From the first world to the "end of the world": the incredible coincidences between the disappearances of Madeleine McCann and Sofía Herrera

Neither blonde nor brunette: girl

Madeleine disappeared on May 3, 2007 as nine days pbaded before she complied Four years. Sofia disappeared on September 28, 2008, when she had three months to complete Four 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 they are particularly vulnerable to being trafficked for the purpose of badual exploitationforced 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 had dinner at the resort's restaurant, about 50 meters away and, according to its history, they took turns every 20 minutes (between them and with the other couples of friends with whom they had traveled) to see their children.

Did they do well to leave them alone? How far should a parent be to avoid danger? The Argentine writer Samantha Schweblin talk about it in your book Rescue distance: "I always think in the worst case. At the present time, I calculate the time it would take to get out of the car and get to Nina if she suddenly rushed to the sink and threw herself. 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 still risk more than I should. "

Sofia has also disappeared while he was with his 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 with the guard falls, parents did not usually fear anything: there was no tumult or stranger, 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," he says. Infobae Maria Elena Delgado, the mother of Sofia.

The theory easily caught by the public opinion: Madeleine's father is a cardiologist and the mother anesthesiologist and family doctor. They were therefore convinced that they had given him sedatives to go to dinner quietly, and they had "gone hand in hand". There was never any evidence.

In the case of Sofia, the finger pointed at the parents was not that of justice but that of an indicator. "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 him and put us against", says María Elena and finds another coincidence with the case of Maddie. So against that, 9 years after Sofia's disappearance, they agreed to dig in the yard in front of the media (not at the request of justice). There was nothing there.

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

Sofía Herrera was also a girl very researched. Maria Elena had an endometriosis, an ectopic pregnancy, a tube had been removed and Sofia, his first daughter, it had taken him five years to arrive.

"Many people did not see it, they told us in social networks"deadly& # 39; & # 39;you sold it& # 39; All the time that they used to investigate us is wasted time find our daughter. "

In both cases, they looked for girls alive until they started to look for their bodies. In Portugal, they searched near the hotel. In Tierra del Fuego, they searched the edges of the road, in the sewers, in the bags, in the rivers. As well they searched.

Why do not parents cry?
Madeleine's parents they never overflowed in front of the camerasThey 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.

Sofía's parents have asked for the same thing, which is expected of one "good victim": a good mother must be visibly collapsed.

"I did not cry in front of the cameras because I did not have more tears, because I still cry to the sea when I was in front of the media he tried to enjoy showing his pictureTell them how they could recognize it, ask people to keep looking for it. The times I broke up later, they said: "Scoundrel, he's crying guilt that he has for what he's been doing to his daughter. There are people who are very cruel. "

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 his parents had killed him unwillingly and the friends were complicit in camouflage.

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 is it appropriate that someone can cover something like that and resist the pressure without breaking?, Anyone can imagine that we told them: "Hello, we killed Sofia and buried her in the yard.Will we eat a barbecue in the field so that nobody notices? ".

It has been said, moreover, that the couple of friends had fled from the island ("They have nothing to hide why they left?"), 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 of amplify suspicion against the parents. Twitter was new and a lot They took the advice as 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 justice has determined that the psychic suffered from psychosis and declared it unimaginable, "That's it, the harm is done." Nobody forced her to close her Facebook account and today it has 17,000 followers.

"Now, in addition, he has become a troll, he has armed the profiles of another name and does two things: criticize everything or praise himself. He says that she has solved impossible casesthat they follow him, he is the only one who knows the truth ".

Private detectives: parallel research
Madeleine's parents, confronted by the Portuguese police, hired several private detectives: some, incredibly, the deceived. 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 Fabián charged for leaving the factory, he financed his: it was behind clues from Bolivia, Chile, Peru. "Where there was a data that he was leaving, it was not a parallel investigation with detectives, put the body. "

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

In the local case, the reward was so high (2,500,000 pesos today) that there was also Attempts to scam: calls from the prison (they were told they were removing their panties), and until it was removed, they wanted $ 50,000 to avoid 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, there was mothers of other missing children who complained. They argued that as parents of Maddie They had contacts with powerful people and money available, they were looking for more than other children.

In the case of Sofia, there were also those They sowed doubts. Why, having so many missing children, political and media attention has been focused on it? "I can not explain why Sofi came in the media and others did not, but they did invite me to the Mirtha Legrand program and I went with my daughter's photo. Then they said on the networks: "Girl of a bitch, how much money will she have caught? She's a millionaire"

Faced with nothing, the craziest theories
When the DNA of the hair found in the car of Madeleine's parents did not match that of the father, Portuguese media incredible versions.

They could have badumed that the baby had simply never been in the car (which, moreover, had been rented by the parents almost a month after the disappearance), but they said, for example, that the father was not the father. When he was then "alien", there was More likely than he is suspicious.

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

The same hypothesis and the myth of poverty:
In both cases, The main hypothesis is the child trafficalthough 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.

"In the case of Sofi, the dogs proved that their way ends in a point of the fence where he was raised safely. There the other couple's baby saw a car with a man. I've heard people say, "How will anyone steal a boy next to parents while there are many in the north of the country who wander all day long?" ? " This increased mistrust, the same thing that happened to Madeleine's parents"said Elena.

International organizations fighting against child trafficking argue that poverty increases vulnerability (they call him "poverty more") but this is just one of many risk factors: being a migrant or a woman, for example, is another risk factor for being a victim of human trafficking.

The years pbad and, even if they do not know each other, the two girls' parents keep looking for them. It is difficult, but it is important to remove from the head the image of the girl who went to the garden: if she is still alive, in December, Sofia will be 15 years old.