Spain<\/a>, Nada and her parents lived in a neighbourhood that was a byword for poverty, crime, drugs and despair. But, to Nada, Santa Cruz seemed even grubbier, shabbier, noisier. Children her age sold wares on the roadside. As they waited for a second bus to Morales\u2019 home town of Cochabamba, they argued about her passport. Morales had kept hold of it. Now he claimed it was lost, and blamed her. They would have to stay longer while he got her a new one, he said. It was then that Nada realised she had been tricked. She wept loudly and banged at the bus window, crying for her mother.<\/p>\nMorales had claimed to be wealthy, but his mother\u2019s home outside Cochabamba was a dump. They spoke Quechua, an Indigenous language that Nada didn\u2019t understand. Morales and Nada moved into a ramshackle two-storey brick building on a dirt road in Cochabamba that belonged to his absent brother Fidel. A woman called Cristina and her two daughters rented the downstairs.<\/p>\n
Morales rang Nada\u2019s parents twice briefly. On one call Nada was able to tell her panicked mother that her passport had gone. On the other she blurted out an urgent request. Could she please tell her teacher that she had chickenpox? That way, the school would not strike her off its books.<\/p>\n
One night she dreamed that Morales was on top of her and, when she awoke, she found his hands on her thighs. Nada screamed and rushed to the window, hoping that someone might hear her cries for help. Nada was tall for her age, about the same height as Morales, but he was stronger and dragged her back. Today she recalls it as \u201cthe worst night of my life\u201d. Over the next few weeks, during the day Nada would skip rope with Cristina\u2019s daughters and borrow their Barbie. At night the abuse continued.<\/p>\n
Morales never let Nada out of his sight, so when his phone rang a week or two later, she overheard the voice of a Bolivian policeman, demanding that he turn himself in and hand her over to the authorities.<\/p>\nNada before she was kidnapped.<\/span> Photograph: Jordi Matas\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nUnbeknownst to her, Nada\u2019s parents had reported her missing, sparking a police hunt on two continents. Yet this call made her life worse. Morales took out his sim card and smashed the phone. Even a nine-year-old child could see what was happening. He was now a fugitive from justice, and Nada was his captive.<\/p>\n
The morning after, Morales ordered Nada to grab a few of her things and shortly after, they boarded a long-distance bus. Morales behaved as if they were Bonnie and Clyde, two fugitives who were joyfully on the run together. He also gave her a new name. She was now Evelyn and would pose as his niece. He made her cover her head with headscarves and wear long dresses.<\/p>\n
Nada told me such stories as if from a distance, like a bemused spectator. \u201cI use the logical part of my mind to repress the emotional side,\u201d she said. \u201cI can tell all this so coolly because I don\u2019t feel it.\u201d During our conversations, her tone shifted only once, when describing how she had suddenly realised, on the day Morales changed her name, that she was powerless, no longer herself. She cried a few tears, but rapidly pulled herself together, apologising.<\/p>\n
A<\/span>fter more than six hours driving north-east, the bus dropped Nada and Morales near a town called Entre R\u00edos. From there, they hitchhiked to a rural settlement known as Villa Uni\u00f3n. Morales used his knack for starting conversations with strangers, then drawing them into his confidence. Within two days, he persuaded a farmer, Santos Rodr\u00edguez, to employ them and they moved into his house, with his wife and two daughters.<\/p>\nThe next morning Nada was given a machete. She should have been starting back at school in L\u2019Hospitalet. Instead, she began working from dawn to dusk, clearing fields, weeding pineapple crops and hacking at the encroaching forest. She washed their clothes in a creek. When Morales thought she wasn\u2019t working hard enough, he beat her with a belt.<\/p>\n
Morales told Nada they were earning money to pay for her passport. She had always applied herself to schoolwork and now she did the same to farm labouring. \u201cI thought that was my only way out,\u201d she told me. Nada learned to fish in the creek, make fire by rubbing sticks together and deal with snakes. If the snakes were small, the trick was to step on their head, grab their tail and hurl them away. If they were big, she called Morales or the other farm workers, who hacked at them with machetes. Apart from strength and experience, the men had an additional advantage: boots. Morales had only bought her rubber sandals.<\/p>\n
On Saturdays, Morales would take her to a place of worship that belonged to a controversial messianic Andean religion called Aeminpu, the Evangelical Association of the Israelite Mission of the New Universal Covenant. Founded by a former Peruvian shoemaker, this fiercely conservative religion preaches a mishmash of beliefs, fixates on the Ten Commandments and sees signs of the apocalypse everywhere.<\/p>\n
