Coincidences in the disappearances of Madeleine Mc Cann and Sofía Herrera

Madeleine Mc Cann lived in Rothley, Leicestershire, a small town in England, in the so-called First World. Sofia Herrera lived in Rio Grande, in Tierra del Fuego, a small town called "the end of the world". The English girl disappeared in 2007, Argentina in 2008.

There is 12,000 kilometers of distance between the dramas. However, Netflix's new documentary series – "The Missing of Madeleine McCann" – has allowed Sofía Herrera's mother to detect the coincidences between the mysterious absence of her daughter and the one of the most famous missing girl in the world. .

Madeleine disappeared on May 3, 2007, while she was nine days old at the age of 4. Sofia disappeared on September 28, 2008, when she was three months old to finish her 4 years.

The English girl was a girl with white skin, fair eyes and fair hair. Argentina was a girl with skin, eyes and black hair. What did they have in common when they disappeared? Both were girls.

According to the document "Trafficking in Women and Girls", published by the United Nations General Assembly, "women and girls are particularly vulnerable to trafficking for the purpose of badual exploitation, forced marriage, forced labor or services and other forms of exploitation. "

Rescue distance

Madeleine disappeared from the apartment where she slept during a family vacation in Algarve, Portugal. His parents dined at the resort's restaurant, about 50 meters away, and according to his story, they take turns every 20 minutes (between them and the other couples they had traveled with) to see their family. children.

Did they do well to leave them alone? How far should a parent be to avoid danger? The Argentinean writer Samantha Schweblin talks about it in her book Salvation Distance: "I always think in the worst case, for the moment I calculate the time it would take to get out of the car and go to Nina if she ran suddenly to the pool and I call this the "rescue distance", so I call this variable distance that separates me from my daughter and I spend half of the day calculating it, although I risk always more than I should. "

Sofia also disappeared while she was with her parents and a couple of friends. They went Sunday in a campsite on the road. The baby got out of the car and ran behind his father while he was looking for a repair to extinguish the fire. On the way home, his father thought that he had gone from the front to return to his mother's home. His mother thought I was always with him.

They were unprepared and the parents feared nothing: there was no tumult or alien, at least in sight. "It was seconds of distraction, something that happens to all parents, the difference is that here there was a crazy person walking around," says Maria Elena Delgado, Sofia's mother.

The parents killed her and hid the body

In the case of the English girl, Gonçalo Amaral, the chief of the Portuguese police in charge of the investigation, was at the base of this hypothesis. His hypothesis – he supports it in the documentary and reinforces it in his book "The truth of the lie" – is that Madeleine died in a domestic accident and that the parents got rid of the body.

Public opinion has well understood the theory: Madeleine's father is a cardiologist and the mother anesthesiologist and family doctor. They were therefore convinced that they had administered sedatives for a quiet dinner and they had "left". . There was never any evidence.

In the case of Sofia, the finger that indicated the parents was not that of justice but that of a seer. "We continue to denounce the thug and the murderer," writes the visionary on his Facebook profile. "Parents abandoned, thieves Let justice raise the small court of 4 x 2 and find Sofi.Show your innocence, it is very easy, gentlemen.They are accused of badbadinations, show that it is not is not the case, because we know very well that you lost your life in an episode of domestic violence. "

"Many people who supported us believed and we were against," says Maria Elena. She finds another coincidence with the case of Maddie. So against that, 9 years after the disappearance of Sofia, agreed to dig in the court in front of the media (and not at the request of justice). There was nothing there.

A very wanted girl

Madeleine's mother became pregnant with her first daughter in 2002, after a long search and in vitro fertilization. His two twin sons, two years younger, were born with the help of science.

Sofía Herrera was also a very sought-after girl. Maria Elena had an endectrosis, an ectopic pregnancy, a tube had been removed and Sofia, her first daughter, had taken five years to arrive.

"Many people did not see it, they told us" killers "on social networks," you sold them ", all the time that they have to investigate us, it's a wasted time looking for our daughter. "

In both cases, they searched for the living girls until they started looking for their bodies. In Portugal, they dug near the hotel. In Tierra del Fuego, they searched the edges of the road, in the sewers, in the bags, in the rivers. They also dug.

Why do not parents cry?

Madeleine's parents never overflowed in front of the cameras: they did not cry inconsolably, they hired spokespersons and always read their statements. This gave them the nickname "cold" and "calculus" and fueled the theory that they were lying.

Sophie's parents have said the same thing, what is expected of a "good victim": a good mother should be visibly collapsed.

"I did not cry in front of the cameras because I did not have more tears, because I always cry towards the sea." When I was in front of the media, I tried to take this opportunity to show her picture, say how they could recognize it, ask people to keep looking for it. The times when I broke down later, they said, "Sinvergüenza, cry because of the guilt you have for what you did to your daughter.

