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"The morning of April 3, 2002, started out like any other for 23-year-old Marita Veron. She ate breakfast with her daughter, Michaela, then three, and left her family&amp;amp;#8217;s modest home in San Miguel de Tucum&amp;amp;aacute;n, a city in northwest Argentina, to walk to a routine doctor&amp;amp;#8217;s appointment at a nearby hospital. She said she&amp;amp;#8217;d be back for lunch. But midday came, and Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s chair sat empty. Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s parents, Daniel and Susana Trimarco de Veron, grew anxious. A dark-eyed beauty like her mother, Marita was known for being punctual and dependable. That afternoon the Verons went to the hospital where Marita had been headed, checked emergency rooms at others and combed the streets. No one had seen her. Like most of their neighbors, the family didn&amp;amp;#8217;t have a telephone at home, so they called all of Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s friends from phone booths. Nothing. They called the police, who said they had to wait 72 hours before filing a missing-person report. By evening Michaela was screaming for her mother. Susana feared that her daughter had gotten into an accident or had been assaulted and was alone somewhere, needing her mother&amp;amp;#8217;s help. &amp;amp;#8220;I had a premonition that was so intense,&amp;amp;#8221; Susana says, &amp;amp;#8220;I had to lean against a wall for support.&amp;amp;#8221; The next morning Susana stayed home with Michaela while Daniel continued searching for Marita. The tense quiet in the house was interrupted by a frantic knock on the door. It was the maid of a neighbor who had one of the few telephones on the block. An anonymous man was on the line with information about Marita, the maid said. Susana ran across the street in time to hear her neighbor say, &amp;amp;#8220;Please, don&amp;amp;#8217;t hang up!&amp;amp;#8221; The line went dead, but the caller had already disclosed some disturbing information: The day before, the person on the phone had seen three men in a red Fiat Duna pull up at the corner of the Verons&amp;amp;#8217; block, just as Marita was crossing. As they stopped the car, one jumped out, twisted Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s arms behind her back and pushed her, struggling, into the backseat. Seized by panic, Susana rushed to a regional government office and started banging on the door. Eventually someone came out to talk to her. &amp;amp;#8220;I want my daughter!&amp;amp;#8221; Susana yelled at him. &amp;amp;#8220;I demand you start looking for her!&amp;amp;#8221; In the agonizing weeks after Marita disappeared, Susana says she continued putting pressure on local officials to intensify the search for her daughter. She showed up at their offices, trying to force them to listen to her story, but maintains she got nowhere. Frustrated, Daniel and a friend from work went cruising through Tucuman&amp;amp;#8217;s seedier districts one night carrying a photo of Marita, looking for anyone who might know about the kidnapping. They pulled up to a prostitute loitering on the edge of a city park. Thinking the men were potential customers, the woman, Mabel, got into Daniel&amp;amp;#8217;s car. &amp;amp;#8220;I&amp;amp;#8217;m not a client,&amp;amp;#8221; Daniel said. &amp;amp;#8220;I&amp;amp;#8217;m looking for help.&amp;amp;#8221; He told Mabel about Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s disappearance and showed her one of the &amp;amp;#8220;missing&amp;amp;#8221; posters he and Susana had made. What Mabel proceeded to tell Daniel horrified him. &amp;amp;#8220;Oh my goodness,&amp;amp;#8221; Mabel said. &amp;amp;#8220;I have seen this girl. A guy who sells drugs took her to La Rioja,&amp;amp;#8221; a neighboring province. Then she added, &amp;amp;#8220;They did the same thing to me that they did to your daughter.