2023-07-30 19:01:00
Marisa Olguin he can clearly reconstruct the day Bruno disappeared, almost as if the last 27 years hadn’t happened. As if time had stopped, at least partially, that Sunday, March 2, 1997, in which his daughter, barely 8 years old, was lost in minutes from everyone’s sight. From that moment, for the next 26 years and until today, his family has not heard from him.
Bruno Gentiletti He lived with his parents, Marisa and Claudio, and his four siblings in the city of Las Rosas, Santa Fe province. He is the third child in his family: in the middle of his two older brothers, Belén, who was 11 at the time, and Martín , 10; and his two younger brothers, Franco, 7, and Gisela, 6.
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That Sunday, still summer, the family left their home in Las Rosas in the morning for the river. They wanted to spend the day at the beach to celebrate Franco’s birthday, which had been the previous Wednesday. They traveled by car for more than an hour to the coast of the Paraná River, and entered the La Florida Spa, in the city of Rosario. They arrived around 11 in the morning: they parked, unloaded their things, settled under an umbrella.
What followed, Marisa reconstructs it like this: the boys’ father went with the two older ones to the water, and Bruno stayed with her at the water’s edge and the two younger ones. Later, the three of them asked permission to go to the playground that was on the property, regarding 100 meters away. She stayed behind preparing something to eat and when, half an hour later, she called them to come, Franco and Gisela returned without Bruno. “He went to the slide,” they told her mother. “But I looked and there was no one on the slide,” says Marisa in dialogue with PROFILE, 26 years later.
When Claudio Gentiletti and the older boys came out of the water, Bruno was gone. “And at that moment, half an hour had passed since we had arrived, it was all very fast. And we began to search, to search, to search. Inside, outside, and we can’t find it anymore. That’s how it all went,” says Olguín.
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The certainty of his mother and a wrong search hypothesis from the beginning
They looked for him at the games, in the parking lot where they had left the car, they asked the families who were there if they had seen him go by. They trusted that he might be around, nearby. They searched around the place and even in a property located in front of the spa, where there was another slide and they believed that Bruno might have crossed out of curiosity. The personnel from La Florida, recalls Marisa, told her that the possibility that she had left there was zero. because no minor passed through the turnstiles without the company of an adult. But two of his brothers had already crossed the turnstiles without any problems to go look for Bruno.
Then despair began: no one remembered seeing him, except Franco and Gisela. Hours later, with the police complaint, the authorities unhesitatingly leaned towards the hypothesis that Bruno had drowned, for which reason they deployed rakes along the Paraná River. Neighbors who arrived from Las Rosas, fishermen and divers also participated in the Prefecture operations, but no results were obtained and the baby still did not appear.
Bruno had secretory otitis, and they had operated on him in August 1996 to place two devices that were going to regenerate the membranes of his eardrums. From that diagnosis, he knew that he had to avoid getting his ears wet and use earplugs whenever he was in contact with water.
“He used the earplugs to bathe, to get into the Pelopincho, for everything. He had to always have that dry area and he paid attention. And his first impression when he saw the water was ‘oh mommy, what dirty water’, because it was river water, and he told me ‘and I didn’t bring the earplugs’ ”, remember Marisa.
That background in Bruno’s medical history is what gave his mother certainty: for her it was –and is, still today– almost impossible that he would have gone into the water without the earplugs and, from the very beginning, she felt that searching the river for a possible drowning was wasted time. However, that was the main hypothesis around his disappearance for at least the first month, despite the fact that his family asked that other possibilities be investigatedand in which they feared the most: that someone had taken him from the spa.
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With the reconstruction of the events, which might be done on the spot before Judge Edgardo Bistoletti just three months later, Bruno’s brothers made the tour that day. They explained that he went to the slide, and came back telling them that a man and a woman had told him it was closed, but that in any case he insisted on going back there to play and returned alone. “We went to the trampoline and Bruno to the slide. Suddenly Bruno came and told us that a man and a woman told him that the slide was closed,” Franco and Gisela said at the time.
Of the people present in Florida that March 2, there were no testimonies that might provide information regarding what happened to Bruno. The next day there were people who said they had seen boys who might be him around the beach. “We search at night, at all hours, but no”, reiterates his mother.
