through platforms like Spotify — which currently hosts at least three original songs glorifying the exploits of Bendito Menor. (Spotify did not respond to a request for comment.)
Bendito Menor’s use of social media to grow his profile represents “a new stage of sophistication” in narcoculture, according to Jaime Andres Wilches Tinjaca, a Colombian researcher who studies criminal subcultures.
Although it’s unclear whether he had direct control over any particular account, he clearly produced his own content. The result was compelling posts and videos that presented “drug trafficking as an everyday, aspirational, or even fun activity,” Wilches said.
It wasn’t uncommon for his posts to rack up comments asking how to join him, or inquiring about job opportunities.
“Young people facing exclusion find in these narratives a way to validate drug trafficking as an effective means of social mobility,” he said.
‘I became the thread that pulled the strings of destiny … and kilos’
“My name is Naim Andrés Pérez Toncel/ In the Sierra I learned not to fall,” begins one of the best-known songs about Bendito Menor, often used as a backing track for TikTok and Instagram videos about his exploits.
Known as a corrido tumbado, the song spins a tale of a quasi-mythical figure, born into poverty, who rose to a position of power through bravery and guile — and destiny.
"It wasn’t luck, it was pure danger/ Every step marked on the razor’s edge/ From a hitman, I became the thread/ That pulled the strings of destiny ... and kilos," the song continues.
The more prosaic version of his life story is that Pérez was born in 1999 and grew up in Riohacha, an impoverished city in the Guajira peninsula.
Sandwiched between the Caribbean Sea and the isolated Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range, Guajira is closer to Venezuela than to Bogotá, and state power has traditionally struggled to assert itself here.
Organized crime, on the other hand, has thrived, with a succession of local criminal groups exerting a stranglehold over key transport routes for cocaine and smuggled fuel.
Riohacha, the capital of La Guajira Department, Colombia.
As early as 2021, according to internal reports obtained by OCCRP, the Colombian prosecutor’s office identified Naim Pérez as the head of a small Riohacha-based gang called the Combo de los Majayura, which specialized in murder, extortion, and drug-dealing at a local level. The reports noted that the gang was “affiliated with the ACSN,” the main paramilitary organization operating in the area.
Although the ACSN only came together under that name in around 2018, it descends from other paramilitary groups that have a long history in the region. Today, it has roughly 600 members and controls a key swath of land around the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. According to a July report by the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a Colombian think tank focusing on armed conflict, its main source of income comes from extracting “commissions” on fuel and cocaine smuggled through the port of Santa Marta and river mouths in the region from which speedboats can depart.
It’s unclear when Bendito Menor formally joined the ACSN, but he rose quickly through the ranks once he did. By 2026, he had become a key commander in charge of drug trafficking routes, the Ideas for Peace Foundation said.
He was also known for his violence, and had been implicated in multiple mass killings in the La Guajira department and attacks on security forces, it said.
As Bendito Menor was becoming more powerful in the real world, he was also growing his fame online. He did not have one official social media account — instead, content he apparently produced was shared by a number of accounts dedicated to reposting his material as well as fan content, with names like bendi_tomenor and Fansofbenditomenor.
The result was “a digital ecosystem where followers, admirers, content creators, and even users with no direct connection to the criminal organization contribute to amplifying these narratives,” Wilches said. It also may have made it harder for social media sites to police his content. As of last week, OCCRP identified at least 20 Bendito Menor-related accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, with over 700,000 followers.
Even some of his fellow ACSN commanders appeared taken aback by the extent to which Bendito Menor broadcast his doings on social media — and the security risk this could pose.
In an interview with Colombian newsweekly Semana on September 12, Fredy Castillo Carillo, a top leader of the ACSN who goes by the alias Pinochio, said the senior members of the group had found Bendito Menor “difficult to control.”
“There were several commandos of the Autodefensas Conquistadores de le Sierra organization who summoned him and he never went up to a meeting,” he said. “He always did things poorly. He liked to publish his life on social networks, to show things. He appeared with his rifles, in trucks, threatening: serious crimes.”
Senior commanders who came up in an earlier era of armed conflict also seemed perplexed by his habit of sharing his location.
“He live-published on his social networks that he was in Riohacha,” Castillo Carillo said. “He recently shared a video where he was seen in a car threatening some guys who stopped motorcycles [in Riohacha].... And look where they murdered him. It was a risk that he was locked up in a house where he could be easily located.”
In contrast to the ACSN’s dry official communiques, Bendito Menor’s content was playful and romantic, incorporating jokes and memes as well as music. At one point during the recent presidential election campaign, one of the accounts associated with him shared an image of a ballot, suggesting to followers that they write him in. Bebecita was featured alongside him so often, sometimes with guns or wearing camouflage, that she became quasi-famous in her own right.
“They portray themselves as a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde,” the governor of La Guajira lamented on a talk radio show a few days after the killings.
But it wasn’t all romance and harmless swagger. Experts and locals told OCCRP that Bendito Menor had also shared footage of killings and other violent crimes he committed, sometimes in real time, although none of these videos appears to be currently online.
In one of its periodic Strategic Threat Report published late last month, Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — announced that it had suspended more than 1,000 accounts, groups, or pages in Colombia associated with an unspecified “terrorist group” that used accounts to “spread ideological material and recruit new members.”
“This organization is known to specifically try to target younger people over social media,” Meta wrote. “It also sought to highlight its capacity to challenge state authority, by posting images and videos of its presence in rebel-controlled regions, as well as footage of military-style training and weaponry.”
Although it did not name the group, clues in the report suggest it was referring to the ELN, a major guerilla group with a nationwide presence.
