Sara Sofía, the girl who never appeared

“For me, the search for Sara Sofía was never done on time, or with the rigor that the family expected. At least not by the Attorney General’s Office. On the other hand, I value what the community has done ”, said Xiomara Galván, the aunt of Sara Sofía Galván, the girl with huge blue eyes who disappeared while in the hands of her own mother, Carolina Galván, in January of this year.

The pain endures in the Colombian community, in the entire country. It is not easy to accept that her caregivers have allowed her to die and that, as if she were an object, they dumped her in a river wrapped in a blanket without the slightest remorse.

It also hurts because this case reflects the drama experienced today by the families of 1,952 minors under 18 who disappeared this year and reported until October in the country. According to national figures from the National Institute of Legal Medicine, 80 are children from zero to 4 years old. Each story contains the pain of the reality of an abandoned childhood, it is enough to remember what the short life of this victim was.

Sara Sofia He was born on March 30, 2019, that is, at this time he would be 2 years and 9 months old. Her arrival was unexpected because the family found out late about the pregnancy and it was never known who her father was. However, they decided to give him a hand despite their problems. “My sister was fine living with us, but by October 2020 she told us that she was going to a friend“Xiomara said.

The news was surprising, because she finally had what she needed with her sister’s family: husband, two children and mother-in-law. However, they noted the inexperience of the mother towards the child. “It cost her her role as mom. I used to reproach him for that”. There was a compelling reason: Xiomara and her sister had grown up without their mother’s presence, a pain they carried their entire lives. “My dad and our paternal grandmother raised us “, he counted.

The only thing Carolina said about Sara Sofía’s father is that it was a one-night stand and that when she told him she was pregnant, she disappeared.

Carolina, for her part, lived her own hell, she was a disoriented young woman who knew little or nothing about what she was going to do with her life. So when he left he left his daughter. In the garden where they took care of the little girl they had already noticed some oversights. They were saddened by the obvious abandonment.

By January 2021, Carolina returns home with the intention of seeing the girl. “She was never forbidden to see it, or to enter the house. In fact, on the 8th of that month, he took her to the park and brought her back. The baby was happy, in the midst of everything she adored her mother and was left in a sea of ​​tears when she left “Xiomara said.

On January 16, he returned with a request to stay with the girl for the weekend. He told his family that he is living in a house with three boys and a girl. “He caught me working and although I asked him for the address, he came out with not knowing it.” Xiomara knew at that moment that who she lived with was Nilson Diaz and that, supposedly, the four children with whom she resided were her children. In short, it was not the dream scenario for a girl. “On January 23, he called me for the last time and told me that he was going to stay with Sara Sofía.”

Four days later, Carolina appeared telling her family that a lady was taking care of the baby and that she would pick her up at the end of the day. That was his version after days of evasively answering questions from his family. At that time they were insistently asking him for information about the girl’s condition.

An incident surprised them even more. When they went to Sara Sofía’s kindergarten, they were told that Carolina and Nilson had gone on January 29 to claim the minor’s bond, but that the girl was not with them.

The first news

The first time Xiomara had news about her niece again was on February 18. “A lady named Marisela called me”. The conversation shocked her. It was about a Venezuelan woman who makes a living from her job as a street vendor at Gate Seven in Corabastos, in Kennedy. She told Xiomara that she had earned Carolina’s trust since the young woman arrived in the sector and, inexperienced, began to prostitute herself, apparently, she said, carried by the man with whom she lived. While I was buying him a sweet they became friends. Without knowing it, she had become a key witness in this case.

From her, Xiomara learned that the girl went through days of crying and insomnia and that she sometimes refused to eat by pressing her lips together. “He told me that on January 28 he fed her lentils for lunch and then fell asleep. That three hours later the girl did not wake up and that she saw her purple. The baby had died ”.

They say that the fear and guilt of the couple to face their death and, therefore, the authorities led Carolina and Nilson to put the small body inside a blue blanket and it is inside a white canvas tied with a brown ribbon and which was then thrown into a Class Roma sector spout, in Kennedy, 300 meters from the local church. “She always said that she had done everything with Nilson”Said Marisela.

According to the witness, a complicity pact was sealed between the couple. Carolina was forced to work and bring everything she produced to her partner, and the latter to shut up what had happened. “But all this sounds strange to me, I did not see Carolina so bad as to do that”added the woman, and said that Nilson manipulated Carolina. “It was sad to find out that my sister was selling her body”Xiomara said.

When he found his sister, he took her to the Patio Bonito CAI, where he heard the same version, that the girl had died three hours after eating and sleeping. That same day, in the company of the policemen, they walked along the riverbank for the first time, without finding a trace of the minor. Another was Nilson’s version. He used to say that he complained to Carolina for taking Sara Sofía to him, arguing that he did not have the money or time to take care of her, but his testimony has always been in question, so much so that today he is in jail, just like Carolina.

The Attorney General’s Office, through a prosecutor from the Bogotá Sectional Directorate, obtained an assurance measure in a prison for Carolina and Nilson, after charging them as allegedly responsible for the crime of aggravated forced disappearance, a charge that neither accepted.

The national pain for the disappearance of the girl not only mobilized citizens who took to the streets to distribute flyers with her photograph, but also several members of her family who toured the country. But today, more than eleven months after the report, she is still absent. Only the memory of her immense eyes and fleeting videos in which she was seen dancing happily remains.

‘We keep looking for her’

Faced with the controversy unleashed this week by the cessation of the search activities for the girl, Ederley Torres Agudelo, operational coordinator of the Colombian Civil Defense of the Bogotá section, wanted to defend all the tireless efforts of his staff, the community and the the girl’s family. “I know that our hopes have been diluted, but we keep looking ”.

Even personnel from the institution who reside in the area have sacrificed their personal safety to find any vestige that leads to the whereabouts of the small body, despite the fact that the clues given by her attacker were contradictory. Dogs, boats, drones, dredges have been used for this, and even so, nothing more than tons of garbage has been found.

I know that our hopes have been diluted, but we keep looking.

Every day about 30 people, distributed in teams, toured about 20 neighboring sectors, plus 8 people who sailed in the boats all day and yearned to find a piece of the sack, a vestige of the blanket, something of the girl’s humanity that end his search, but the days have passed and nothing has happened. “In total, about 800 people have participated in that search “. They say that it hurts them not to have an effective result because they do that job out of vocation. The same says the staff of the National Police and of the Sijin. Now the case is the responsibility of the Subdirectorate of the Prosecutor’s Office, but so far nothing is known.

Meanwhile, the outrage continues, above all, among the defenders of children. “Our soul hurts to have to think that the page is going to be turned and that this country is going to forget Sara Sofía. It is incredible that Colombia is not able to clarify the events that led to the disappearance of a baby only two years old. They have found absolutely nothing ”, said Yohana Jiménez, a defender of children’s rights. He added that it is necessary to know if the girl was really murdered or, on the contrary, was the victim of another crime. “It is very rare that nothing has been found in that spout, not even a shoe, a sack. The only thing that tells us is that they started looking for the girl late, they did not react in time ”.