Virginia Guerrero's mother is 84 years old and refuses to change the landline of her house in Aguilar de Campoó (Palencia) in case her daughter finally calls her, who disappeared 30 years ago.
The old woman, Trinidad Espejo, doubts that her home number will be maintained if she replaces her old device with a more modern and wireless one.
She hopes that one day the voice on the other side of the device will be that of her daughter, whom the earth swallowed on April 23, 1992 together with her friend Manuela Torres when they were returning from nearby Reinosa (Cantabria). ).
Virginia was 13 years old and Manuela, 14. They were last seen hitchhiking in the Cantabrian town to return to Aguilar.
They never arrived.
The absence fills with pain the conversation with Virginia's brother, Emilio Guerrero, 56, who maintains the type to describe three decades of horror.
The man, thin and with deep blue eyes, has embraced caution after so many years of false leads, alleged news about the girls, unsuccessful contacts and a single conclusion: nobody knows anything about them.
The man speaks sitting on a bench in a park in Aguilar, where young people used to go "to eat pipes, chat or smoke."
Also the missing ones.
"Most likely, they are dead, but we are not certain, we have to be objective and assume the worst... but also the best, in that they could be alive," he says, with the prudence of someone who has become accustomed to stifling illusions. .
"You have to learn to live with it,
Virginia Guerrero Espejo (on the left) and Manuela Torres Gougeffa, in their SOS Disappeared poster.
The event marked the life of a town of 6,800 inhabitants where "generations and generations" of young people resorted to "hitchhiking" to go to the festivities of nearby towns.
Nothing had ever happened, until it happened.
The relatives of the teenagers are now fighting in court to obtain search resources that did not exist before.
Currently, the case is definitively filed after the Provincial Court confirmed in September the dismissal of the case issued by the Cervera de Pisuerga (Palencia) court in June.
Both instances rejected the opening of procedures that were not carried out then, explain Carmen Balfagón and Ramón Chippirrás, from the legal criminology office that attends to the complainants.
“We are going to resort to the Constitutional Court and, if they do not approve it, to the European Court of Human Rights”,
indicate the specialists, who ask that a cave be inspected in the area that the Civil Guard saw in a summary of 1995 "suitable" to dispose of corpses, but that admitted not having "technical means" to analyze.
Today, the lawyer and the criminologist wield, yes it could.
The testimonies collected in these 30 years suggest that the adolescents got into a white Seat 127 on Castilla de Reinosa Avenue, where they had arrived by train, 37 kilometers from Aguilar.
The car was driven, the lawyers specify, by "a man between 20 and 25 years old, dark-haired and well dressed," according to witnesses.
The police investigations into suspects and the tracking of thousands of vehicles of that model did not produce results even when a year ago, after a television report about Virginia and Manuela, a woman denounced that something similar happened to her at that time and with that car. , but he was able to escape and flee.
The investigation did not produce any news either.
The exhaustion is noticeable in the voice of those who have closely suffered the case.
Chari Mendia, 45, lives "a nightmare that has lasted 30 years."
The woman, based in Toledo, affirms that on the day of the events the girls suggested that she join Reinosa's plan.
She declined.
She still believes that if she had accepted, nothing would have happened.
"It's that if I had gone...", she guesses.
Her father tried to dismantle her feelings of guilt months later, when three girls of similar ages were murdered in the same circumstances in Alcàsser (Valencia).
It didn't matter if there were two or three.
At least they found their bodies and there was no "hypothetical nightmare" like the one that shakes Mendia, who went to a squat in Madrid where it was rumored that the women from Palencia were staying.
That, like so many other truncated clues, did not give results.
Several pedestrians, through the streets of the municipality on October 6. EMILIO FRAILE
The woman cried for the first time for this ordeal when in 2017 some bone remains found in the Aguilar reservoir were related to the girls.
The DNA tests ruled out that they were theirs, which again prevented her relatives from closing the mourning of her absence.
Guerrero believes that the investigators have been able to act "with more coordination" throughout these 30 years, although in his words there is neither rancor nor reproaches beyond the insistence that they continue looking for his sister.
Manuela's mother, contacted by EL PAÍS, refers the legal criminology office that is handling the case.
Guerrero, a biscuit factory worker like so many others in Aguilar de Campoo, finds some peace chatting about movies or about the drought-depleted swamp to which he guides journalists.
He cites, as a source of optimism, other episodes of juvenile disappearances that years later had a happy ending.
Chari Mendia or her mother cling to that thread of hope, whom he prefers not to expose to the media.
“We lived in the same house, but we didn't know each other, we were in very different times.
It's like I didn't have time with her… but I couldn't know what was going to happen”, says her older brother.
Her other sister has named her daughter Virginia, which keeps the memory of the teenager even more alive.
Emilio Guerrero is the father of an only daughter, 12 years old.
He had to tell her about the family drama when he was barely seven, when he saw the child in the library drawings of a certain Virginia with the same surname as hers.
When the subject came up, his father smelled that he was aware.
"By the look on your face, you know something," he told her.
"How do I explain this to a seven-year-old girl?" Reflects Guerrero, who clarified all her daughter's doubts and begged her to inform him of anything they told him in town.
She reacts with silence to the matter, but "she is not stupid, luckily," says the father.
He acknowledges some concern when his daughter makes plans for Aguilar.
He knows that nothing should happen to her, but he picks her up by car so that she doesn't drive down a long, uncrowded avenue on her way to her home.
Just in case.
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