Escuela de Yoga de Buenos Aires / Buenos Aires Yoga School

Escuela de Yoga de Buenos Aires (EYBA), legally registered between 1993 and 2023 as the Fundación Escuela de Yoga de Buenos Aires, began as informal activity in the early 1980s and was founded outright in 1983 by Juan Percowicz (b. 1938, Buenos Aires), a trained public accountant who built an extensive real-estate and legal network under the corporate umbrella BA Group. Percowicz, known within the organization as 'El Ángel,' 'El Maestro' or 'Papi,' sat atop a seven-level internal hierarchy — descending through 'apóstoles,' 'genios' and 'alumnos' to 'humanos comunes' — that Argentine prosecutors and press have repeatedly described as a pyramid of psychological coercion. Based in the Villa Crespo neighborhood of Buenos Aires and later reaching Córdoba, La Rioja, Rosario and Bahía Blanca, as well as offices in New York, Las Vegas and Chicago, the school presented itself publicly as a center for philosophy, personal development and yoga; former members and investigators say it did not, in fact, offer conventional yoga instruction.

EYBA faced criminal scrutiny once before, and that history matters to how the current case should be read. In 1993, parents Elena and Rodolfo Sommariva reported the disappearance of their daughter Valeria, who had been recruited by the group, prompting federal judge Mariano Bergés to investigate Percowicz on suspicion of sexual exploitation and servitude. Bergés concluded the school functioned as a front for a coercive pyramid in which members surrendered their property to the collective under an obedience structure centered on Percowicz, but the investigation proceeded under pressure — Bergés later said he received threats and recusal demands — and the case was ultimately closed without any conviction: defendants who had initially been processed were sobreseídos (dismissed), an outcome this catalogue treats as functionally equivalent to full acquittal on the underlying allegations, reported as having concluded by around 2000.

The matter resurfaced in 2021, when Pablo Salum, a former member, filed a complaint with Argentina's Federal Court No. 4 and its anti-trafficking prosecutorial unit, PROTEX, describing EYBA as a coercive organization engaged in trafficking, money laundering and criminal association. Salum has publicly said he was brought into the group by his mother at age eight and left at fourteen, and has alleged that his mother and sister were among the women sexually exploited and that he witnessed orgies and the sexual abuse of children within the group — allegations attributed throughout to his own account, not established here as independent fact. On 12 August 2022, federal judge Ariel Lijo ordered roughly 50 simultaneous raids on EYBA properties in Buenos Aires (principally Villa Crespo and Almagro) and other linked addresses. Police reported seizing more than US$1.1 million in cash, 36 properties, 13 vehicles, gold, jewelry and documentation investigators characterized as evidence of a money-laundering network; nineteen people, including Percowicz, were initially indicted on charges of criminal association, human trafficking for sexual exploitation and money laundering, with Lijo ordering fourteen held in pretrial detention. By 2023, prosecutors had narrowed the formally processed group to 17 defendants.

Prosecutors' charging documents, described in Associated Press reporting carried by NBC News and CBS News, allege EYBA operated a 'Geishado' system in which female members — some recruited as minors, addicts or people with serious health problems — were assigned to make wealthy or influential 'guests' feel welcome, with sex characterized as part of the expectation; a subset, the 'Geishado VIP,' allegedly built ongoing paid arrangements with such men, with some women reportedly sent to the United States and Uruguay in a practice authorities described as amounting to slavery. Wiretapped conversations released by investigators reportedly captured a man authorities identified as opera tenor Plácido Domingo discussing a meeting at his Buenos Aires hotel with concert pianist Susana Mendelievich, whom prosecutors named as a 'Geishado VIP' leader. A law-enforcement source told the AP that Domingo was 'a consumer of prostitution' but was not accused of any crime, since prostitution itself is legal in Argentina; Domingo has denied wrongdoing connected to the organization's alleged illegal activity and said he felt 'used' by musicians he considered friends. His professional ties to EYBA's leadership, beyond the wiretapped exchange and a former member's account of his attending group functions in the 1990s, are not established in the sources reviewed for this entry, and he is not a defendant in the case. Separately, EYBA leadership is accused of running an unlicensed clinic, CMI Abasto, that administered prolonged sedation — so-called 'curas de sueño,' or sleep cures — to discipline resistant members, and of an asset-stripping scheme in which followers' property was transferred to the organization and laundered through real-estate and legal entities in Argentina and the United States; prosecutors put the group's total assets near US$50 million, including US bank accounts in Chicago, New York and Las Vegas.

