Chapter 25 – Madeleine / Mari Luz Missing Portuguese children

Chapter 25 – Madeleine / Mari Luz
Missing Portuguese children

The media coverage and the police attention that were given to the case of Madeleine, were of proportions that had never been seen in Portugal before. In fact, means were put in motion like never before in a missing child case, and an event like this had never had such prominence, not in Portugal and not anywhere else in the world.

The truth is that even the parents of missing English children were subject to mixed feelings. If on one hand they were solidary with the parents of a child from their own country, on the other hand they failed to understand why this event was more serious and more deserving of national and worldwide attention than what had happened to themselves.

In Portugal, the parents of missing Portuguese children felt the same, with the aggravation of events taking place in their own country, the same country where their own children had disappeared. Concerning the media coverage, there are no doubts about the commitment and the dedication, but it has to be kept in mind that the Portuguese media just followed a tide of information that was being generated and fed on an international level by the most important media groups, present in Portugal also. If there is an event in our country that is also the most publicized one all over the world, the Portuguese media cannot remain indifferent to what is happening around them.

On the police level, the commitment was the same as in any other case. What this one had in particular, was that diligences that were taking place, day after day, were transported into publicity, despite the fact that the reporting was not always the most faithful mirror of what had actually been carried out by the authorities. The police did not always show to be prepared to deal with a type of publicity that it was not used to at all. Tradition demands that the work is carried out in secret, and results are only shown at the end.

The parents of missing Portuguese children felt that there was a different treatment of this case. They felt that, because of the dimension of media coverage. But the police did not commit any more or any less to this case than to any other, and it was certainly not the high number of investigators that were assigned to the case, that would guarantee a different quality in their work. This became obvious when dozens of investigators that had been dislocated into the Algarve, returned to their original posts. This is not what determines the solution of the cases.

What effectively happened in the case of Madeleine McCann was that, since the early days, people who make it their work to project events, to mould them and to give them impulse, took sides in the process. They carried their mission out, knowing that the first impulse would be the hardest one. That if this one was properly executed, the rest would follow naturally. And that is how it was. With all the implications that it brought along.

In January this year, Mari Luz Cortes disappeared in Huelva. The Portuguese media converged into that city, and as the media took an interest in the case, so did the public.

There is another missing child in Spain, Amy Fitzpatrick, aged 15. The young Irish girl disappeared on the evening of New Year’s Day, and never seen again. Neither the Spanish nor the English media ever gave this case a relevance that came even near to that which was given to the cases of Madeleine or Mari Luz.

There are Portuguese children that disappeared several years ago, from the street where they lived, from the garden where they used to play. Parents who werebroken by the emptiness of not knowing. They even conceive that their children may be dead, but they are dead and dry inside, themselves.

They were all forgotten, until a little British girl, almost four years old, disappeared when she was spending a week of holidays with her parents, in Praia da Luz.

Just for having reminded us of the others, those Portuguese boys and girls that had been forgotten, only for that, Madeleine has done a great favor to those who refuse to forget.

In fact, the media formula that was used by the McCanns has made ‘jurisprudence’, as their example was followed by others, namely by the family of Rui Pedro Mendonça, that created the site www.ruipedro.net, and the parents and family of Mari Luz.

Madeleine awakened the sleeping minds, helping those who still refuse to accept the fate, the destiny, the star of some Portuguese children and their parents.

But she did so much more than that. She prompted debate, heated opinion interchanges. She motivated cultural convulsions. She forced us to speak about missing children. She made so many of us read, learn, speak about children that disappear without a trace, that are sexually exploited, that become labor slaves, children from poor countries where their organs are used to save the lives of children in rich countries with rich parents, even if that means the death of the poor children. Madeleine made us talk.