Tabernacle Ortega |
Madrid (EFE) And it is that the field is the main enemy that the Civil Guard faces in the investigation of a disappearance.
For this reason, it is very important that the relatives report it from “minute one”, just as it is also essential that the agents gather exhaustive information about the moment of the disappearance, about the victim and about any detail that will help them in the search for to be able to “pull the thread”.
This is how Captain Daniel Arranz, from the Homicide, Disappeared Persons and Fleeing from Justice Section of the Judicial Police Technical Unit (UTPJ) of the Civil Guard, explained it to Efe, on the day in which People’s Day is commemorated disappeared without apparent cause.
From the data of the last year in the demarcation of the Civil Guard, it can be deduced that this body collected around ten daily reports of disappearances. More than half – 57 percent – referred to minors in reception centers and, of these, seven out of ten were girls.
Regardless of these cases, which also increase the number of complaints in other police forces, the Civil Guard is faced with voluntary or involuntary disappearances that require a deployment of means to replace those that do help the investigation in the urban environment.
The absence of cameras or repeating antennas and the few witnesses in highly unpopulated areas make tracking difficult, which is compensated for by the use of drones, sniffer dogs, helicopters and other means to carry out raids in which, in addition, volunteer residents usually participate.
“People get involved” in the search, but their participation requires a lot of organization, as Captain Arranz warns. “We don’t want there to be another disappeared person,” he emphasizes.
The weather, one more enemy
And another factor that becomes one more enemy for locating the disappeared person alive in the field is the weather, crucial in the case of people with cognitive impairment, generally of advanced age, who are lost and to whom the cold or excessive heat can cause death.
Precisely, the Civil Guard investigated last year 96 complaints of missing people with cognitive impairment, which represented 2.4 percent of the almost 4,000 that were collected in the territory of the armed institute.
Within the chapter of involuntary disappearances are located, in addition to these 96, another 16 due to accidents and 148 without apparent cause, that kind of mixed bag where those whose motivation is unknown or there are insufficient indications about the absence are included. When in doubt, explains the captain of the UTPJ, “we classify them as involuntary.”
As voluntary (92 percent of the total disappearances investigated) the Civil Guard classifies the more than 2,200 complaints of disappearances of minors in reception centers in the last year and the 486 minors who have fled from their homes.
The 853 reports of disappearance of adults due to intentional absence are also cataloged in this way.
These are sometimes located, but if the disappeared person does not want the agents to explain their current situation to their relatives, the security forces simply inform them that their family member is alive.
Since the creation of the National Center for the Disappeared (CND) of the Ministry of the Interior, “long-term” disappeared persons have also been located by crossing different official databases.
Crimes, kidnappings and child abduction
The latest data from the Civil Guard puts 9 reports of forced disappearances in the criminal field, such as crimes or kidnappings. They barely represent 0.2 percent of the total.
A higher figure is that of complaints for child abduction, with 42. More than half, says Captain Arranz, are children that one of their parents has taken out of Spain without the consent of the other. Of the 27 abductions still active, that is, those that are still under investigation, eight would have Romania as the destination of the minor, four the United States and another four Morocco. The rest will be shared between France, Ecuador, Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Argentina and Colombia.
There are two ways to locate these minors: criminal and civil. In the first case, the obstacles to the investigation can be set by the country of destination, if it does not consider these facts as a crime, which interferes when issuing an arrest warrant.
Regarding civil proceedings, the captain recalls that it is carried out under the umbrella of the Hague Convention for the Return of Minors, to which more than a hundred countries adhere.
Arranz recommends “attacking” the two routes and points out that although the civil route, which is implemented through the Ministry of Justice, may be slower, it often gives a positive result.
Complaints still active: 76% of minors in reception centers
The Civil Guard maintains 576 active disappearances, of which 456 are of men. And of the total, the vast majority, 438, are minors.
Investigations in which the Civil Guard continues to work, in close collaboration with associations of the disappeared and families.
With the latter, the armed institute maintains continuous contact and prefers that it always be with the same interlocutor, both from the family and from the investigative unit itself.
Precisely, the work of the section of the UTPJ in which Arranz works has recently been recognized by the European Foundation for Missing Persons QSD Global with the award for “The best police intervention”.