Loan Danilo Peña is five years old and has been missing for ten days in northern Argentina. His image has been spread non-stop on television, newspapers and social networks, but until now no one has been able to provide an accurate clue as to where he is. Hundreds of rescuers, firefighters and police search for him without success while the justice system has arrested six people and suspects that Loan may have been kidnapped by a human trafficking network.
“I want my son to come back,” Loan’s mother, María Nogueira, pleaded in front of the cameras, in the march that was organized this Saturday on July 9, a small town of 2,500 inhabitants in the Argentine province of Corrientes. “They stole it from me, they took it,” denounced his father, José Peña, surrounded by dozens of neighbors and family friends. They don’t trust anyone, but even less so the municipal commissioner, Walter Maciel, suspected of having covered up the alleged kidnapping of the minor.
Loan was last seen on June 13. That day, he had lunch with his father and twelve other people at his paternal grandmother’s house, located in a rural area. At the end, three of the adults present said that they had left for the mountains in search of oranges, followed by five children. Loan went with them, but never returned.
The first hypothesis was that it had been lost. Police, family members and volunteers participated in exhaustive search raids through that wild area without finding him. Ten days later, that track has lost steam. Neither his uncle Bernardino Benítez nor the couple of friends Daniel Martínez and Mónica del Carmen Millepi, the three detainees, have been able to explain to the court when they lost sight of Loan or why.
According to judicial sources cited by local media, investigators believe that the child did not participate in that excursion. The trail of the dogs used in the search device indicates that he did not even get a hundred meters away from his grandmother’s house. Therefore, they suspect that while they were searching the place, Loan had already been taken away from there.
Among the most compromised detainees are former Navy captain Carlos Pérez and his wife, municipal official Victoria Villalba. Friends of Loan’s grandmother, Pérez and Villalba participated in the June 13 lunch but left before the others because Pérez wanted to watch a soccer game, according to his wife. Police dogs detected traces of Loan’s clothing in one of the couple’s vehicles, used the next day to go to the provincial capital, Corrientes, for a medical check-up on Villalba, according to her story. According to the police, they later crossed into the neighboring province of Chaco with that same car.
The place where Loan disappeared is near roads that connect Argentina with the borders of Brazil and Paraguay. The central hypothesis of the ongoing investigation is that Loan was kidnapped and experts are trying to reconstruct the itinerary to find his whereabouts. One of the places under analysis is the country house that Pérez and Villalba have two kilometers from the urban center of 9 de Julio. Police are trying to find out if Loan was there on Thursday night, June 13.
Also in the spotlight is Commissioner Maciel, in charge of the search during the first days and who authorized Pérez and Villalba to leave the town after Loan’s disappearance to go to the doctor. The family denounces that Maciel discouraged popular mobilization. “The commissioner told me not to march. “You don’t have to trust anyone,” Loan’s mother declared on Saturday night. The lack of results in the search has Argentina in suspense.
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