The disappearance and brutal murder of María Camila Potosí, eight months pregnant, represents one of the episodes of greatest horror that has shaken Cali in recent years.
Atrocious murder case of María Camila Potosí when she was eight months pregnant. Photo:Cali Police,
So far there are five suspects captured, a woman and four men who would belong to a criminal gang, and the body of a baby has been found within the same geographical quadrant where the victim was found. The authorities sought to determine whether the remains of the newborn corresponded to those of María Camila’s little girl, who disappeared at only 36 weeks of gestation. They hope that the National Institute of Legal Medicine will give the last word.
It was thus that this July 31, Legal Medicine in Bogotá confirmed to the Cali Personería that there is a correspondence between the remains of the baby found with little Alahia.
Since the 21-year-old girl did not return to her home in the upper area of the Polvorines neighborhood, on the steep and vulnerable slope of the capital of Valle del Cauca, the ‘ordeal’ began for parents who dreamed of becoming grandparents for the first time; a sister who was excited by the arrival of a new member of the Potosí Gómez family; and a couple who were excited about Alahia, the name they had chosen with María Camila for the baby.
The young woman was found dead on the banks of the Meléndez River, on July 20, in the wooded area of La Buitrera, about six kilometers away from Polvorines.
EL TIEMPO learned, as it has been reporting in previous editions, that the clues to find the perpetrators of the murder and those who ripped her daughter from the womb of a mother without completing the pregnancy, pointed to a macabre plan to deceive the mother and then keep the newborn and allegedly pretend that she would be someone else’s daughter. But in this case, with the intervention of a criminal gang called ‘the Santa’. Alias Nitson, alias Kevin and alias Yulieth would have devised and coordinated the illicit actions. Alias Kevin and alias Edwin would have committed the murder and alias Juan José would have left the body abandoned near the Meléndez River.
María Camila Potosí’s family and the community are crying out to find the baby alive. Photo:EL TIEMPO, ‘It’s not time to be silent’ and Personería de Cali
The hypothesis of wanting to harm María Camila Potosí and take away her baby gained strength as the investigation progressed, initially when the alerts were activated to find María Camila’s whereabouts and after the tragedy that left a low-income home in commune 18 of the city in mourning.
The clues
The first clue was the recordings of security cameras in Polvorines and in the nearby neighborhood of Meléndez, also in the same commune, which showed María Camila being transported as a griller on a motorcycle driven by a woman named Yulieth, on July 16.
One of the cameras shows that at 10:33 in the morning, the woman on a motorcycle and the victim were traveling through the narrow, sloping streets of Polvorines, a neighborhood that emerged as a settlement in a mountain area in the southwest of Cali.
Case of María Camila Potosí. Photo:Cali Secretariat of Security and Justice
An hour earlier, at 9:33 in the morning, María Camila had gone to the Polvorines health post, as reported in the Red de la Ladera State Social Enterprise within level I among the public hospital centers of Cali.
These clues included testimonies from relatives of the last conversations with María Camila to reconstruct her last moments of life and one of them was related to the visit that the victim would make to a relative in the Meléndez neighborhood, who had undergone surgery. The version had also emerged that María Camila was going to be given clothes, without specifying the origin of the donation.
That July 16 The young woman was recorded again on the street with the same woman on the motorcycle: Yulieth. At 4:16 in the afternoon both were captured traveling one of the roads in commune 18.
Another testimony that entered into the investigation was the one given by Carlos Rincón, who assured in a video broadcast by himself on social networks that Yulieth never slept in the home they shared in the commune, that July 16. The next day, according to reports, the theory arose that Yulieth was behaving strangely and that she had tried to hide a black and pink flip flops on the house lot, with the same characteristics as those that María Camila wore on the day of her disappearance.
March for María Camila Potosí. Photo:Juan Pablo Rueda / ELTIEMPO
Rincón’s statements gave further direction to the investigation when he said that Yulieth had faked a pregnancy in the past and then, this year, he had assured her that they were both going to be parents of a girl. “He showed me ultrasounds and a check-up card,” commented the man who today doubts whether Yulieth would be pregnant.
When Rincón and Yulieth’s ex-mother-in-law saw the videos of her with María Camila, doubts began. In statements they have said that they noticed she was nervous and sweating a lot.
María Camila would not have been chosen at random as a victim to snatch her daughter
The investigation continued to advance, taking into account that Yulieth and the victim had met two months ago in a program of the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF), aimed at pregnant women, nursing mothers and 2-year-old children. Everything would indicate that the alleged suspect, now captured, would have gained the trust of María Camila, as she would have launched the plan to deceive her about the baby she was expecting. In this case, according to police sources, Yulieth would not be pregnant and would have infiltrated the group of pregnant women.
EL TIEMPO learned that this woman would have used false empathy as her best weapon. She was the last link that interacted with the victim to support what could be a lie and that is within the investigation for a main motivation that could not have been money, but the obsession with materializing a real baby to sustain a false pregnancy.
Another of the authorities’ hypotheses has been related to a network dedicated to child trafficking. However, the manner of the murder denotes that there would have been a rush on the part of the criminals to abandon the young woman’s body in an area also on the hillside, such as Altos de Santa Elena. It was also considered whether the baby has been transferred to another municipality. This hypothesis would be being discarded.
The idea of hiding the minor in towns outside or distant from Cali opens a deep forensic debate: due to lung immaturity and the lack of asepsis protocols for a forced extraction. Forensic experts also consulted by EL TIEMPO warned that the land transfer of a live premature creature is scientifically unfeasible without immediate hospital support.
This forced the authorities to concentrate their efforts on two realities: one is the criminal network or the transfer out of Cali was carried out when the minor had hypothetically died, seeking to disperse the evidence of the crime.
The commander of the Cali Metropolitan Police, Brigadier General Herbert Benavídez, said that after ten days of investigation, it was determined with the Prosecutor’s Office to capture five people, among them, the woman on the motorcycle that transported María Camila.
The search on the Cali hillside
There was an operation ‘Ratrillo’, touring the Polvorines, Meléndez and Altos de Santa Elena neighborhoods to find Alahia and the perpetrators of María Camila’s crime.
The general made it clear that within A criminal network is responsible for the murder of María Camila and those who took her baby.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, At first he kept Yulieth as an accused or suspect and then, this July 30, confirm his capture with the four men of a gang, The operations were also concentrated in the center of the Valley, in the area of the Tuluá and Andalucía municipalities. Yulieth had not been captured because she has been key in locating the other suspects.
General Benavídez highlighted the capture of the woman on a motorcycle and that some of those detained planned to leave the country. In this process to prosecute the five people before a guarantee control judge, one of those captured revealed the location where the remains of María Camila’s baby would be.
The Police had already indicated at the beginning of the week about telephone calls informing that the girl would not have survived. However, the uniformed officers continued with the search for the culprits without losing the thesis that he could still be alive.
María Camila’s parents, Alba Ruby Gómez, and Alexánder Potosí, and other relatives hope that Alahia has not died and that the remains of a baby found in that wooded area, near where María Camila’s body was removed, are not those of the girl in a tragedy that has triggered a country’s repudiation for what happened to her mother and her.
CAROLINA BOHÓRQUEZ
EL TIEMPO correspondent
Cali
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