One Saturday, Morales groomed himself carefully. Nada remembers watching a ceremony in which he stood on the stage and a man in a white tunic wafted incense. Words were intoned in Quechua. Men hugged him. Morales looked happy. Nada asked what had happened. \u201cNow you are my wife,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He became mean, jealous and more violent. At night, he raped her. One evening, as she washed in the river, he pushed her head under water and held it there. He repeated the action three times. Another day, she dared question his belief in God. Enraged, he struck her right foot with a machete, opening a hole down to her sole. They doused the wound in gasoline. She still has the scar.<\/p>\nPhotographs taken of Morales and Nada on entry at the airport at Santa Cruz, as featured in a police file.<\/span> Photograph: Jordi Matas\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn the evenings, Morales made her repeat out loud the Ten Commandments. In the mornings, she had to tell him her dreams, which he would interpret. In her spare time, Nada drew birds, plants and flowers in her notebook. She labelled them in three languages \u2013 Spanish, Catalan and English. It was like schoolwork, which made her feel better. She clung on to her optimism. This would all be over one day, and she could go back to her family, and to school.<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n late December 2013, four months into her ordeal, Nada and Morales returned to his brother Fidel\u2019s house in Cochabamba. As Nada listened to drunken neighbours celebrate New Year and calendars flipped to 2014, Lt Jos\u00e9 Miguel Hidalgo of Spain\u2019s Civil Guard police was anxiously awaiting permission to fly to Bolivia. At 45, Hidalgo was a lead detective in the homicide, extortion and kidnapping squad at the elite investigative Central Operative Unit (UCO) in Madrid.<\/p>\nNada\u2019s case had landed on Hidalgo\u2019s desk after her parents went to the Catalan police in the early hours of 5 September and tearfully tried to explain what had happened. In Spain, international investigations must go through a national police force such as the Civil Guard, so the two forces worked together. The Catalans tracked down Morales\u2019s brother Fidel \u2013 owner of the Cochabamba house \u2013 who also now lived in the Barcelona area. Wiretaps were placed on Nada\u2019s parents\u2019 phones, and on those of his brother.<\/p>\n
Nada\u2019s parents said they had trusted Morales. They believed that he wanted to dress her in jewels to smuggle back into Spain, but seemed confused. Even today, Nada is not sure whether Morales fooled them, or if they effectively sold her. Maybe both things are possible. They were undocumented immigrants living in the shadows of Spanish society. Her father \u2013 who drank, raged and bullied his wife \u2013 worked odd jobs for cash. Her mother cleaned houses. They squatted in a repossessed flat, with no running water and electricity stolen from the grid. Water was fetched from a public tap in the cemetery across the road. Nada used to push a shopping trolley there with her mother, to fill plastic bottles.<\/p>\n
As he investigated the case, Hidalgo\u2019s concern for Nada grew. He discovered that Morales had fled to Spain in 2005 using false documents to avoid trial in Bolivia for raping two half-sisters, aged 11 and 14. Worse still, it took four months for Hidalgo and a colleague to receive permission to travel \u2013 slowed by bureaucracy and fraught relations between a rightwing Spanish government and Bolivia\u2019s leftwing president, Evo Morales.<\/p>\n
On 28 January, Hidalgo and a colleague finally reached Bolivia and two days later, police raided Fidel\u2019s house in Cochabamba. When they arrived, they were greeted by Cristina, who informed them that Morales and Nada had left the previous day. \u201cIt was like in the movies,\u201d said Hidalgo, when we met recently at the Civil Guard headquarters in Madrid. \u201cYou get so close, and then they disappear.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Cochabamba, Nada had watched Morales buying more farm tools and realised they were about to move again. He also bought her a guitar and a music book to learn Aeminpu songs. She was scared of him, so studied diligently. Within a week, she could strum and sing \u2013 but Nada hated that guitar. When they departed, on the morning of 29 January 2014, he made her carry it. More precious things, like some earrings her mother gave her, were left behind.<\/p>\n
As Hidalgo was making his way to Fidel\u2019s house in Cochabamba, Morales and Nada were starting a journey deep into the rainforest by bus, taxi and on foot. Inside the forest, the trees grew so tall and dense that it was dark even during the day. Snakes, monkeys, giant ants and jaguars lurked. It took almost an hour to wade through chest-high water across one river. They eventually met a tall man dressed in black, wearing high boots. Nada noticed that Morales was deferential to him, and treated her well in his presence.<\/p>\n