&amp;amp;#8221; That had been many years ago, when Mabel was a teenager. Just like Marita, she&amp;amp;#8217;d been kidnapped, and she told Daniel how she was forced into sex slavery. She looked much older than her 23 years, and no longer had to be coerced into prostitution&amp;amp;#8212;it was the only life she knew. Yet she was eager to help this stranger desperately seeking his daughter. According to Mabel, Marita had been bartered by her kidnappers for around $800 worth of cocaine and had been taken to one of several reputed brothels in La Rioja run by the same alleged madam. Daniel was ready to leave immediately for the city, a four-hour drive away&amp;amp;#8212;but it was the middle of the night and, knowing he&amp;amp;#8217;d never make it while the brothels were still open, he decided he had no choice but to wait until the next day. If he&amp;amp;#8217;d gone to La Rioja, he might have found Marita; an eyewitness later said she was exactly where Mabel had mentioned. But the next morning, someone saying they were from the police called, claiming a young boy had seen Marita in El Cha&amp;amp;ntilde;ar, a small town less than an hour&amp;amp;#8217;s drive from San Miguel de Tucum&amp;amp;aacute;n. Setting off right away, Susana and Daniel spent 10 grueling days searching through fields in that area before they accepted that they&amp;amp;#8217;d been given a false lead. It was the first of many they would receive. Before that fateful day when Marita never came home for lunch, Susana had been a normal middle-class mother, a social worker who lived in a single-story house with a big backyard. But her daughter&amp;amp;#8217;s disappearance changed everything. Susana&amp;amp;#8217;s search for Marita would become all-consuming, transforming her into a fearless agitator of criminals and corrupt politicians. It would lead her into the netherworld of sex trafficking, where kidnapped women and girls are beaten, drugged and pimped out for a few dollars up to a dozen times a night. She&amp;amp;#8217;d grow all too familiar with crooked judges and policemen and death threats. And yet something good&amp;amp;#8212;something extraordinarily good&amp;amp;#8212;happened when this average mom was thrust into the center of one of the planet&amp;amp;#8217;s most lucrative criminal enterprises: She became one of its greatest adversaries. She&amp;amp;#8217;s since rescued scores of young women who might still be imprisoned in brothels or possibly even dead if not for her. She has helped them get back their lives, even as she has never stopped searching for her Marita. Sex trafficking is a global epidemic, a multibillion-dollar business that has enslaved an estimated 118,800 women and girls in Latin America and the Caribbean and 1.3 million worldwide, per the International Labor Organization. Argentina&amp;amp;#8217;s sex trade has grown since the country&amp;amp;#8217;s financial meltdown earlier this decade, says attorney Susana Chiarotti, an expert on sex slavery. Taina Bien-Aim&amp;amp;eacute;, executive director of Equality Now, an anti-trafficking group, puts it more starkly: &amp;amp;#8220;Arms you sell once. Drugs you sell once. But human beings are cheap. You can sell women and children over and over again in the sex trade.&amp;amp;#8221; Traffickers often prey on the powerless, women whose families are too poor or broken to try to rescue them. Marita wasn&amp;amp;#8217;t the typical victim. She ran a small grocery store and was studying to become a teacher&amp;amp;#8217;s assistant. &amp;amp;#8220;She was very honest. She hated lies, hated gossip,&amp;amp;#8221; says Vanesa Palavecino, her lifelong friend. The Verons were tight-knit. Susana and Marita would regularly take Michaela to the park, drink yerba mat&amp;amp;eacute;, the tea that is Argentina&amp;amp;#8217;s national drink, and have long talks. &amp;amp;#8220;People mistook us for sisters,&amp;amp;#8221; says Susana. As in most families, though, things weren&amp;amp;#8217;t always placid. Susana disapproved of Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s boyfriend, Michaela&amp;amp;#8217;s father, and had been upset when her granddaughter was born out of wedlock. But in general, the Verons were content&amp;amp;#8212;and blissfully ignorant of the dark trade festering in their city. Then they started living it. After Daniel&amp;amp;#8217;s encounter with Mabel, he brought Susana to meet her. The three began getting together at night, under a tree in a shadowy area of the city. Based on information from Mabel, Daniel and his childhood friend Jorge Tobar&amp;amp;#8212;a cop then in charge of the police department&amp;amp;#8217;s forensic unit&amp;amp;#8212;visited an alleged brothel about three weeks after Marita disappeared. Jorge tried to get a warrant to search the place, Daniel says, but a judge rejected his request. So the men asked a local police official for help. Sympathizing with Daniel&amp;amp;#8217;s anguish, he agreed to send in officers, which could be done without a warrant. Daniel accompanied the police into the alleged brothel, a two-story building with a bar downstairs and 10 or 15 cell-like rooms above it. Although they couldn&amp;amp;#8217;t search the premises, police asked the patrons and half-dressed young women for identification. When all IDs checked out, Daniel says he realized there would be no arrests. Suddenly he announced, &amp;amp;#8220;Anyone here against their will, come with me!