Maria Noguera He spends several hours each day in front of an altar dedicated to a dozen saints, praying for the appearance of his son Loan alive.
According to the criteria of
The five-year-old boy disappeared two weeks ago after going to a lunch at his paternal grandmother’s house., and nothing has been heard from him since. With a lost look and anguish reflected on her face, María agrees to take a photo next to the altar and a green sign with black letters crying out for the return of her son.
In a moment of vulnerability, María shares her pain with a journalist from La Nación, performing a kind of catharsis. Through tears, he makes a desperate call to Lionel Messiasking him to record a video directed at Loan’s captors so they can return him alive.
Mary, who especially venerates the Virgin and Saint Expeditus, explains that they were preparing a party for the Virgin on July 9, but now everything is on pause until Loan appears. “We still have time, if Loan shows up and everything goes away,” she comments with hope.
María makes a direct request: “I told him that the journalists talk to Messi, who is so popular, so that he asks for Loan to be fired. That we are already suffering a lot, many days. I don’t know where he is, but he is somewhere. But if they’re keeping him locked up, poor guy, he’s going to be suffering. Because he’s not usually locked up. “He doesn’t like being locked up, he likes being outside more,” she expressed.
When the rain stops, he feels very bored because he can’t go outside. He is going to be there, he is not going to forget his brothers, he is not going to forget César, Cristian. He is already saying, from mom, dad. Well, I hope he comes back,” he added.
Loan’s memories and Maria’s faith
Loan’s mother recalls tender, everyday moments with her son. “He had a wipe, a tiny hand wipe. And with that he slept and sucked his thumb. When he goes to sleep he tells me, ‘mommy, my towel.’ Or when he’s going to be on his cell phone, looking at cartoons and lying down, he asks me for the towel and sucks his finger. He sucks his finger. And I’m going to continue saying suck your finger, I’m not going to say sucked because they’re going to find it. It makes me sad that he is going to be suffering. He never suffered that. He’s going to be suffering,” he says.
María does not distrust her partner, José Peña, who was present at the lunch and took Loan to the field in El Algarrobal. “I don’t distrust him because he told me that no one asked him for permission. He believed that he was there in the yard with the creatures and others who were playing. He thought he was playing there, you could hear them playing. After he found out that he did not appear, his sister (Laudelina) called him. He started running there, he told me and then they called me,” she commented.
In response to criticism of her, María defends herself: “What they say is that I forced my son to go to the fields, that I sold my son to them, that is stupid. Nobody forced my son to leave. He wanted to leave for a while. He wanted to leave, he had that desire to go to the countryside. I sent him that day because he didn’t have a teacher. I took advantage of the fact that I didn’t have a teacher, because his teacher was never absent even once. He liked to go to school more. “I took him at half past one in the afternoon and I was going to pick him up at half past four.”
María still does not understand what happened and shares her doubts: “I still can’t believe why that happened to him. I don’t know if it was about to happen to another child, and he just fell that day. You can’t believe it until now. Before they said that there were no wolves, alligators, or monkeys, but just as Loan went to the countryside that day, all the bugs appeared. That doesn’t stop me. The one who claims that Loan said that he wanted to get back together with his father doesn’t stop me either. Why didn’t that person tell someone older to accompany Loan? Or that they would wait for everyone. But those who were there with Loan have to know, they have to know.”
When asked what she would say to the detainees if she had them in front of her, Maria answers firmly.: “Let them talk. They have to know. The one who took him to have orange juice, I don’t know why he took him so far away, if he had oranges and tangerines in the house. I don’t know why he took him there from so far away and he didn’t tell my husband either. If he saw that the father was very angry when he talked to her about them, I don’t know what they were talking about, but he should have told him that they were taking him to Loan, but nobody told him anything, nobody said anything to him.”
Grandma’s word
Catalina Penathe grandmother of little Loan who disappeared last June 13, broke the silence in an extensive talk with La Nación from her field in El Algarrobal, the place where the five-year-old boy spent his last hours before disappearing.
Catalina Peña, Loan’s grandmother, received LA NACION in her El Algarrobal field, which can only be reached with permission. She says her daughter doesn’t want her to talk and she claims she asked for a gun to protect herself from her because she is alone because of her | Jose Costa (@jmcos) pic.twitter.com/rXFGOdQ3QS
— LA NACION (@LANACION) June 25, 2024
Catalina, an octogenarian woman, replicated with the special envoy of La Nación the journey of almost 600 meters that separates her house from the orange grove to which Loan was taken and from which he never returned. Anguish, anger and fear are some of the feelings that Catalina experiences, since his life took a drastic turn and part of his family and friends are under the scrutiny of Justice for the alleged crime of recruiting minors for trafficking purposes. Meanwhile, Loan is still missing.
From kidnapping theories to the mention of “el Pomberito”, a mythical goblin of the Guaraní cultureCatalina has drawn up various hypotheses about what could have happened that fateful afternoon in which she organized a lunch to fulfill a promise to San Antonio after having lost her small, old cell phone.
THE NATION / GDA
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*This content was rewritten with the assistance of artificial intelligence, based on information from La Nación, and was reviewed by a journalist and an editor.
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