Women's History Month

 

On April 3, 2002, a young woman named María de los Ángeles Verón — known to everyone as Marita — left her home in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, for a routine doctor's appointment. She was 22 years old. She had a three-year-old daughter at home. She told her mother, "Don't worry. I'll be back soon."

She never came back.

Her mother, Susana Trimarco, ran to the police station the same day. She begged them to file a report. They told her Marita had probably left with a boyfriend. They said they had no paper to write down the report. They said they had no fuel to go looking.

Days passed. Then weeks. Witnesses quietly came forward — a neighbor who saw two men push Marita into a red car. An elderly carpenter who told Susana the same thing, then disappeared and was never heard from again. The trail of corruption went deeper than Susana had imagined.

She slowly understood the truth: her daughter had not been lost. She had been taken. And the people who were supposed to find her were the same people protecting the ones who had stolen her.

So Susana decided to go looking herself.

She was 48 years old. She had never done anything like this. She had no training, no badge, no backup. What she had was a mother's love and a fury that could not be extinguished.

She went to police stations and pulled files on known traffickers — names, addresses, locations of suspected brothels. She studied how trafficking networks moved women across Argentina. She learned the language of the criminals. She learned how buyers spoke, how madams operated, how deals were made.

Then she put on expensive clothes, heavy makeup, and walked into Argentina's trafficking underworld.

She disguised herself and entered brothels across northern Argentina, pretending to be a buyer looking for women and girls for her own establishment. The first time she walked through one of those doors, her heart was pounding. She looked at the young women lined up in front of her — some barely teenagers, some with empty eyes that had stopped looking for rescue a long time ago.

She kept her disguise. She asked questions. She took mental notes. She was searching for Marita. But she was also seeing something she could not walk away from.

Girls as young as 12 and 14, sold like objects. Girls who had been drugged and beaten and kept in rooms with no doors. Girls who whispered to her: "Please don't leave us here."

Susana couldn't leave them.

Every time she left a brothel, she reported everything to authorities and pushed relentlessly for raids. When rescues finally happened — often only after enormous public pressure — Susana was the one waiting outside to receive the survivors. Over the course of her years of undercover work, she personally helped rescue more than 150 women and girls.

She took many of them into her own home. One hundred and twenty-nine survivors of sex trafficking lived with Susana at various points. She became their mother, their guardian, their bridge back to life. She sat with them through nightmares. She helped them find lawyers. She held their hands when they testified in court. She helped them rebuild lives that had been stolen from them piece by piece.

And she kept searching for Marita.

One survivor told Susana she had seen Marita — drugged and barely conscious in a trafficker's house in La Rioja. Susana went there immediately. By the time she arrived, Marita had been moved.

The trail went cold. But Susana did not stop.

What she uncovered went far beyond individual criminals. Police officers were on traffickers' payrolls, warning them before raids. Judges dismissed cases or handed out lenient sentences. Officials at every level looked the other way. The system was not failing to stop trafficking — it was actively keeping it alive.

Susana started speaking publicly. She named names. She provided evidence. She made it impossible for Argentina to pretend this wasn't happening.

In 2007, Argentina passed a law making abduction and sexual exploitation a federal offense. In 2008, a broader anti-trafficking law followed, establishing protections for victims and creating mechanisms to prosecute traffickers and corrupt officials. Since that law passed, more than 3,000 people have been rescued in raids across Argentina. Susana's advocacy made those laws possible.

She paid a price for it.

Death threats arrived by phone. Anonymous voices told her to stop talking or she would disappear like her daughter. Someone set fire to her house. She was physically attacked multiple times. She kept going.

In 2012, thirteen people — including former police officers — finally stood trial for kidnapping Marita and selling her to traffickers. Survivors testified. Evidence was presented. Susana sat in that courtroom for weeks, believing justice was finally coming.

Then all thirteen defendants were acquitted.

The judges said there was no proof. The outrage that followed was immediate and nationwide. Thousands of Argentinians took to the streets. The decision was so transparently unjust that the government was forced to act. The three judges were impeached and removed from the bench. New trials were ordered. By December 2013, ten of the original defendants had been convicted.

But the convictions still could not answer the question Susana needed answered most.

Where is Marita?

Some witnesses believe she was killed shortly after being taken. Others believe she was trafficked abroad — to Spain, or another country. There is no body. There is no definitive proof. There is only silence, and a mother who has spent more than two decades refusing to accept it.

María de los Ángeles Verón would be in her mid-40s today if she is still alive. Her daughter — Susana's granddaughter — is now in her mid-20s and has grown up without her mother.

Susana Trimarco, now in her early 70s, is still searching. Her foundation, the Fundación María de los Ángeles, continues operating today, providing survivors with legal support, safe housing, psychological care, and job training. As recently as 2024 and 2025, her foundation helped dismantle trafficking rings and assisted in operations that freed trafficked women and girls.

She has received the U.S. State Department's International Women of Courage Award, the Canadian John Diefenbaker Defender of Human Rights and Freedom Award, recognition from the United Nations, honorary doctorates, and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. Her story inspired a major Argentine television series and a documentary film.

She does not talk much about the awards.

Susana once said: "Every woman I help somehow helps María. They represent hope in this new life of mine."

That sentence carries everything. The grief that never healed. The love that never ran out. The refusal to let one impossible loss become an excuse to stop fighting.

She walked into darkness so others could walk out. She turned a mother's desperation into a country's laws. She gave her home, her safety, and decades of her life to women that the world had decided were not worth saving.

She never found her daughter.

But more than 150 women are alive and free today because a mother refused to look away. An entire nation changed its laws because one woman would not be silenced. And every girl who did not disappear into that darkness — because of those laws, those raids, those rescues — is part of Susana Trimarco's story too.

A mother's search never ends.

Neither does her impact.