&amp;amp;#8221; Three women sprinted past him and into the cars outside. One of them, Natalia (her name has been changed to protect her), a willowy woman in her early twenties, gave the Verons a promising clue about their daughter&amp;amp;#8217;s whereabouts. Marita, she said, was there that day and had been taken out the back door. Natalia knew Michaela&amp;amp;#8217;s name and could describe Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s sneakers and the C-section scar she bore from childbirth. At Susana&amp;amp;#8217;s urging, Daniel brought Natalia back to Tucum&amp;amp;aacute;n, where she stayed with the Verons for more than two months. After a year in captivity, she was withdrawn and fearful, Susana recalls. But the women bonded. At night they slept in the same room, leaving the lights on because Natalia was afraid of the dark. Susana was the only one she&amp;amp;#8217;d speak to. Slowly, Susana says, Natalia unspooled her story, describing how she&amp;amp;#8217;d been drugged, beaten and pimped out. With information Natalia gave Susana, Jorge got more warrants, which led to additional raids and rescues. Soon, other escaped women passed through the Veron house, each filling in the puzzle of Argentina&amp;amp;#8217;s sex trafficking network and Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s journey through it. Susana mothered these women as she wished she could mother her daughter. Word about Susana spread and families began to beg for her assistance. There was the despondent mother who asked Susana to help rescue her teen daughter from a brothel. The two enlisted a truck driver, who, posing as a client, paid for the girl. When she emerged, half naked, they whisked her away. Then there was Fatima Mansilla, 23, whose mother had called Susana after hearing her on the radio. Eventually Fatima escaped. She said her captors had drugged her&amp;amp;#8212;and is convinced that&amp;amp;#8217;s why her little girl was born severely disabled, blind and deaf. Susana arranged for Fatima&amp;amp;#8217;s daughter to get medical care. &amp;amp;#8220;She is like a second mother,&amp;amp;#8221; says Fatima, simply. But Susana was not able to save everyone. A few years ago, Susana heard that Mabel, her good friend and valuable informant, was found dead in her apartment; she&amp;amp;#8217;d apparently been overcome by carbon monoxide fumes. Maybe it was a gas leak, but to this day Susana is convinced Mabel was killed for talking. Despite the dangers, Susana kept up the search for her daughter. She&amp;amp;#8217;d walk right into brothels, occasionally disguised in a wig. Showing Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s picture, she&amp;amp;#8217;d say the woman in the photo had a dying mother who hoped to see her one last time. She even posed as a madam shopping for girls to learn about women for sale and enable Jorge to get warrants. &amp;amp;#8220;I lost my sense of fear and time,&amp;amp;#8221; Susana says. &amp;amp;#8220;Day and night were the same, always with a force pushing me to find my daughter.&amp;amp;#8221; When she wasn&amp;amp;#8217;t sneaking into brothels and welcoming rescued prostitutes into her home, Susana was browbeating&amp;amp;#8212;and sometimes suing&amp;amp;#8212;the government to act. At the time Marita was abducted, there was no anti-trafficking law in Argentina, and police weren&amp;amp;#8217;t trained to deal with it. But there may have been more sinister reasons for officials&amp;amp;#8217; inaction: A 2008 U.S. State Department report found that some of Argentina&amp;amp;#8217;s local security forces profit from sex slavery and protect traffickers. &amp;amp;#8220;Susana faced a wall of official indifference, and perhaps even complicity, when she first went to provincial and local authorities demanding that they investigate the kidnapping of her daughter,&amp;amp;#8221; a U.S. diplomat says. &amp;amp;#8220;Despite her pleas, local police and judges did not help.