“Mom, my mobile card is broken, I don’t have a phone, we can’t talk.” It is the last conversation that Ignacio Palmero -Nacho- had with his mother. He disappeared in Tenerife, on July 14, 2021, when he was about to turn 30. It was precisely a congratulations to which the young man did not answer that set off the alarms. On the other side was Lola, his mother. “When I saw that there was no way to contact him, I went directly to the Civil Guard“.
The alert was activated. A year later, there is nothing, not a clue that leads to his son. Nothing that sheds light on your disappearance.
“I live on a roller coaster. I have bad days, passable days, horrible days, scary moments…”. Her name is Lola Hijar and she has been looking for her son for a year. She just disappeared. His trail was lost.
Lola visualizes, thinks, discards. “We have no clue,” she laments, “he may be fine, he may be disoriented, he may be in a center, he may have taken his own life…there are many options.” She has not rested since then: “she has been able to get on a ship… When we have nothing, everything comes to mind”. Her only certainty is that “he’s disappeared, they can’t stop looking.”
“My card is broken”
July 14, 2021. Nacho opens the Messenger app and writes a message to his mother. “I didn’t have a phone,” Lola remembers. “He wrote to me that his mobile card had been broken and that he couldn’t call me.” They had been living apart for a few years: he in La Laguna (Tenerife); her on La Palma. They saw each other, they called each other, they had each other. “I’ll ask you for a duplicate and I’ll send it to you by courier, son,” he told him, “the phone was in my name, so that’s what I did: I bought one and sent it to him, but he no longer received it“.
A week later, on his birthday, the alarms went off. “On the 20th there was no way to find him. Neither by messenger, nor by phone… I tried to congratulate him, but nothing. The next day I went to the Civil Guard, on the 21st I denounced. On the 22nd I went to his house“. His son was not there. “He left with his wallet, ID, driver’s license and insurance card. The rest stayed at home, they didn’t have a phone. His car and his motorcycle were also there.”
“I want to disappear”
Lola waited at home, he didn’t come. He did not arrive. She tried to reconstruct the last steps of her son to make it easier to locate her. “The previous days she had ups and downs,” says her mother. “He was down. Hopeless.” A disagreement with a manager had caused him to lose his job. “I told him that if he wanted me to go to his house, he would often go, spend a few days there. Other times he would come…”, he answered no. “I want to leave here, what I want is to disappear, he answered. Many times she said it, we have said it all over the world… but yes, My son disappeared.”
Adrift
Brilliant, cultured and intelligent, Nacho had moved to Tenerife at the age of 21. “Since his father passed away. He went to his chalet and that’s where the disaster started a bit“, laments Lola. “At first it was great: he was alone, freedom… A young boy, a chalet… His house was everyone’s house: music, video games… until he drifted away.” studies, flirted with drugs, “began to have an addiction”.
Lola, vigilant, tried to get him out of the well. “I took him to psychologists, psychiatrists… but there was no way”, her character changed. “He was in and out of some centers and his friends weren’t with him much either because it was difficult, it was complicated.”
Finally, the work that he missed days before disappearing has arrived. “He was cleaning roads, look, it’s hard work, but he was happy,” recalls his mother. “He had a disagreement, the summary is that they wanted me to throw the rubbish they collected into a garden. Nacho said that this was an ecological attack. That he would load it onto the truck and throw it in the right place.” They told him no and that he wouldn’t bother to come back. “He began to think that he wanted to do good and everything turned out badly. Fatal, fatal… it was fatal.”
“A man from a bar said that he had seen him on Saturday the 19th walking near his house, and nothing more was known.” Lola, together with SOS Disappeared, scoured the nearby beaches, “they knew him, they had seen him, but they hadn’t known anything for a long time.” The investigation did not advance.
“I filed the complaint with the Civil Guard, but I am on another island. They process it and since La Laguna belongs to the police, it goes to National Police“, says Lola. “Can’t you bring dogs?” asked the woman. “Look, the dogs are in Las Palmas, and bringing them for nothing… It’s not worth it because you already know what we’re looking for, he replied.”
Lola looked at the agent, “what are we looking for? It will be who we are looking for, right? You understand me, you tell me”. Lola makes a silence. “I was looking for a corpse, she meant. They decided that Nacho had committed suicide. They gave no other option“. Lola breaks the silence again: “if so, we have to look for the body, right?”
One-way tickets
“Your son has not left the island,” said an agent as soon as the investigation began. “When his bank accounts were checked we discovered that I had four one-way tickets: one to Barcelona, two to Madrid and one by boat“. In principle, he did not use them.
“We have no evidence to confirm anything,” explains Lola. “There are many options. Here it is not difficult to get on a cargo ship and get lost. If you go to a ship to Africa, for example, there you can’t get anything in the bank, your accounts would be without movements, as they are.”
Sheltered in her house, “in the face of pain I calm down in my garden, working in my garden”, she searches for answers, draws options. “He told me many times: ‘Mom, why don’t I dare, but I would steal an identity card and leave with someone else’s card‘” He doesn’t know if he dared, if he did it or not, “that can be done. If no one looks at your face, they see that the bill matches the DNI. Now in a pandemic with a cap and mask…. why not?”
detoxification
Friends, acquaintances, neighbors, Lola toured the island asking for him. “A person from a nearby bar told me, ‘I could swear I saw him with a group of guys, the kind that come from detox centerswhatThey don’t go inside the bar because they can’t…” With that information, he went to the police station. “I told them that it was another option, that he went to a center, that they only ask for your name. You get in there, you work, you have food and sleep and you disappear for a while.” She didn’t look at herself. they said there were more than 30 centers on the island. I tried to call myself, but due to privacy policy they couldn’t give me information.”
Smart, “too much…”, draws his mother. “He was like he was a little bear, very warm, loving, very noble, very good…” Nacho is not. Lola there is not a day that I don’t think about him. She remembers her smile, “it was beautiful”, her jokes, “it was funny, with a very fine humor”. She visualizes him catching waves, “she loved it”, reading, “loved the story”, enjoying… she looks forward to it, no doubt; she waits for him, without more.
