(OSV News) — As he reflected on child labor and other critical situations involving children all over the world, Pope Francis mentioned in the Jubilee Year’s second general audience Jan. 15 the case of Loan Danilo Peña, a 5-year-old Argentine boy who went missing in June 2024, an unsolved tragedy that shocked the South American nation.
“I would like to remember a boy named Loan today,” the pontiff said during his Wednesday audience. “One of the hypotheses is that he was sent to have his internal organs extracted for transplantation.”
He expressed concern about the widespread exploitation of children and the suffering they endure, sometimes returning with scars or, tragically, not at all.
That has not been the first time that Pope Francis expressed his concerns over Loan, who disappeared after having lunch with family members at his grandmother’s house near the northeastern Argentina town of Nueve de Julio.
Over the past few months, the pope exchanged letters with Gustavo Vera, a long-time advocate against human trafficking in Argentina, and mentioned Loan on a number of occasions.
“In three or four letters, he talked about Loan’s case, saying that it’s similar to many unknown occurrences,” Vera told OSV News.
The case has not been solved yet, as there’s no conclusive evidence of what happened to the boy. On that day, he went with his father to his grandmother’s house to have a special lunch with other family members and friends. It was St. Anthony of Padua’s day, an important festivity in the region.
After eating lunch, Loan and other kids followed his uncle Antonio Benitez and two of the uncle’s friends to a nearby orange grove, without his father’s authorization. He was never seen again.
According to Vera, the case involved a series of errors and possibly other crimes. The local authorities, for instance, failed to issue a Sofía alert immediately after Loan’s disappearance.
The Sofia alert in Argentina — similar to an Amber alert in the U.S. — starts a comprehensive protocol involving security forces and several state agents in order to prevent the crime of human trafficking to be fully carried out, especially within the first 24 hours, and to find the child still in good health and close to the place where he or she was last seen.
“Instead, the Judiciary believed that he was lost, an absurd assumption that led the investigators to lose at least five crucial days,” Vera argued.
Seven people were detained in connection to Loan’s disappearance, including a police officer accused of covering up the crime. The boy’s uncle and aunt were also arrested — she gave two distinct and contradictory testimonies to the police and her actions that day may have involved the creation of false evidence to deceive the investigators.
Vera said that nobody knows what happened to the boy and that the pope is not saying that his organs were sold but had just remarked that such a possibility should be seriously analyzed.
Groups that combat human trafficking in the Argentine church have been very active in demanding to the authorities that the case is immediately solved — and have even promoted marches against human trafficking.
Pope Francis has been a strong international voice in denouncing human trafficking, calling it a “global scourge.”
“It is a call to take action, to mobilize all our resources in combatting trafficking and restoring full dignity to those who have been its victims,” the pontiff said last February, warning that “If we close our eyes and ears, if we do nothing, we will be guilty of complicity.” He made the comments in his message for the 10th World Day of Prayer and Awareness against Human Trafficking.
Scalabrinian Father Juan Antonio Ramírez, secretary for the Commission for Migrants and Refugees, known as CEMI, told OSV News in August that human trafficking is not something new in Argentina, with hundreds of cases coming and going over the years and never being solved because no decisive clues are ever found.
“Many of such problems occur in a sphere of crime and violence, so they are invisible for most in society,” Father Ramírez declared.
Eduardo Campos Lima writes for OSV News from São Paulo.
