The disappearance of Loan Danilo Peña, the five-year-old boy who has been intensively sought for more than two weeks in Argentina, has once again revived the scourge of missing children and adolescents in the country. An official register indicates that the search for at least 1,777 children and adolescents is still underway in Argentina, while the organization Missing Children lists 115 missing children in the last three decades and around 1,500 reports per year. Loss, accidents, extortion between relatives or sexual exploitation: the hypotheses that float around many of these cases still unsolved. In addition to the search for the boy from Corrientes, there is an investigation that is coming too late and shrouded in doubts about collusion.
“They have to speak and say what they did with Loan. It can’t be that he has been missing for so many days. Those who have him should leave him at my doorstep, not do anything to him and return him alive and well,” pleaded to the media María Noguera, the mother of Loan, the boy who disappeared, apparently without a trace, on Thursday, June 13. That day, his grandmother Catalina Peña organized a lunch: she wanted to celebrate Saint Anthony’s Day, who, she says, helped her with a request she had entrusted to that saint.
Five of those present that afternoon in the precarious El Algarrobal area —rural area of 9 de Julio, province of Corrientes— are today detained and investigated for the disappearance of Loan. Among them are the boy’s uncles and a couple who are friends of his grandmother, made up of Victoria Villalba, a civil servant of the municipality of 9 de Julio, now dismissed from her position, and Carlos Pérez, a retired naval captain, on whom the greatest suspicions fall. The sixth detainee, Walter Maciel, is the local police commissioner, who was charged with concealment. The rest of the family was summoned to testify.
During the first days of the search, the provincial courts followed the line of disappearance: as the adults present at the lunch had said, Loan had gotten lost while searching the land for oranges. Under this hypothesis, the investigation was led by police chief Maciel, later accused of planting false clues.
What followed was an investigation tainted by police and judicial blunders in a case that, amidst the massive protests by neighbours demanding that Loan be found alive, was finally handed over to the federal courts. Since last Monday, the case has been handled by Judge Cristina Pozzer Penzo and the federal prosecutor of Goya, Mariano de Guzmán, who, with the collaboration of the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Human Trafficking (PROTEX), added the hypothesis of kidnapping for exploitation purposes, although they do not rule out that the child was the victim of sexual abuse followed by homicide to hide the crime or a disappearance. The case entered a “high confidentiality” stage on Thursday.
The latest line of investigation has to do with a possible fatal accident. This weekend, Loan’s aunt, Laudelina Peña, said that her nephew was killed when he was run over by the vehicle driven by Pérez, with Villalba as co-pilot. Experts have found a stain on the front wheel of the couple’s car and are awaiting the results of the tests to determine whether it corresponds to human blood, animal blood or some other type of substance.
The commotion in the country has been as wide as the range of conjectures: from networks that sell “children as puppies” —that is how a national official put it— to the belief that it could have been “el Pomberito,” a creature from the Guaraní culture. The truth is that there is little evidence that stands on solid ground in the investigation into the disappearance of the child, who until now remains a complete enigma.
Sources from the Ministry of Security had to admit to local media that “there is no hypothesis” about what happened to Loan, so “all possibilities are taken into account and all must be investigated.” Fernando Soto, National Director of Regulations and Judicial Liaison, considered that “crucial time” was lost in the first hours of the search. “Unfortunately, time passes and it is increasingly difficult to find Loan,” he added. Amid criticism for the late intervention of the Ministry of Security, its head Patricia Bullrich, generated controversy for her statements in a television interview: “Now I am going with everything: I am going with divers, forest personnel, with radiology equipment to see the belly of animals, because there are alligators, pumas, everything.”
For Ximena Tordini, journalist and author of Missing men and women in contemporary Argentinathe phenomenon of disappearances of people today can be the result of very different situations: from social violence – such as sexist violence, when a femicide makes the victim’s body disappear – to cases linked to complex criminal organizations. “But then we have disappearances that occur due to poor investigation of the facts: the fact that judicial and police investigation in our country is so deficient in certain cases makes a homicide, a violent death (on the public highway or wherever) become a disappearance,” he explained.
“In Argentina we have an extremely deficient state response in this matter. There are no institutional infrastructures that allow for a good investigation to resolve a disappearance, there is no system that allows for searching for people. Of course there are exceptions, but they are not the rule,” he emphasized.
