Rosa Arcos has still not been able to access the estate of her sister María José, who disappeared 30 years ago: “We have settled my parents’ inheritance and there are two accounts in her name that we cannot access,” she explains to EL MUNDO. During these three decades, she and her family have had to fight against bureaucracy, but also against the suffering of not knowing whether María José is alive or not.
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Despite this uncertainty, the Tax Agency forced the family to declare María José deceased to resolve a pending inheritance, under threat of financial penalty: “You have to go through this whole process carrying grief and dissatisfaction. We would never have initiated María José’s death declaration, but we had no other choice.” To this day, Arcos estimates that there are about 9,000 euros in both bank accounts, but she cannot confirm it since she does not even have access to the balance, not even with the death certificate in hand.
In Spain, there were 25,086 missing person reports in 2025, with 6,874 active cases. Behind these figures are thousands of families trapped in a legal limbo inherited from the Law of September 8, 1939. Since there is no legal definition of ‘missing person,’ the absent individual remains in an absolute void: they cannot exercise their rights in life, but their relatives also cannot access benefits or rights due to death. Families are condemned to civil and economic paralysis until the mandatory ten years—five if the missing person was over 75 years old—required by the Civil Code to request a death declaration have passed. “I doubt there was much interest in finding missing people back then…” reflects Francisco Pérez for this newspaper. His father disappeared more than two years ago in Almuñécar (Granada) and, despite the existence of unified protocols for the Security Forces and Corps, the first hours of the search evaporated like water: “We were at the police station from quarter to seven until midnight to file the report. If a person is disoriented and caught in cold weather… It’s the difference between life and death,” he laments.
But neither Arcos nor Pérez are the only ones affected by a deficient system. María José Sánchez has been searching for her mother, Josefa Padilla, since 2019. As the regulations dictate, María José tried to declare her deceased five years after her disappearance, but the surprise came when she read the ruling: the court declared her deceased retroactively, that is, as if she had died the very day she disappeared. Faced with this, Sánchez appealed, since there was a possibility that the Administration would claim back the entire pension her mother had received while absent.
“We have had to continue filing her income tax returns and everything else. If she has to pay everything despite being absent, then she should receive everything normally,” defends Sánchez, who ultimately won the appeal. Pérez’s complaints go along the same lines, as he is forced to handle processes like the quarterly VAT declaration as if his father had never disappeared: “Every three months we file his VAT return. It’s something that makes you remember everything again… He keeps fulfilling his obligations, but he has no right to be searched for, because no one is looking for him anymore,” he tells this newspaper. Despite these bureaucratic and legal entanglements, families have no right to free legal assistance. The 2015 Voluntary Jurisdiction Law made the presence of a lawyer no longer mandatory to start the procedures, leaving relatives unprotected.
Lawyer Verónica Guerrero explained at the National Meeting of Families of Missing Persons the contradiction this entails: “If you want to do the procedures alone, you can carry them out, but you won’t know how to do it. You will need someone to advise you.” This is the case for the vast majority of relatives, who call for a specific law to resolve their daily obstacles.
Thanks to tireless effort over the years and the power of association (Quién Sabe Dónde Foundation, QSD), they have managed to get Congress to approve the creation of a subcommittee to draft a basic legal statute for people missing without apparent cause. The initiative, proposed by the PSOE, passed with 32 votes in favor and five abstentions, those of Vox, ERC, and Junts. But for now, in addition to the lack of legal coverage, there is the emotional abandonment.
Relatives live between uncertainty, pain, and anguish, but the State does not provide them with the help they deserve as indirect victims. This is how Encarna Rodríguez, daughter of Simón Rodríguez, who disappeared in the province of Huelva four years ago, tells this newspaper: “I think we already have enough pain at that moment, added to everything that comes after, to have to deal with lawyers and spend money like that.” Although Victim Assistance Offices should provide “adequate legal, psychological, and social support from the first moment of disappearance” according to the official Guide, in practice it is not a service that is solving these problems, among other things, due to the lack of resources dedicated to it. Neither Antonio Zurera—who has been searching for his sister Angelines for 18 years—nor the family of Paco Molina, a 16-year-old who disappeared in 2015 in Córdoba, received that emotional support, like many others affected.
His father Isidro Molina tells this newspaper the response he received when he went to request it: “I asked for psychological help, not only for myself but for my wife and my other son. They referred me to the Juvenile Court, and there they told me that one of the three available psychologists would attend to me when my son appeared. ‘When my son appears, I won’t need any psychologist,’ I told them.”
The search for a loved one requires enormous energy and activity. Relatives feel alone in this situation: “Psychologically it destroys you, but if you break down, everything stops. A psychologist is necessary even if only to maintain the strength and spirit to keep searching,” Pérez tells this newspaper. Besides dealing with psychological and bureaucratic pressure, families have to fight off calls from scammers who seek to capitalize on their suffering. “They called me from Colombia and told me they had my son kidnapped: if I didn’t pay 50,000 dollars, they would kill him,” Molina says.
Many also receive calls from psychics who claim they can find their missing loved ones. Josefa Padilla’s family was asked for 3,000 euros to find her. Desperation makes it not so difficult to fall into these kinds of situations. Pérez describes to this newspaper how they operate: “When a lot of information about your case is published, the psychic already knows what to say. It’s a trap. They more or less always support the suspicions that the relatives have that go against the ‘official version’. It’s a way to trap you. It’s easy to fall for it when you’re desperate,” he concludes.
The Statute of the Person Missing Without Apparent Cause, formulated by the QSD Foundation, tries to provide a solution to all these contingencies by establishing a preamble to a legal framework. Families rely on it to obtain free psychological and legal assistance, among other things. One of its pillars is the “right to be searched for”. In Molina’s case, this right was glaringly absent: “My son was not searched for. They told me: ‘This is a kid’s tantrum. Your son will be home tomorrow. You come here and withdraw the complaint.’ Well, 11 years have passed and my son still hasn’t appeared,” he says.
But not everything is a fiasco. The National Center for Missing Persons, a public body created in 2018 thanks to the tireless struggle of families, functions as an oasis to turn to when everything else fails. It manages statistical data on disappearances in Spain, coordinates the different Security Forces and Corps, trains them to act in disappearance situations, and issues missing person alerts, among other tasks.
Also, since 2022, strategic plans have been approved that are funded with millions of euros to modernize and improve the response to the phenomenon of missing persons. Although some objectives of these plans have not been met within the expected deadlines, the mere existence of these plans is seen as progress: “More firm steps need to be taken, but these are first steps compared to the absolute nothingness that has prevailed for decades,” summarizes journalist and QSD founder Paco Lobatón to this newspaper. Pérez trusts that the Statute will materialize into a law: “We are fed up. Without a law, we have nothing.”
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