&amp;amp;#8221; Jorge, however, always did. He advised Susana to keep the case in the public eye, so she spoke constantly to local reporters. But her visibility put her at risk. There were threatening calls, some vowing to kidnap Michaela, too. Eventually Susana got 24-hour police protection. In the summer of 2007, needing storage space, Susana built a shack in her yard for Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s things. She&amp;amp;#8217;d carefully piled her daughter&amp;amp;#8217;s clothes, books and old toys on shelves under a plastic roof. One day the shack caught fire. Susana suspects the blaze was an act of arson&amp;amp;#8212;a warning. It melted the faces of dolls, seared novels such as Louisa May Alcott&amp;amp;#8217;s Hombrecitos (Little Men) and destroyed the homemade clothes Marita liked to make for herself. Susana was deeply shaken. For several days she couldn&amp;amp;#8217;t look at the charred remains; she sobbed just thinking about them. Even as Susana&amp;amp;#8217;s search for Marita hit a low point, her fight against trafficking reached new heights. In 2007 she was given an International Women of Courage Award by the U.S. State Department, which called her &amp;amp;#8220;an indomitable crusader against human trafficking.&amp;amp;#8221; Officials at home in Argentina rushed to embrace her. The Tucum&amp;amp;aacute;n governor held a press conference with Susana, where he pledged to create an anti-trafficking police unit. The first of its kind in the country, the unit opened with Jorge in charge, at Susana&amp;amp;#8217;s insistence. In spring 2008, Argentina finally passed a federal law against human trafficking. Around the same time, Argentine television started running a telenovela, or soap opera, called Vidas Robadas (Stolen Lives). Featured in the plot was the mother of a kidnapped girl, inspired by Susana, who breaks up an underground prostitution ring. As the show became popular, people talked about the once repressed topic of sex trafficking&amp;amp;#8212;and Susana&amp;amp;#8217;s quest to find Marita&amp;amp;#8212;more and more. Before Susana, sex trafficking in Argentina had been shrouded in stigma, hypocrisy and, most of all, raw fear. &amp;amp;#8220;She has been so crucial in bringing attention to this issue,&amp;amp;#8221; says advocate Susana Chiarotti. &amp;amp;#8220;It&amp;amp;#8217;s like David and Goliath. Susana is David to me.&amp;amp;#8221; Susana has opened a foundation in her daughter&amp;amp;#8217;s name to continue her anti-trafficking work. There&amp;amp;#8217;s a shelter where rescued women learn job skills, with doctors, lawyers and social workers on hand. At this point, Susana has helped at least 280 women escape or avoid sex slavery, according to her foundation. And thanks largely to her and Jorge&amp;amp;#8217;s efforts, 13 people allegedly connected to her daughter&amp;amp;#8217;s disappearance are now facing criminal charges. Seven years after Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s disappearance, Susana says she has never even considered that her daughter might be dead. &amp;amp;#8220;I know Marita is alive,&amp;amp;#8221; she says, &amp;amp;#8220;and when I find her, I hope we can run the foundation together.&amp;amp;#8221; It seems that Susana rarely lets herself stop working long enough to think about any other possibility. In the past year, Susana has received multiple leads about Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s whereabouts that have gone nowhere. The police call when unidentified bodies are found. Susana then has to wait several excruciating days for DNA results. Susana and Daniel have split, amicably, mainly due to the stress their shared trauma put on the marriage. Michaela, now 10, often wears Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s pink pajamas to bed and asks when her mother is coming home. &amp;amp;#8220;I tell her that when we find her, we&amp;amp;#8217;re going to move,&amp;amp;#8221; Susana says, &amp;amp;#8220;to a place where they can both be safe.&amp;amp;#8221; Along with her beloved Michaela, the women Susana has rescued since Marita&amp;amp;#8217;s disappearance are the center of her world now&amp;amp;#8212;the unexpected reward of an otherwise unbearable tragedy. &amp;amp;#8220;Every woman I help somehow helps Marita,&amp;amp;#8221; she says. &amp;amp;#8220;They represent hope in this new life of mine that&amp;amp;#8217;s often filled with terror.&amp;amp;#8221; What you can do Urge your U.S. rep to support H.R. 72, an anti-trafficking bill, and to join Congress&amp;amp;#8217;s Human Trafficking Caucus (writerep.house.gov). Donate to these groups: Coalition Against Trafficking in Women-International (catwinternational.org) The Global Fund for Women (globalfundforwomen.org) Michelle Goldberg&amp;amp;#8217;s latest book is The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World. Shirley Velasquez contributed reporting for this story. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/inspired/magazine/2009/04/why-did-this-happy-normal-girl-simply-vanish/6>