Milagros Cuello left her home in the city of Pando, in southern Uruguay, on December 3, 2016. She was 16 years old. “I’m going and I’ll be back in five minutes,” he told his father before leaving for the main square at around 11 pm. Since then, her family has not heard from her. She, too, has not had any answers from the police, the Prosecutor’s Office or the Justice. Nancy Baladán, her mother, began her search on her behalf. She toured the 19 departments (provinces) of the country and in 2018 she created Where are our gurisas?an organization that brings together mothers like her who tirelessly search for their missing daughters.
The story of Milagros Cuello is part of a research by the organization openDemocracy, published this week, about nine cases of disappeared young women in Uruguay. “Official negligence – judicial, fiscal and police – is widespread,” says the report on the treatment received by the cases analyzed, in which there are indications of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Milagros’s, he points out, is a sample of the prejudices that exist in local institutions towards poor disappeared women. In this sense, openDemocracy maintains that there is a “convincing record” of constant omissions and affirms that complaints, files, reports, evidence or witness statements are frequently lost.
Baladán, Milagros’s mother, studied the law, investigated and searched for her daughter in the streets, brothels, canteens, ditches, following clues or rumors about her whereabouts, according to Angelina de los Santos, author of the report. “If you keep stirring shit up, I’ll blow your head off,” a man told Baladán, pointing a gun at her a few blocks from her house. After two years, she managed to get three men arrested, who were prosecuted with prison in 2019 for the sexual exploitation of her daughter. The mother denounces that the authorities have not been exhaustive in the search for Milagros nor have they exhausted the investigation hypotheses, such as the one raised by the family lawyer, for whom the disappearance is related to sex trafficking.
“Were they kidnapped by drug traffickers, by traffickers or by pimps? Did they die? Were they murdered?” are some of the questions raised by the mothers and which remain unanswered. In addition to the case of Milagros, the investigation includes another eight. Seven of them correspond to young women who disappeared in the 19 de Abril neighborhood, located on the western outskirts of Montevideo. In March 2019, Florencia Barrales, 19, disappeared; in September of that year the same thing happened with Gina Rodríguez, 27. In January 2020, Yamila Estévez, 20, disappeared; in February, Jennifer Gómez, 19, and Daniela Virginia Bera, 22; in December, Micaela Ramírez, 21 years old. In January 2022, 35-year-old Tatiana Pintos disappeared. The investigation also deals with the case of Silvia Fregueiro, who disappeared at the age of 28 in the Punta del Este resort (southeast of the country), where she worked as a housekeeper, in December 1994.
“Uruguay boasts a stable democracy and a solid legal and rights framework in a region where none of this abounds,” the report says. But in this South American country, he adds, there is also a “thriving underworld” of drug trafficking and sex trafficking, in which young women, especially those from poor or vulnerable backgrounds, “are easily exploited by criminal gangs.” Coming mostly from this context, the families of the nine disappeared, backed by lawyers, social workers and human rights defenders, maintain that the police ignore them “systematically”.
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According to the report, the registry of absent persons (as these cases are called) of the Ministry of the Interior lacks a disaggregation criterion, the data provided is not always correct, it is not complete or updated. Commissioner Juan Rodríguez, director of the fight against organized crime and Interpol between March 2020 and March 2023, told openDemocracy that Uruguay adopted a protocol to search for missing persons in June 2020, but acknowledged that the police had not yet been trained to apply it. Regarding the cases of the disappeared girls in the Montevideo neighborhood, he pointed out that the police had not yet prepared the profiles and did not have detailed files on them. Rodríguez also did not know how many of these disappeared women had been victims of gender-based violence.
Between 2020 and 2022, the Ministry of the Interior received 14,402 reports of missing persons, of which 6,228 were classified as “absent people” after receiving detailed information, for example, about their physical appearance. According to official information, 99.5% of all those cases were resolved and none of those linked to “absent persons” in that period were related to sex trafficking. However, support groups for sex trafficking survivors argue that these numbers are inaccurate. According to openDemocracy, a significant number of women officially listed as absent had ties to drug dealers or to people suspected or convicted of sexually exploiting them or other women.
Andrea Tuana, director of the NGO Step, which provides government-funded services to victims of trafficking in Uruguay, says in this report that the Uruguayan state’s response “is an absolute disaster.” “This topic is not prioritized, it is not interesting, it does not exist”, he assures. In 2022, El Paso served 210 victims of human trafficking. In that year, only two judicial investigations into this crime resulted in a conviction, while 20 were filed, the report indicates based on data from the Prosecutor’s Office. “The anemic judicial response is part of an established pattern in this country,” says the author of the report.
According to the investigation, in Uruguay there are at least 48 cases of people who disappeared more than a decade ago and which remain unclear, such as that of Silvia Fregueiro, who disappeared in 1994. Another 34 cases, such as Milagro Cuello, are Open for more than five years. In addition, there are another 74 unresolved for more than a year, such as that of the young women from the 19 de Abril neighborhood of Montevideo. “Today and always, I am constantly going around, looking, because if I don’t keep looking for her, they won’t look for her. It’s short, they’re not going to look for anything,” says Milagros’s mother, Nancy Baladán.
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