What is behind this phenomenon that almost no one talks about?

According to data from the Institute of Legal Medicine, only between January 1 and April 30 of this year, 705 missing people have been reported in Bogotá, which means that in that period six people went missing daily, on average.

What is most worrying is that the majority are boys, girls and adolescents under 18 years of age. According to these data, young people between 15 and 17 years old disappear more, with a report of 129 cases in the same period, followed by children between 10 and 14 years old, with 101 records, and adults between 25 and 29 years old, with a record of 85 missing this year.

Despite being a topic that spreads easily through information networks, due to the agility with which friends and family report, It is true that little is said about the disappeared and the search and response processes for their loved ones are slow and cumbersome; In addition, they face the extensive period of 72 hours that the Law stipulates to report a disappearance to the authorities.

(To read: This is ‘Troya’, the Police strategy to eradicate the extortionists who are cornering merchants in Bogotá)

According to official statistics, in the first four months of the year, 19 of those reported were found dead, another 264 alive, and there are still 422 whose whereabouts are unknown. Particularly, Mondays are the days of the week that most cases of these occur. There are already 115 reports of these cases just in the sum of Mondays of the first quarter.

And this scourge is frightening. One of the most notorious cases during 2023, for example, was the kidnapping in broad daylight of the artisan Martín Aguilar, who was intercepted in broad daylight by a group of six men, who wore fake Sijín jackets and posed as agents of the institution.

The 43-year-old man, who disappeared on August 31 of last year in the Bellavista neighborhood of Engativá, was forced to get into a private car and since then there has been no trace of his whereabouts.

But there are also other facts, such as that of the young Anyelina Cuéllar, 16 years old, who was reported missing on August 16 of last year. The particularity of this case was that the young woman claimed to have been kidnapped and abandoned in one of the hills of Bogotá and later appeared at the CAI of San Victorino. However, after investigations by the authorities it was determined that Cuéllar left his home voluntarily and citing personal reasons.

There are hundreds of these cases that occur in the city and they correspond to various reasons. According to Paula Andrea Amaya, Criminal Investigation coordinator at the Manuela Beltrán Universitythe most frequent reason for disappearance in the city is human trafficking, both for sexual exploitation and extortion.

Furthermore, the expert explained, that problems in family structures and mental health problems can also influence the high numbers of disappearances, since not all cases correspond to reasons related to a criminal act.

In this regard, the Missing Persons Unit of the Metropolitan Police indicated that the cases with the highest reports correspond to rebellious teenagers with bad family relationships, men and women who run away from debts and love disappointments, people who go out partying and end up scopolaminated, victims of traffic accidents and cases of mentally ill people, considered voluntary disappearances. On the other hand, there are forced disappearances, which represent its greatest challenge. And in Bogotá, there is everything.

Although the causes of a disappearance cannot be established with certainty, what the authorities have tried to modify is the collective imagination that one must wait a certain amount of time to notify the case of a missing person. “Each family knows when there is a latent risk, so, as soon as they have an alert, they must report the case to the National Institute of Legal Medicine. than those in charge of recording all the reports,” they say from that unit.

Andrés Nieto, analyst at the Central University and former undersecretary of Security explained that Legal Medicine and The Prosecutor’s Office has developed an immediate search mechanism that indicates that any person who is missing can be reported immediately before any authority and that, at the request of the family members, with a plausible reason, this mechanism must be activated.

Nieto also pointed out that Bogotá not only has one of the highest disappearance rates in the country, but in all of Latin America, and that this is a product of the variety of causes they analyze when classifying a disappearance.

For its part, Cristian Carranza, analyst at the Faculty of Law of the Manuela Beltrán University, He added that the figures are alarming and that they require “urgent and coordinated” attention to optimize the technical search and rescue capabilities of the authorities.

“It is essential to improve the capabilities of public forces to investigate and resolve cases of disappearance and that includes the use of technology such as drones and other electronic devices (…) High coordination is also required between the Police, the Prosecutor’s Office, human rights organizations and health sector entities to improve the response in cases of disappearance,” the analyst noted.

One mechanism proposed to address this crisis is the ‘Pink Alert’, designed to be activated immediately after a disappearance is reported. However, the Ministry of Justice has not implemented this alert, despite having a deadline of March 13 of this year.

“This makes it extremely important that the national government can regulate the Pink alert. This can help us so that in cases where there are missing persons we can all have that information and as citizens, as institutions, as civil society and others, and we can act to help in this search,” said María Clara Ramírez, councilor of Bogotá.
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JONATHAN TORO ROMERO
​Bogotá Editorial