It’s unclear whether Meta was also aware of Bendito Menor’s popularity on its platforms. It removed a number of Bendito Menor fan pages from Facebook and Instagram last week after OCCRP asked for comment on them. However, a handful were still visible online as of publication time. (TikTok, where OCCRP also found Bendito Menor-related content, did not respond to requests for comment.)
“We have strict policies against Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, and we take action as soon as we identify violations,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement on Friday.
But for Catalina Niño, a project coordinator at the local branch of the Friedrich Ebert Stichtung, a German nonprofit that promotes democracy, that’s not enough.
“Digital platforms have an enormous responsibility” to stop the spread of what is effectively PR for organized crime groups, she said.
She said the popularity of narcocultura on social media had become a serious issue in Colombia, with clear real-world impact.
“On one hand there is recruitment, and on the other, presenting themselves as role models and building rapport with the local population to give these groups legitimacy — and perhaps even protection when authorities pursue them.”
The ACSN had been in talks since 2022 with the previous government of Gustavo Petro — whose ‘Total Peace’ policy sought to disarm Colombia’s smaller guerilla groups by cutting individual deals with them. But the agreement was scrapped after Petro was voted out of office in June.
His successor, De la Espriella, a far-right former criminal defense lawyer endorsed by U.S. President Donald Trump, promised to take a harder line on security. On July 9, after he was elected but before taking office, De la Espriella declared that Bendito Menor was one of his future administration’s “high-value targets.”
Seemingly in response, the accounts associated with Bendito Menor started taunting the incoming president, who calls himself "the Tiger."
One video posted in July referred to De la Espriella as a “Temu Tiger,” a reference to the Chinese online marketplace selling cheap goods. Another juxtaposed footage of military helicopters supposedly looking for Bendito Menor with a defiant message: “We remain steadfast, heads held high and undeterred by fear,” it said.
An image that circulated in Colombia this summer, showing Naim Pérez, alias Bendito Menor, and his girlfriend Rosa Angélica Tarazona, known as Bebecita, apparently wearing shirts that say "ANTI-ABELARDO," a reference to the newly elected president of Colombia.
In a widely circulated photograph, the outlaw was pictured on a motorcycle with Bebecita riding pillion, both seeming to sport white T-shirts that read “ANTI-ABELARDO.”
“This reality show had to end,” said the governor of La Guajira, Jairo Aguilar, in a radio interview a few days after Bendito Menor was killed.
"The man known as ’Naim’ flaunted his criminal activities on social media — including training, murder, and drug trafficking. He practically became a public figure. This is something that should never have been allowed in a constitutional state governed by the rule of law," he said.
‘Robin Hood’ in Camouflage
Bendito Menor’s funeral procession, two days after his death, was so massive that it paralyzed traffic in Riohacha, local newspapers reported.
Videos posted on social media show hundreds of black-clad motorcyclists driving through the streets of Riohacha blasting narcocorridos and occasionally discharging gunshots into the air.
“Why was Bendito Menor given a funeral like a ‘celebrity criminal’?” asked an article in the El Colombiano newspaper, which reported that the ACSN had used the event to display its enduring power and support in the region, perhaps sending a message to the government.
A few days later, a reporter for OCCRP visited the La Ñapita neighborhood of Riohacha, where Bendito Menor’s mother still lives in a small house roofed with aluminum. A white tent had been set up in the middle of the street to accommodate a continuing stream of mourners. Young men in black T-shirts roamed the street on motorcycles, keeping an eye on the scene.
His sister Rosa emerged from the house to speak briefly with a reporter. “He was very generous,” she said. “The shopkeepers liked him.”
Indeed, three local merchants did praise Bendito Menor for keeping crime in check — but acknowledged that he also collected money from them in exchange for protection. (All three spoke with OCCRP on condition of anonymity due to concerns about their personal safety.) One said that Bendito Menor had become popular with small business owners after he brutally cracked down on a local gang of youths known as the Jota Jota, who engaged in small-scale drug trafficking and extortion.
“He prevented extortion and rid the neighborhood of thieves,” the shopkeeper said emphatically.
But he was also known to circulate images of himself giving to charity and helping the poor, locals said.
This highly performative style of service provision was a large part of Bendito Menor’s appeal to citizens of a region where state power is weak, and armed groups like the ACSN still regulate community life to a large extent, experts said.
“He shows all his crimes live and in person, but at the same time he is a person who can give food to someone on the street, who … begins to show himself as a Robin Hood,” said Dimas, the research professor.
“Of course he is actually a very bad man who does terrible things: Unlike the original Robin Hood, he doesn’t just steal from the rich — he extorts everyone, wrests power from drug traffickers, and amasses great wealth for himself, his inner circle, and his armed organization. And yet, because he does offer some help to the impoverished population, he is viewed as a very significant figure.”
Colombia’s new president, De la Espriella, has publicly opposed the type of glorification of narcos that Bendito Menor engaged in, and vowed to impose stronger state governance in regions like La Guajira.
After an outburst of arson and street violence from the ACSN this week following the killing of another commander, the president ordered troops onto the streets of Santa Marta, the capital of the Magdalena department, which borders La Guajira. He personally accompanied them on patrol, sharing a video of himself walking the streets wearing a bulletproof vest and armed with a pistol
“Gone are the days when wrong was sold as right, gone are the days when society’s scum was hailed as heroic: under my watch, these bandits will not have a single minute of peace,” he wrote on social media after Bendito Menor’s funeral procession, signing the message with a tiger emoji.
But Bendito Menor is still enjoying a digital afterlife of a sort. A number of the accounts that shared his content have continued posting messages in his voice, as if he were still alive, and sharing what appear to be AI-generated images of Bendito Menor handing out gifts and cash to the poor.
His fans have responded in kind.
”RIP, fly high my king, it is forbidden to forget you,” wrote one.
“No matter what anyone says, he was better than many,” said another.
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