Missing in Portugal: How do you say goodbye with hope for the living?

Every year, Portuguese authorities receive about 4,000 reports of missing people. Most of the cases resolve themselves within a few hours or days. They can be elderly people with memory problems who are in the neighborhood, adults who decide to cheat on their marriage, teenagers who recover and return home, children who get lost and return to their parents.

Few years ago, Judiciary Police officials estimated that only about one percent of reports warranted criminal investigation, but the public's growing sensitivity to the problem and the authorities' increasing awareness of the urgency of intervention have changed that reality: in 2019, for example,''there were 1,911 applications to the General Prosecutor's Office (MP) for suspicion of a crime. In other words, almost half of the disappearances were caused by some kind of action that led the MP to conduct a check, in order to be alert to the development of the case and to be able to intervene if necessary - in the initial phase, the investigation is conducted by the police authorities. When suspicions of a crime are heightened, an investigation is opened.

A large proportion of reports do not involve any criminal act and in most cases the police can find answers. Murders, suicides, kidnappings - with good or bad news at the end, many cases are closed. There are also stories of people who voluntarily disappear and don't want to be found. In these''cases involving adults, their will must be respected: when they are found, authorities inform the "missing" that their families are looking for them but cannot reveal their whereabouts without the permission of the missing themselves.

This is a complex area that is difficult to characterize and constantly changing. Referrals can be made to different police services (usually the Community Police and the National Republican Guard), many cases are closed in a short time, others turn into homicide or kidnapping investigations, in other cases the suggestion of suicide is confirmed.

Every story is unique - there's''records of people who are reported missing despite unofficial recognition of their killer; or of murder convictions where the bodies of the missing have never been found...' And there are also unrecognized bodies that wait decades to be identified. All of this confuses the statistics and makes it difficult for those who want to study the problem. But in this book, our focus is not on the legal characterization of this phenomenon. We have tried to look at the stories of those who disappear forever. Without a trace. Leaving behind families, friends, people suffering from the cruelest doubt, unable to move past their grief, chained to cruel hopes, vulnerable to the insatiability of social media and pursued by sensation hunters and morbid curiosity crowds and the most sensational