Sunday May 14, 2023 | 12:00 p.m.
“I always have her present in my memories, but it is not enough. I grew up looking for it in every look, in every gesture of the people I come across daily. Not knowing about her is an immense weight that I carry, not only me, but my entire family. Her absence causes us a lot of pain ”. Blanca Ayala’s words are full of anguish and contain a family search that has been going on for at least 25 years.
One night in 1985, her youngest sister, Ramona Argentina Ayala, who was nicknamed Gucha, disappeared from the farm where they lived in rural San Vicente, when she was barely 13 years old, and since then everything has been desolation. Currently, if she is alive, that girl would be 38 years old, so hopefully her family wants her to know that they have been looking for her all this time and are still looking for her, with the desire to find her.
The march that this week brought together hundreds of people to ask for justice for the unpunished crimes in the town was mobilizing for Blanca, so she decided to expose the case and ask the community for help. Her faith is unshakable.
“We lived at Kilometer 65 of San Vicente, a neighborhood area quite far from everything,” recalled the woman, mentioning her father (now deceased), her mother (Ramona Fernández) and the 15 siblings: “There were 16 of us with me, 11 men and 5 women”, he detailed.
“One Saturday Gucha left the house to go to church and from that moment we never heard from her again, she completely disappeared. It was as if she had swallowed the earth. We never found out what happened and the authorities could not find her either despite the search that, I remember her, was done at that time. We never heard from her, ”he lamented.
I remember motorizing
Blanca was 15 years old at the time and she could not do anything immediately, but once she was of legal age, she began a personal search despite the shortcomings and the lack of data to guide her investigation.
“Years ago it was all very difficult, you had to work the farm and there was no possibility of getting to the city to motorize a search claim,” he said, and along these lines he said he recalled “the suffering of my parents for not knowing what to do in the face of the lack, because of the few answers they had, that’s why since I’m an adult I’ve been struggling to find my sister. Where is she? What happened to her? What did they do to her? These are questions that until now remain unanswered.
For more than two decades, Blanca and her family have been searching for clues about what happened to her younger sister.
“In the middle of the search in those early days, they once found buried bones and told us they were hers, but the tests were negative. We have not known since then if she is alive or dead, it is the anguish that we carry, ”said Blanca with tears in her eyes.
In turn, he explained that “she was a quiet girl, who did not leave the house and there were no people living nearby or who frequented us enough to suspect that she went with someone of her own decision. It is impossible that she left alone because she was barely 13 years old, so we are left with the certainty that someone took her by force, but who, where, what did or did they do with her ”.
The woman said that her father passed away without knowing what happened to that daughter she was looking for so much, and that her mother “constantly asks about her, making everything too difficult because we don’t know what to answer her,” she lamented.
Blanca confessed that she constantly asks God “that my sister is well, that she is alive” and with her hopes pinned on it she wants her to know “that her mother and brothers never stop looking for her, that we want to find her.”
In this context, he appealed to the empathy of the community: “If any neighbor who lived in those years in the Kilometer 65 area saw or heard something related to the disappearance of my sister, if they know what happened, I ask them to get involved and contribute data. We are not going to blame him for keeping silent, we just want to know how Gucha is, where, if she lives or not. And if she no longer exists, at least we will be able to know where her body is to be able to visit her and close this story that is increasingly painful for us.
Pablo Correas de Melo
Candela’s Father
A clue revives hopes of finding Candela Correas de Melo