There are no records of missing persons in the country, nor a census of those found without identity that can be cross-referenced with active searches. “The Federal System for the Search for Missing and Lost Persons (SIFEBU), the agency in charge of reporting disappearances, says that it is not complete or in real time: there is no updated census of who are missing in the country,” added Tordini.
According to the National Registry of Information on Missing Minors (RNIPME), in 2022, 1,935 searches for children and adolescents were recorded, of which almost half (48%) were between 13 and 15 years old, 30% between 16 and 17 years old, and 18% between 0 and 12 years old. “In 2023, the number increased, registering 3,115 searches. Finally, until March 31, 2024, 687 new searches were registered. As of today, a total of 1,777 searches are still in process,” explained the then chief of staff Nicolás Posse during his presentation before the Senate of the Nation on May 15.
The Missing Children organization lists 112 children and adolescents who have disappeared in the last three decades, of which at least 74 are minors. “We receive an average of four or five reports a day (about 1,500 a year). Most of them are female adolescents, aged 12 to 13,” said Ana Rosa Llobet, president of the NGO, in statements to local media. She explained that these are usually children who decide to leave their homes voluntarily due to family conflicts, the so-called “parental kidnappings” or who goes missing due to carelessness. In general, these children are found soon. “But there is still a percentage of children who do not return. That is our concern. We do not want Loan Peña to be one more of those cases in which we never know what happened, what happened to her, where she is or who she is with,” said Llobet.
Those who have been working for decades to combat trafficking, slave labor and child exploitation see a different scenario: “The truth is that if you travel through the northeast and northwest of Argentina, a region with a lot of poverty and social vulnerability, there is probably a ‘Loan’ in every town. It is much more common than we think, but unfortunately there is a great invisibility of this crime.” This was expressed by José Serbin, former delegate in Corrientes and the northeast region of Argentina of t
he Committee to Combat Trafficking, a national organization in charge of inter-institutional coordination in matters of prevention, prosecution and assistance to people affected by cases of trafficking and exploitation.
The State’s retreat
Loan’s disappearance occurs in a context of the dismantling by the Government of Javier Milei of public policies related to the treatment of this crime. Since the beginning of his administration, he dismantled the delegations of the Committee that operated in the 24 jurisdictions of the country. “The problem is that when the State backs down on policies against organized crime, it leaves the territory free precisely for this type of organizations,” said Serbin.
For the expert, a representative of the Alameda Foundation, in the case of Loan “unfortunately everything was done wrong and at the wrong time. Her search went against what is established in the protocols to which our country adheres, which follows the recommendations of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, for possible cases of trafficking.” These protocols indicate, among other measures, that the local police should be immediately replaced by federal forces and the entrances and exits of the town should be blocked and controlled, as well as issuing a migration alert for exhaustive control of the borders. In all these aspects, the search for Loan came late. “I think it is a combination of incompetence or lack of expertise and covering up a system. It is not minor that the detainees are a civil servant, a commissioner and a ship captain,” he questioned.
Despite being an extremely serious crime, “the sale of children and adolescents is not criminalized in Argentina, which is extremely serious and has been condemned internationally,” Serbin emphasized. “However, more than 60 projects to criminalize this crime are dormant in Congress and it is very striking that it has not prospered, it makes us think that this is a big business throughout the country.”
Loan’s story recalls the story of other girls and boys, whose absence has shocked the country for years: Sofía Herrera, who disappeared in September 2008 at just three years old in Río Grande, Tierra del Fuego. While they were spending a day camping, the girl disappeared from her parents’ sight for a few minutes, disappeared and no one ever heard from her again. A decade later, her case motivated the launch of the Sofía Alert, an emergency system for coordination at the federal level in the search for children and adolescents whose lives are at “imminent high risk.” It was issued days ago by the boy from Corrientes. Also in June 2021, when Guadalupe Lucero, five years old, was last seen at her aunt’s birthday party, in the province of San Luis. A total of 180 lines of investigation in various parts of the country, 100 testimonies collected and more than 400 raids: her whereabouts remain a mystery.
Absences that have points in common – negligence in the first hours of the search – and that expose the shortcomings in the protection of the rights of girls, boys and adolescents. Serbin said: “They have touched a very intimate nerve of our people who are our children and, despite the anguish, Corrientes stands up and demands that Loan appear.”
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