EYBA's legal personhood was formally dissolved by Argentine authorities on 24 February 2023 — an administrative act this entry treats as context, not as evidence of the underlying harms. The criminal case has followed an unusually contested procedural path since. On 20 September 2023, the instructing court rejected defense dismissal and nullity motions and moved to send 17 defendants toward oral trial. That trajectory did not run in a straight line: according to a June 2024 account in Reason magazine, Argentina's Court of Cassation — the country's highest criminal court — had, the week before publication, upheld a December 2023 lower-court ruling declining to elevate the case to trial, citing an evaluation by the Supreme Court's own Forensic Medical Corps that found the women prosecutors describe as victims to be 'psychologically normal and believable,' undercutting prosecutors' argument that the women's denials of victimhood were themselves evidence of coercion. By March 2023, everyone detained in the 2022 raids had already been released by a Court of Appeal after roughly three months in custody the Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne, writing in the Journal of CESNUR, described as harsh. The case nonetheless continued: on 24 April 2025, Argentina's Federal Chamber (Cámara Federal) again confirmed the procesamientos — formal criminal processing, short of trial or conviction — of all 17 defendants and revoked an earlier dismissal of a physician linked to the alleged sleep-cure clinic; Argentine press coverage from that period again describes the case as elevated toward oral trial. In April 2026, the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation ordered judge Ariel Lijo removed from the case; judge María Servini assumed it the following month. As of this review, the matter remains at the charge stage in both prosecutions of Percowicz: no conviction has been obtained in either the 1990s case or the case reopened in 2021.

The case has become a point of open, credentialed dispute rather than settled fact. Introvigne's CESNUR paper, 'The Great Cult Scare in Argentina and the Buenos Aires Yoga School,' reports that a man was badly beaten by police during the 2022 raids after being mistaken for someone else, and that a widely publicized claim police had found a 'sex museum' turned out, on investigation, to be a small painting and some old commercial pornographic VHS tapes stored by a neighboring shop. Introvigne and co-author Maria Varde, writing in Bitter Winter, characterized a June 2024 New York Times account of the case as 'a sensationalist attack' that leaned heavily on prosecutors' framing. Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown, citing Argentine lawyer Marisa Tarantino, notes that Argentina's anti-trafficking statute treats a woman's denial that she was trafficked as further evidence of coercion under the law — a structure critics argue can make a prosecution self-confirming regardless of what the alleged victims themselves say. None of the women prosecutors describe as victims has said publicly that she sold sex for money or was trafficked, per the Times reporting cited in both the CESNUR and Reason accounts; Percowicz's lawyer, Jorge Daniel Pirozzo, told the Times this amounts to 'human trafficking without victims of trafficking.'

This entry scores EYBA in the High band for a documented, decades-long pattern of pyramidal control — total surrender of assets, forced isolation within the organization's own housing and work structures, coerced sexual 'healing' framed as service to wealthy patrons, and drug-assisted discipline through an unlicensed clinic — corroborated across Associated Press, NBC News, CBS News and Argentine judicial reporting. Confidence is set at Low, and the modifier is held well below the maximum, because every specific trafficking, exploitation and money-laundering charge remains unadjudicated; the near-identical 1990s prosecution of the same founder on comparable allegations closed without a single conviction; Argentina's own highest criminal court agreed, at least for a period, that the current case should not go to trial; and credentialed scholars, citing a forensic finding from the Supreme Court's own medical corps, have publicly challenged the prosecution's central premise. This entry does not resolve that dispute; it documents both the scale of what is alleged and the live, sourced contest over whether the underlying conduct occurred as charged.