One year after the disappearance of Guadalupe Lucerothe Because of his search, he has some 180 different lines of investigation, motivated 400 raids and received more than 180 telephone complaints. But it could add a key piece in the coming weeks: a update of the image of the girl made by the same experts who in recent years made known the projections of the faces of Sofia Herrera (disappeared in 2008) and Mary Cash (disappeared in 2011).
The specialists belong to a private security consultancy, but in all these cases they work ad honorem. They are gathering information and images about the case, waiting for the Justice to allow them to collaborate in the case, at the request of Guadalupe’s family. “We spoke with the family, from whom we have all the support, to carry out the projection, and they asked the Justice to incorporate this update into the case. We cannot intervene without the judicial order that requests it, since it is the image of a minor, ”says Walter Duarte, the owner of the consultancy that bears her name.
For his part, the expert Alberto Suarezwho together with Daniel Antiman, are precisely in charge of making the new portrait, argue the reasons for having a new image, despite the fact that 12 months have passed since the disappearance of the girl: “It is only a year but Guadalupe is right in the period in which the dental pieces begin to change, from milk teeth to permanent ones, the maxilla is modified, the face is stretched and that gives it a different physiognomy. It’s also the time when the hair starts to bulge more.”
The expert compares the situation with the one that occurred after the disappearance of Sofía Herrera, another of the cases in which he worked, who was three years old and required new projections due to these foreseeable variations in the girl’s appearance due to natural growth.
How to make the portrait
To account for the changes it may have undergone the face of the girl who disappeared from the door of a house in the 544 Viviendas neighborhood of San Luis, where they were celebrating a family birthday, the experts use the age projection technique and do not use any software, but rather work freehand, with a stylus and a tablet.
“The old projection, is a drawing that It is carried out progressively, based on a photograph or image of the person who is missing or who is missing. A drawing of faces is obtained projected at a specific age (the current age of the assessed moment), and it can be done on children, adolescents and adults”, explains Duarte.
For his part, Alberto Suárez specifies that he works not only with photographs of the disappeared person, but also of his parents, current and from when they were children, also adding interviews with the family group so that they can provide details that are not seen in the images. .
In the case of Guadalupe, after having analyzed many images and having spoken with the family, the experts await the approval of Justice to work on an updated portrait that, they anticipate, will be in a different profile from the one currently available, where a birthmark stands out.
In many places abroad and even in the security forces of Argentina the images of missing persons are updated with programs and software, which are automatic with pre-loaded images and not in an artisanal way, but the experts have their reasons for choosing this procedure: “Computer programs have two major drawbacks: the first is that perhaps the software is designed for another ethnic group or another type of skin that does not undergo the same changes as that of the case study. And the other one that does not take into account the genetic load, the characteristics inherited from the parents, which are so important”, completed Sergio Torcigliani, another of the experts involved in the case.
The hope of Sofía Hererra’s mother
The experts came to the case of Guadalupe based on the recommendation of María Elena Delgado, the mother of Sofía Herrera (the girl who disappeared in a campground near the city of Río Grande in 2008), who fully trusts the updates as one of the ways to keep the search active.
“Alberto Suárez has made four images of Sofía and that It has helped a lot because people are aware and let us know if they see someone similar. From social networks today these portraits can be disseminated and more data is received. People are very supportive and they have sent us data from all over the world,” Delgado told Télam.
“Unfortunately, my daughter Sofía is growing and we cannot see her, we cannot see her face, how she is growing, so the projection of age from the photo of the family, parents, grandparents, siblings is used to to get Sofi’s face out,” explains Sofía’s mother, who synthesizes: “As long as the search continues, there is hope, and these images serve to keep it active.”
