In the early hours of this Thursday, the fugitive Jaime Saade will be forcibly reunited with the life that he left paused on the morning of January 1, 1994. That New Year's Day, after leaving Nancy Mariana Mestre with a thread of life at doors of a hospital in Barranquilla, Jaime Saade was swallowed by the earth. A flight that lasted three decades in which the father of the 18-year-old woman, who lay dying for nine days, ensured that the shadow of her past never left the murderer. Martín Mestre pursued Saade with the determination that it was the only thing he had to do in this life. He did not find it until 2019 in Brazil, when the sentence was already entering his injury time. Four years later, Mestre, 82, will sit this Thursday in silence in the brown armchair of his apartment in Barranquilla while a plane returns Saade to the starting point. For the first time in three decades, this father will sleep without the anxiety of getting up another day to look for his daughter's murderer.
- I plan to put an end to this story. "Although one never knows," says Mestre by phone a few hours before the extradition.
What Martín knows is that the story of the last 30 years of his life is the story of a thousand defeats and some small victories. What he knows is that never, not even today, can one take anything for granted. He spent 26 years going around in circles without achieving anything concrete. Every week, even at the risk of being “tired,” he went to court to keep the arrest warrant in force. He felt “kind of like Forrest Gump” telling everyone who would listen, and those who wouldn't, the story of his loss and the search for him. He used social networks to collect data - which even earned him some complaints - and as a member of the army in the reserve he took an intelligence course from which he learned some tracking tactics. He forgot everything to focus on what was important and delved into the Internet with renewed faith every morning.
Oblivious to the concerns of this father without a daughter, Jaime Saade, who became Henrique Dos Santos Abdala, a man in his fifties married with two children, lived in Belo Horizonte (Brazil) remaining free from a 27-year prison sentence for murder. . If in July 2023 no one had located him, he would be a free man without charges. But Mestre arrived first. Through some false profiles with which he entered Facebook groups around the Saades, Martín directed Interpol to Belo Horizonte, where one day in early 2019, Henrique dos Santos was arrested for the first time. That January morning, a call reporting the capture made Mestre fall to his knees crying and thanking God in the patio of his house. He believed he had made it.
The extradition, which seemed like a fact, reached the Supreme Court of Justice of Brazil, where two judges ruled in favor and another two against due to the time that had elapsed. The tie favored Saade, who regained his freedom. It was the first time that Mestre almost gave up. “In this 30-year journey I have always found little angels who have helped me. Margui [Barranquilla lawyer Margarita R. Sánchez, partner at Miller & Chevalier (Washington)] arrived when almost all the doors had closed,” Martín recalls.
Margarita R. Sánchez heard about the case through a friend. She also remembered Nancy Mariana and decided to help her father. Her law firm in the United States, without charging her family, began a legal battle against the Brazilian Court to rectify and accept her extradition, something that no one had ever achieved before. They argued that a tie was not valid for a case like this and that the crime had not prescribed. The Court, in an unprecedented decision, invalidated its first ruling and approved the delivery of the condemned man to Colombia in the midst of a powerful plea against sexist violence: femicides do not prescribe. It was April 2023.
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From then until today, Saade even participated in an escape attempt in Brazil and some judicial maneuvers in Colombia to try to prevent his extradition. Everything has been in vain. This Thursday a judge will determine the amount of time he has left to serve and will sleep in a Barranquilla prison for the murder of Nancy Mariana, a young woman who was about to finish school and who on the first morning of 1994 said goodbye to her father. after toasting the new year to take a walk with the man who would end his life with a shot to the head.
Martín doesn't know exactly what each day will be like now without having to look for his daughter's executioner, but he feels something like peace.
- Would you like to see Saade from the front?
- I have no need. I already know everything, he is directly responsible.