RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In December, Lucas, Alexander, and Fernando went out to play in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and never returned. They are part of the 30% of teenage minors missing in Brazil when the International Day of Missing Children is commemorated.
Data recorded by several official entities indicate that the whereabouts of some 80,000 people are unknown in Brazil. Of this total, it is estimated that more than 36% are minors, mostly adolescents.
Brazil does not have a detailed, unified and updated national list of disappearances making searches difficult. It prevents the true reality in the country from being known, according to experts.
Despite not having these tools, “there is a perception by several authorities that the largest group (of missing persons) is that of young people who are in their late teens,” said Larissa Leite, coordinator of the missing person program of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Brazil.
Data from the National System for Locating and Identifying Missing Persons of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (Sinalid) confirms this assessment by stating that 31.65% of the people who are missing are between 12 and 17 years old.
FIVE MONTHS WITH NO RESPONSE
The three missing children in Rio – aged 8, 10, and 11 – went out to play on December 27 in the surroundings of Castelar, a depressed community located in the metropolitan area of the Brazilian state.
In that region, drug traffickers and militias (paramilitary groups, mostly made up of police and uniformed officers – active, retired, or expelled) daily fight over the control of the territory, where they extort and threaten those who do not follow their law.
Nearly five months after their disappearance, there are few answers from the authorities, who still have not found the whereabouts of the three minors. At the same time, they support the investigation with “not very credible” theses, according to relatives and neighbors of the community.
Last week the police captured 17 suspects and hypothesized that the children disappeared for stealing a bird from a local drug dealer, while ruling out possible involvement of militias.
The case of the three minors is neither the only one nor the first to occur in that region, known as Baixada Fluminense, since 30 % of the disappearances of minors up to 17 years of age in the state of Rio are registered there, according to official figures.
“It is a peripheral region, poor and inhabited mostly by blacks. It is an area where this type of situation occurs with a certain frequency,” said Fabio Leon, journalist and spokesman for the organization “Forum grita Baixada”.
THE PANDEMIC INCREASED THE DESPERATION OF FAMILIES
When a person disappears, family members do not rest until they know their fate or whereabouts.
With the arrival of the pandemic in Brazil in March 2020, the relatives could no longer search in the streets for their missing persons and felt powerless. This anguish caused illnesses that, in some cases, ended in death, according to experts.