The man led them to their final destination, a coca-cultivating village high in the steep, verdant Carrasco national park. Nada was amazed to find herself in what she saw as a dazzlingly beautiful prison. They were in a place where the land rose towards the Andes and clouds clung to the thick forest. Wooden houses were dotted around a green pasture with a crystal-clear stream. Horses grazed and trees were laden with fruit. The men here carried guns. The green coca plants stretched out in neat long rows. Apart from that, the village felt remote in both distance and time. \u201cLike something from the 12th century,\u201d Nada recalled.<\/p>\n
Now she worked full-time in the plantations, picking coca leaves on day wages. It was her job to collect their pay from the farmers they worked for, and she secretly stashed away small sums of money, with the idea of buying herself a ticket home. Aircraft and helicopters occasionally flew overhead. Often, these were transport for the cocaine trade. Police were afraid to come here, and rarely did so. There was no escape.<\/p>\n
O<\/span>n 13 February 2014, Hidalgo and his colleague flew back to Spain frustrated. They had missed Nada by 24 hours and now she had disappeared again. \u201cThe sad truth is that she had already been in the hands of an abuser for six months,\u201d he recalled. The leads his Bolivian colleagues received over the next few weeks produced no results. Meanwhile, back in La Florida, few people beyond Nada\u2019s family knew she had been kidnapped. Her story had been kept out of the media.<\/p>\nThree weeks later, on 2 March, Cristina received a call from Morales. Police were tapping her phone, and listened in. The conversation was mostly in Quechua but, suddenly, they heard a girl start speaking Spanish. It was Nada, asking about the maize she had planted in Cristina\u2019s garden. She sounded upset when Cristina said that they had already eaten it.<\/p>\n
The call at least proved Nada was alive. Cristina\u2019s phone showed that Morales had rung from a solar-powered public telephone deep in the Yungas de Totora region, an 18-hour hike from the nearest road. A police unit set out on 4 March, prepared to camp overnight and cross three large rivers, but a wooden bridge over the last river had been swept away. As they trudged back the next day, Nada turned 10 years old.<\/p>\n
Hidalgo returned to Bolivia, arriving in Cochabamba on 7 March. Bolivian colleagues warned that the only way to reach her was by helicopter, but local narcos would shoot at any aircraft passing over their fields. They would have to do a deal. Over lunch at a restaurant in Cochabamba, Hidalgo sat down to negotiate with local leader Angel Le\u00f3n, who held sway over the coca growers (some of whom grow legally, while others produce for the cocaine trade). \u201cHe took it as a matter of honour,\u201d Hidalgo said, who also bought the farmers 500 kilos of sugar as part of the deal. Le\u00f3n agreed to instruct his men to capture Morales and hold on to Nada. Police could then fly in, load them up, and immediately fly away.<\/p>\n
That night, Nada and Morales were in their cabin when they heard men wading across the river. Soon a posse of rifle-carrying farmers appeared at their door, looking menacing in the gloom. Nada hid in a corner, sick with panic. Morales looked even more scared.<\/p>\n
The men tied Morales\u2019s hands together, locked him in a wooden crate and told Nada to follow them. First, she grabbed her camera, notebook and money. A farmer took her into his family cabin, cradling his gun as he watched over her. She remained terrified.<\/p>\n
The following morning, an army unit provided two helicopters to take Hidalgo and a Bolivian police squad to rescue Nada. They took off at 11am, flying above the thick forest canopy. Twenty-five minutes later Hidalgo made out a clearing with a few houses. A Bolivian police officer pointed to a girl standing in the field with a bright blue headscarf. Hidalgo knew that for the operation to work, it had to be fast. \u201cIn and out, without cutting the engines,\u201d the pilots at the Chimore airbase had told him.<\/p>\n
On the ground, Nada did not understand what was happening. The village was in a state of tension, the men at their cabin doors. The noise of the first helicopter grew louder and louder, until it landed in the field and a policewoman in a blue uniform ran towards her. \u201cAre you Nada?\u201d Nobody had called her by that name for months. She barely had time to reply when another helicopter landed. A tall man with jumped out and asked the same question. It was Hidalgo.<\/p>\nNada, second from right, during her rescue, with Hidalgo, right.<\/span> Photograph: Jordi Matas\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nHidalgo noticed that her voice had a marked Bolivian lilt and her skin was blistered with mosquito bites. She began to cry. When they took off a few minutes later, Nada looked down, transfixed by the sight of the lush rainforest from above.<\/p>\n
