Isabel Garcia Chamizo kindly answers the phone, although she warns that she does not want interviews. Some time ago he decided not to appear more in any media. She got tired of the television networks only letting her speak for a little over a minute and only asking her questions to make her cry, looking for the easy tear with which to feed the television morbidity. She looks hurt and tired. She always felt very alone. His son’s case was not too mediatic, nor was there a great citizen mobilization. A demonstration at the Dos Hermanas Town Hall when he turned one year old and little more.
He has been repeating the same story for fifteen years. Her son, Josue Monge Garcia, 13 years old, disappeared on the afternoon of April 10, 2006. The last time he was seen, he was playing with his bicycle at the door of his house, on Cristobal Halffter street, in the Huerta neighborhood. Single of Two Sisters. It was Holy Monday. The boy told his mother that he would sleep at a friend’s house, in the nearby neighborhood of Vistazul. I never get there. Her husband, Antonio Monge Rodriguez, left in a van with the excuse of going out to look for him and never came back. On April 23, thirteen days after his son’s absence, he was lost forever.
Fifteen years later, no clue has been found as to the whereabouts of either of them. Nor has the van appeared. As if the earth had swallowed them. The case remains an enigma that it seems that no one could solve. At least for now. Isabel confesses that she already has little hope of finding her son. Today she lives as a refugee in her religion and very integrated into the Evangelical Church, to which she belongs and of which her husband and son were also members. Entrusted to God will spend this sad anniversary.
“This case was a failure for the Police”, says, very self-critical, one of the investigators who worked in the search for the boy and his father. “It wasn’t for lack of work, or efforts, we did a lot, everything in our power to find them, but the truth is that today, fifteen years later, we don’t have an answer to give that mother, who continues to suffer,” explains the policeman, who prefers to remain anonymous. The investigation was directed at first by the Dos Hermanas police station, and later (more than a month later) by the Seville Homicide Group. It is one of the few matters that this unit, one of those that presents the highest statistics for clarifying crimes, has still not been resolved.
The agents turned to the search for Josue and Antonio Monge. They did all kinds of things. From the beginning, the court authorized the wiretapping of the phones of all family members. The conversations of parents, uncles and grandparents were heard for weeks, without finding anything relevant. Josue had a mobile phone that stopped giving a signal the moment he disappeared. Since then it has been off and has never turned on again. The same thing happened with the father’s thirteen days later.
One of the hypotheses handled by the Police is that the father had been able to leave Spain. In addition to the dissemination of the profile of the father and son in Interpol and Europol, which is usual in these cases, efforts were made with different police forces throughout Europe to find out if any agent had identified Antonio Monge at any control or reported his van for any traffic violation. As the Police knew, through his mother, Antonio Monge liked Portugal very much, intense efforts were made with the Portuguese Police. There were personal contacts between the members of the Seville Homicide Group and their Portuguese counterparts. Something similar happened with Morocco. All entry cards to the country and all the records of the ferries that cross the Strait were reviewed.
The records in the Social Security were analyzed, in case Monge had received some type of pension or benefit. The same with banks. I never withdraw money from his account, I never use any credit card. Nothing at all. The money trail, so decisive at other times, did not lead anywhere in the Monge case either.
The van was one of the pieces that could be key to the investigation. The Police sent letters to all the municipalities of Spain (there are more than 8,000) asking if the car had been denounced for any infraction and if it had been removed by a municipal tow truck and was in a deposit. In the offices of the Homicide Group, a pile of papers accumulated with the responses, all negative, from the municipalities.
Faced with the possibility that Antonio Monge had committed suicide by throwing himself into the Guadalquivir with the van, the Police helicopter made several inspections from the air along the entire riverbank from Cordoba to Sanlucar de Barrameda. The flights were made in summer, coinciding with the fact that the water level was lower. Swamps were also checked. The police helicopter also flew over the Sierra Morena from the province of Cordoba to Huelva. Not a trace, not a clue, was found from the air.
The Monge were very religious. Elizabeth still is. A brother of Antonio was a preacher of the Evangelical Church and he used to contribute donations. In case he had left the Church to profess another religion, the Police investigated the sects that had communes, given the possibility that the father and son had joined one of them. Every time a new piece of information appeared in a newspaper or television channel, the police received a barrage of calls. There were those who saw Josue in a town in Lerida, almost on the border with France, although he was actually a boy who looked a lot like him. It was confirmed that he was not.
Despite all this work, the Police have not been able to offer an answer to Isabel. “It is an unfortunate case. I do not have a clear conscience, because in the end we have led it to oblivion,” explains the researcher. Perhaps it is time for the Police to consider creating the figure of the person in charge of relations with the victims, who attends to them, gives them all the possible information and explains in detail all the procedures. That if a corpse appears, tell them that it is not their relative and they do not have to find out in other ways. This figure has never been created in the Seville Police. Does not exist. And it would have been very useful in a case like that of Josue Monge. Surely her mother would not have felt so alone, so helpless and so abandoned.