“Nobody was looking for Bruno outside of there except us. Everyone was waiting to see if his body was found in any river mouth. It took us three months to be able to reconstruct the events, for my children to show the judge where Bruno was, where they were. Many things that in the first moments are fundamental, and all that was diluted because nobody took note of us. We felt despair because no one moved”, Marisa tells this medium when talking regarding those chaotic weeks.
A desperate search: data in different provinces and a complaint to Migration that was “misplaced”
In April 1997, Marisa Olguín and Claudio Gentiletti traveled to Buenos Aires to try to give more visibility to the search for their son. On that trip, in which they received advice, they found out that there was still no complaint registered with Migrations regarding Bruno’s disappearance to prevent him from leaving the country. They had to do it themselves.
“The judge said that he had sent it, but that it had been misplaced. Wherever you looked, everything was a legal vacuum”, recalls Marisa. The Federal Police and Interpol only started working on the case in April. “In Interpol it appeared that Bruno had disappeared in April because that month is when I traveled to Buenos Aires and made the complaint, but a month had already passed,” she remarks. More than thirty days in which her son might have been taken anywhere.
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With the passage of time, when a clue arrived, they did not hesitate to follow it. She traveled to Tucumán twice in a row. In San Nicolás, Buenos Aires province, they spent almost a month looking for him because there were many calls from people who saw similar boys. These are just two examples of some of the many calls they received, but that did not lead to anything. “I begged people to keep them (the boys),” he says. We would go crazy, we would go to one side, they would send us to another, it was tremendous. And so in many places.
The anguish grew when it came to returning home following those days without certainty, and without knowing what to say to her other four children, who were deluded that one day she would bring her brother back from one of those trips. Those lives also continued and her family got through it as she might. A year following Bruno’s disappearance, she separated from her husband.
“It was terrible to come home. I was saying ‘I’m going to look for Bruno because they gave me some information’. When he arrived they expected him to return with his brother. They were very close and they remain that close today, they are always looking to see what’s new, they look in newspapers from other countries. I always told them: ‘If we suffer, imagine how Bruno suffered. He had to be outside and we are together’”, Marisa consoles herself.
Bruno disappeared when he was 8 and this year he turned 35: the reconstruction of his image
Throughout these 26 years, two reconstructions of Bruno Gentiletti’s face were made to try to approximate his updated image. The first was done in the United States, through Missing Children and the FBI, which at that time, his mother says, were the only ones that had the technology to do it. A probable image of Bruno was achieved at the age of 17. A second reconstruction was made some time ago by the Ministry of Security of the Nation and it is of his face with 33, 34. Born in 1988, on June 18 of this year Bruno turned 35 years old.
In Argentina, Missing Children is currently looking for 40 people who were lost as minors and are now adults. Although more than 95 percent of the cases of missing children are resolved, there are cases such as Bruno’s or Sofía Herrera’s in which uncertainty prevails.
“We have more than 95 percent of the cases resolved positively. That is a very high number. Of the daily complaints, which are sometimes 3,4,5, the majority are boys who are found quickly and return home, sometimes spontaneously. What happens is that there is a 5 percent of those who never know anything else and they are still there.
They are the ones that worry us and drive us to organize campaigns,” he said some time ago. Ana Llobet, president of Missing Children Argentina, in an interview with PROFILE.
In 2020, the case for the disappearance of Bruno Gentiletti passed to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and a new team was set up to investigate the case from the beginning. The Gentiletti family gave samples to the Forensic Anthropology Team, and in 2022 they were compared with data from a young man from Mar del Plata who had similar features to Bruno and doubted his identity.
The results were negative, but neither Marisa nor her children lose hope of one day meeting him once more: “We see stories in other countries that through DNA and these reconstructions people have been found following 40, 50 years . They are tools that today give you hope that at some point it can happen”.
► The Ministry of Security of the Nation offers a reward of 1,500,000 pesos to anyone who provides data that leads directly to finding Bruno Gentiletti. The reward is intended for those people who provide information that serves to find their whereregardings. You can call 134 anonymously or contact us using the following form: Search for Bruno Gentiletti.
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