The alleged kidnapping of a 5-year-old child and a possible link to the trafficking market, illegal adoptions or even organ trafficking is generating deep emotion in Argentina. For eleven days now nothing has been known about little Loan, 5 years old, the youngest of eight brothers from a humble family in the town of 9 de Julio, who disappeared in the deep countryside of the province of Corrientes, in the north-east of the country.
Loan was last seen at a family lunch at his grandmother’s house which was also attended by some strangers. Initial hypotheses stated that the child may have been lost and engulfed in the swamps of the area. As the days passed, however, clues emerged directly involving two of the people present at the lunch, in whose car traces of the child’s presence emerged, and a police commissioner accused of having misled the investigation. The three are already under preventive arrest together with two uncles and a sixth person on whom serious suspicions also hang.
The justice system, local media report, is working on the hypothesis that the child was kidnapped and transferred from Corrientes to the nearby province of Chaco and from there perhaps to Paraguay. In this sense, it is not excluded that the motive could be that of selling in the illegal adoption market, trafficking or even organ trafficking. According to what has leaked to the press in the last few hours, one of the detainees, a former Navy officer, would have tried to take his own life in his cell and would have offered to collaborate. The wait now is all on a full confession that could lead to certainty about the fate of little Loan.