The Alerta Mafe system, a collaboration between the Paraguayan government and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has recorded its first successful location with the case of a six-year-old girl. The incident, which was actually a family miscommunication, served as the initial test for the new social media notification tool for missing minors.
According to officer Ramón Vera, head of the National Registry of Missing Persons (Renaped), the child's grandparents, worried about not having news of their granddaughter, requested a search and location order from the Court of Caaguazú. After the alert was activated, Renaped began receiving messages from people who recognized the girl or reported having seen her.
The Vice Minister of the Ministry of the Child and Adolescence (MINNA), Eduardo Escobar Said, explained that the girl's mother traveled to Spain and left her daughter in the care of friends to handle a notarial procedure, without informing the grandparents. The people who were with the child, upon seeing the notification on social media, became frightened and contacted the police, allowing the grandparents to be reunited with their granddaughter. Subsequently, the Juvenile Court of Villa Hayes ruled that the girl should remain with the family designated by the mother.
The Minister of the Child and Adolescence, Walter Gutiérrez, stated that since its activation on July 13, the system has achieved a 100% location rate, although he did not disclose the total number of alerts issued during that period. He emphasized that it is no longer necessary to wait 24 or 48 hours to file a missing person report, and that it is crucial to act within the first few hours.
Gutiérrez highlighted that Paraguay is one of 38 countries in the world to have this system, the result of six months of work to make Alerta Mafe visible. The Mafe Law created a National Commission for the Search of Missing Persons, made up of nine institutions, including the Ministry of the Child and Adolescence (MINNA), as well as a national registry and the alert system itself.