When Mari Luz Cortés disappeared near her home in Huelva on 13 January, it was perhaps inevitable that comparisons would be made with Madeleine McCann. Five-year-old Mari Luz went missing as she returned from buying a packet of crisps at a local shop. British journalists based in Praia da Luz, the Portuguese holiday resort where Madeleine was last seen, joined the dots between the two stories and drove 200km (120 miles) across the border to the quiet Spanish town. Was she, they wanted to know, the victim of Madeleine’s abductor?
The Spanish press has resisted the temptation to label Mari Luz ‘Madeleine Two’, but there are signs that the eight-month media circus surrounding the missing British girl has changed the way such disappearances are reported. Lola Galán, a writer and former correspondent at El País newspaper, says that in Spain there is no daily tabloid press, so reporting tends to be straighter, but she fears that ‘the Spanish press is becoming more like the British – more competitive, with more space for populist stories. This is true of the afternoon television shows as well, which have a similar level of aggression as the tabloid press in the UK.’
Nevertheless, the disappearance of Mari Luz has received nothing like the coverage dedicated to Madeleine. In part, this is because there is less mystery: her parents have not been accused of any involvement and the family wasn’t on holiday in a foreign country. This has also removed the element of culture shock that was a key part of the Spanish and Portuguese reaction to the McCanns. Many could not understand why the family were not showing more emotion in public. To them, the outpouring of grief in Huelva is more comprehensible than the apparent reserve of the McCanns. Indeed, this British reserve may have been one reason that so many people were prepared to believe that the McCanns were involved in their daughter’s disappearance.
‘It’s what the Spanish say whenever there is a strange case: the British are involved. We still think of the British as being eccentric,’ says Galán.
Mari Luz comes from a Gypsy family, which has prompted speculation that prejudice may be behind the relative lack of media attention given to the story. The McCanns appeared to be the perfect family and Madeleine’s photogenic looks soon became the international image of their personal tragedy. It shouldn’t happen, the message seemed to be, to a family like this. The Cortés family, on the other hand, comes from a tough neighborhood, where crime and drugs are a problem. Some believe that Mari Luz’s disappearance might be connected to a feud between two families, or a settling of accounts, and that these are the sorts of things that happen between Gypsies.
But Macarena Orte of Korpa news agency, which produced a TV special on Madeleine McCann, believes the explanation is simpler: ‘In the Madeleine case, the family has access to lots of money. In Huelva they are Gypsies and don’t have the money to put together a marketing campaign, so they cannot ensure they are on TV and in the papers all the time.’
Even so, Mari Luz’s parents have been learning from the McCanns’ publicity team, says Manuel Albert, a local reporter covering the story. ‘They produced badges featuring the girl’s face and the telephone number to call. There are posters everywhere and a website with a bank account where you can contribute to the cost of the search for Mari Luz,’ he says.
All of this has been on a far smaller scale, though, with the website thus far having raised €6,000 (£4,467), compared with the £1m raised by the McCanns. Each day the family has organised a press conference outside their house, which has ensured a certain level of interest, although Albert admits that, two weeks on, that has begun to wane.
Like the McCanns, the Cortés family is unwilling to do simply what they are told by the police. They want to take a more active role – hiring their own detectives, organizing press coverage and encouraging public support.
Demonstrations in support of the family have been held across Spain, but they have been low-key affairs. Indeed the father, Juan José, a footballer-turned-builder, said he was upset when he learnt that no representative from either the government or the royal family was attending the rally in Madrid. There have certainly been no high-profile visits to the US First Lady, Laura Bush, or TV adverts with footballers David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo calling for Mari Luz’s safe return. The McCanns flew to Rome for a special audience with the Pope, but the Cortés family is relying on the support of the less well-known Evangelical church.
In any case, the media attention devoted to missing children will inevitably fall away. There are 200 open cases of missing children in Spain alone. According to Rocío Ríos at Antena 3 TV station: ‘We made a number of programs about the McCanns, but Madeleine was the big news story of 2007, whereas we will all have forgotten about Huelva very soon.’ After all, she says, a little boy called Yeremi went missing in Gran Canaria just a few weeks before Madeleine, and who talks about him now?