The pact of silence: a conspiracy between friends

Madeleine's parents had gone on vacation with other couples (there were 8 adults and several children). Many were convinced that parents had unintentionally killed her and friends were complicit in concealing

The same thing happened in the case of Sofia, because María Elena and Fabián, her husband, went to the campsite with Silvio and Paloma, a couple of friends. "In what head can someone cover something like this and withstand the pressure without breaking? Someone can imagine that we told them:" Hello, we killed Sofia and have it buried in the patio.Do we eat a barbecue? Field so no one realizes it? ".

Moreover, the couple of friends had escaped from the island ("if they have nothing to hide, why are they gone?"), But they never left. Paloma went to Buenos Aires just a few years ago because she had been diagnosed with bad cancer. "Silvio was very bad, he was never the same again," says Elena.

What would happen if you went out with friends and something like that happened to them? Would your life stay the same because it would not have happened to your son but to the one next door?

The power of social networks

In the series, you can see the overwhelming power of social networks to amplify suspicions against parents. Twitter was new and many took the opinions for information.

"Parents are pedophiles", "I wish mom dies", "Madeleine died in the apartment, the parents have hidden", "The father is a pervert, both are guilty of murder "," He hid the body in the church and then he moved it "," I wish that they live a hell awake "," This naughty bitch does not let down a tear from that his daughter has disappeared ".

In the case of Sofia, something similar happened, although public opinion in general did not understand each other. Although the judge determined that the fortune-teller suffered from psychosis and declared her irreproachable, "that is, the harm is done." Nobody forced her to close her Facebook account and today she has 17,000 subscribers.

"Now, in addition, she became a troll." She created profiles with another name and did two things: she criticizes herself or praises herself, she says that she solved impossible cases, that she follows her, that she is the only one to know the truth. .

Private detectives: parallel research

Madeleine's parents, confronted by the Portuguese police, hired several private detectives: some, incredibly, cheated on them. The McCanns created a foundation and much of what they did was funded by a millionaire businessman

"I looked for private investigators in Buenos Aires and they said that it had to be someone who knew the area." With compensation that Fabian received for his departure from the factory, he financed his: he went in search of clues from Bolivia, Chile, Peru. "Where there was data that he was leaving, it was not a parallel investigation with detectives, it was to put the body."

They were playing the "blind rooster": "You are stunned but where do you get data, as in the case of Maddie, the next day they said to have seen it in Morocco, here too: they l? we saw in Jujuy, in Catamarca, all over the country, we went, no one was. "

In the local case, the reward was so high (2,500,000 pesos today) that there were also attempts to scam: calls from the prison (they were told they were taking off their panties) and it is removed and sought after. $ 50,000 to not return it in a bag. "There is even a woman who denounced her husband, who went to Tierra del Fuego, to be put in prison and keep everything."

The monetary factor and the construction of the new

In Europe, mothers of other missing children complained. They argued that because Maddie's parents were in contact with influential people and had funds, they were looking for more than other boys. In the case of Sofia, there were also those who doubted. Why, having so many missing children, political and media attention has been focused on it? "I can not explain why Sofi intervened in the media but not others, but they invited me to the Mirtha Legrand program." I went there with my daughter's photo, then they said on the networks: "Girl of a bitch, how much money will she have caught? You make a millionaire. "

Faced with nothing, the craziest theories

When DNA hair found in the car of Madeleine's parents did not coincide with that of his father, some Portuguese media made incredible versions.

They could have badumed that the baby had never entered the car (which had been rented by the parents almost a month after the disappearance), but they claimed, for example, that the father did not Was not the father. When he was then "a stranger", there was more chance that he was suspicious.

In the case of Sofia, it was said that an eagle or condor could have taken it and there were even calls that spoke of "extraterrestrial abduction".

The same hypothesis and the myth of poverty:

In both cases, the main hypothesis is child trafficking, although neither family knows for what purpose. There is trafficking or trafficking of children for the purpose of child labor (from domestic servitude to forced labor in the fields), badual exploitation, for use in the armed forces, in drug trafficking or as beggars. There is also the kidnapping of children for the purpose of illegal adoption.

"In the case of Sofi, the dogs proved that their way ended at one point of the fence where they had surely lifted it, and the other boy's baby saw a car with a man, and I heard people say, "How are we going to fly? "A boy next to the parents when there are a lot of people in the north of the country walking all day?" This increased mistrust, as happened to Madeleine's parents, "says Elena.

International organizations fighting against child trafficking say that poverty actually increases vulnerability (we call it "poverty plus"), but it is only one risk factor among many people. Others: migration or women, for example, are other factors of vulnerability. risk of being a victim of human trafficking.

Source: Infobae