T<\/span>he next 10 days went by in a flurry of activity. Nada was flown to Cochabamba, where she was given a bed at a state children\u2019s home. There were new clothes, medical checks, interviews with police and prosecutors, outings to see the sights. Nada shared the dormitory with a group of teenage girls who brushed and styled her long, dark hair daily. No attempt was made to put Nada in contact with her parents, who were now being investigated by public prosecutors for allegedly risking their daughter\u2019s life in return for a promised share of Morales\u2019 jewellery.<\/p>\nHidalgo consulted his wife, then bought Nada a colourful Monster High rucksack. She was delighted. He was impressed by the girl\u2019s resilience and intelligence. One of her main concerns was whether she would have to repeat the school year. \u201cShe was very bright, lively and grasped things really quickly,\u201d he told me. She also translated basic Quechua words for him. To her, Hidalgo seemed like the sort of father she had only seen in movies \u2013 protective and caring. During the flight back to Spain, Hidalgo noticed that she slipped his uneaten bread roll into her pocket. She was still in survival mode.<\/p>\n
On 17 March 2014, seven months after she left Spain, 10-year-old Nada Itrab stepped off a flight at Barcelona airport, dragging her new rucksack behind her and clasping Hidalgo\u2019s hand. For a few brief minutes, she was allowed to see her parents, but not alone. \u201cI\u2019d never seen my father cry before,\u201d she told me. Then they were led away. Nada was now a charge of the Catalan regional government, which had decided to remove her from her parents. There would be no return home or to the school friends she missed, since she would be placed in institutions away from L\u2019Hospitalet. Her ordeal was far from over.<\/p>\nNada a few months after she was rescued.<\/span> Photograph: Jordi Matas\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nNewspapers and television programmes ran jubilant reports of her return. They had only found out about Nada after her rescue in the jungle. Police gave a press conference, saying Nada was well but offering only vague details about what had happened. And that was it. Apart from the news, in October, that Morales had been handed a 17-year prison sentence for child-trafficking and sexual abuse and, two years later, that her parents received two-year suspended sentences for \u201cabandoning\u201d their child, the story seemed to be over.<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n late 2022, Neus Sala, a seasoned Catalan broadcast journalist, made one of her regular visits to the Civil Guard police\u2019s headquarters in Madrid. While there, she spoke to Hidalgo, whom she had known for more than three decades. After leading some of Spain\u2019s most famous murder and kidnapping investigations, Hidalgo is now a comandante<\/em> and helps manage the Civil Guard\u2019s 700-strong UCO unit from an airy office at its Madrid headquarters, where \u2013 when I visited late last year \u2013 a photo of Nada sits on a bookshelf. In his conversation with Sala, he recalled Nada\u2019s rescue as a career highlight. The girl was now 18, they realised. What had happened to her? Sala was determined to find out.<\/p>\nNada Itrab was easy to find. Local news sites had reported that a girl with that name had recently won a \u20ac500 prize for the best senior year school essay in L\u2019Hospitalet. Curiously, the reports did not mention she was the same girl kidnapped a decade earlier. Nada, who was now studying business at a local university, also advertised online as a tutor. Sala wrote to her, saying that she knew Hidalgo well and they both wanted to find out how she was. Might they meet?<\/p>\n
Nada told me her instinctive reaction was \u201cno\u201d. She did not want to hash over her past, especially with a journalist. The Bolivia affair was a distant, shameful secret, something she had deliberately erased. But the mention of Hidalgo intrigued her. A month passed before she agreed to meet.<\/p>\n
By coincidence, Sala had also grown up in L\u2019Hospitalet. In fact, they later discovered, they had both lived as children in the same apartment block, opposite the Barcelona regional metro\u2019s Can Vidalet station. They arranged to meet at the station at midday on 27 November 2022.<\/p>\n
Sala waited in the winter sun with her small black lurcher dog, Pist\u00f3n. When Nada arrived, Sala was struck by a calm and dignified stylishness: she wore a blue overcoat, was immaculately made up and had her thick black hair twisted in a braid that hung below her waist. In fact, Nada was a bundle of nerves at the thought of revisiting a deeply buried trauma. But she had learned to hide such feelings.<\/p>\n
