Marcelo 'Yogui' Santiago has been teaching jiu-jitsu in Scandinavia since 1995, when the region had almost no organised BJJ to speak of. A 6th-degree black belt under Carlos Gracie Jr. in the Gracie Humaitá lineage, he built the Yogui BJJ Association out of Gothenburg and used it to push the art north and east — to Norway, Denmark, Finland and the Baltics.
In Norway, his seminars and affiliate visits in the late 1990s and 2000s — including time at Kamphuset in Oslo — were among the first sustained Brazilian black-belt instruction the country had seen. For Norwegian practitioners of that era, getting a Yogui stripe was often the closest you could come to a real Gracie lineage without flying to Rio.
He is one of the small group of Brazilian black belts whose work in Sweden quietly built the foundation that later Norwegian schools were able to climb on top of.