Al Jazeera linked the San Juan Bautista Civil Association (SJB) — which in 2012 had acquired land in Piura — and the SCV with a criminal organization called La Gran Cruz del Norte.
In 2018, a Peruvian court convicted the leaders of the La Gran Cruz del Norte gang for different crimes and, during the trial, the representatives of the SJB association were summoned as witnesses, not as accused.
Although the veracity of the Al Jazeera report was questioned by other journalistic investigations — as detailed in the book “History of a Defamation” — journalist Pedro Salinas used it in an article titled “The Peruvian Juan Barros” in which he involves Eguren with the case of land trafficking and compares him to the Chilean bishop Juan Barros, accused of covering up abuses in his country.
Eguren took Salinas to court for aggravated defamation, and the archbishop won the trial in April 2019. A Peruvian court sentenced the journalist to one year of suspended prison and fines, including a payment of approximately $24,000.
However, the archbishop withdrew the complaint against Salinas after the president of the Peruvian Episcopal Conference and the archbishop of Lima, Carlos Castillo, published a statement in which they expressed solidarity with the journalist despite his condemnation.
In July 2023, Pope Francis sent Archbishop Charles Scicluna, assistant secretary of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, along with Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, an official of the same dicastery, to Lima, Peru, to investigate complaints against the SCV for alleged cases of abuse.