As Nada laid out the story of her life since her return to Spain, Sala listened aghast. Catalan authorities had placed her in two different children\u2019s homes (where, initially, Hidalgo visited from time to time) in towns outside Barcelona until she was 14 and then returned Nada to her parents\u2019 squat \u2013 despite their declared guilt in the Bolivia fiasco. Four years later, Nada still lived there.<\/p>\nNeus Sala.<\/span> Photograph: Jordi Matas\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nReturning to La Florida had been a ghastly experience, though she had been desperate to leave the nuns who ran the last of the two children\u2019s homes. She lived in fear of her father\u2019s temper, going to bed early without eating just to avoid him. She kept a knife under her pillow. At the local Rubi\u00f3 i Ors high school, Nada\u2019s teachers saw her crumbling as she struggled at home and fought to get top grades. She suffered severe anxiety attacks.<\/p>\n
Hunger, scarcity, abuse, domestic chaos and anxiety drove her deep into depression. She ran away from home aged 15, sleeping on apartment block rooftops and staircases for a week. She contemplated suicide aged 16, walking around their tiny living room with a knife in her hand for an hour or so. She conjured up a small light in her mind which enabled her to let go of the knife. \u201cIt represented hope for the future,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Once more, her salvation was school. Alba Solsona, the history and geography teacher who oversaw her prize-winning essay (on Palestine \u2013 a subject they both felt passionately about) told me Nada always stood out as curious, competitive and driven. She was more serious than other adolescents and, set on getting good grades, found it hard to make friends. Teachers were told Nada came from an extremely vulnerable background but knew no other details. At home, Nada read assiduously. In class, she was a tenacious debater. \u201cAs a teacher, she forced you to be at your best,\u201d Solsona said. As they grew closer, working on the research project, Solsona occasionally suggested there was more to life than good grades. But Nada was clear. This was her route out of La Florida.<\/p>\n
A<\/span>fter meeting at Can Vidalet metro station on 27 November 2022, Nada and Sala continued their conversation over a shared plate of patatas con alioli<\/em> in the winter sunshine outside a nearby bar, Juanito\u2019s. For Nada, the meeting was revelatory. She had barely talked about Bolivia since she first returned and had come to frame it less as a kidnapping by an abusive paedophile than as a holiday that went wrong. As she and Sala talked, the truth began to come into focus. \u201cTell me my story,\u201d she begged Sala.<\/p>\nSala was wary of provoking fresh trauma. \u201cI\u2019m not a psychologist,\u201d she told me. Nevertheless, she sketched out how Nada had been kidnapped, enslaved and then rescued. Sala, who had spent her career reporting harrowing stories from around the world, was amazed by the poise and resilience of the woman in front her. \u201cShe was a survivor,\u201d Sala told me. She was also indignant that the Catalan government had never formalised Nada\u2019s residency status, even though she had lived in Spain since she was four and, as a victim of people trafficking, automatically qualified for permanent residency. Instead, as an undocumented Moroccan immigrant, Nada was not permitted to work, nor could she apply for student grants.<\/p>\n
When Sala offered to help, starting by ensuring she gained legal residency, Nada was unsure how to respond. A month after their first meeting, in late December 2022, she went to Sala\u2019s house in Barcelona, with a surprising request. She didn\u2019t just want help, Nada explained. She had heroines, whose lives she studied and books she read. Young women like Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education activist shot in the head by radical Islamists in 2012, and the Yazidi woman Nadia Murad, who had been enslaved by Isis in Iraq when she was 21. These women had used their suffering to campaign. Nada wanted to do the same. \u201cI want my story to make abused and enslaved children visible,\u201d she announced.<\/p>\n
Together, over the months that followed, they hatched a plan. Nada would learn to tell her story in public, and together they would work on a book and a documentary. With Sala\u2019s help, Nada had her residency approved. Nada also switched her university course to law and international relations, to better prepare her for a life of advocacy. Yet even as she forged ahead, Nada was haunted by terrible nightmares \u2013 of violent men chasing her through forests or threatening urban landscapes. Sala found Nada a psychologist and took her to an animal therapy centre run by a friend, where Nada spent time with horses. One day, the owner asked Nada to speak with a group of executives who had arrived for a course. For the first time, she told her story to strangers. Nada was bemused to see them weep.<\/p>\nSala with Nada. The small photo shows Nada at her seventh birthday.<\/span> Photograph: Jordi Matas\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nSoon, Sala ceased to think of Nada as the protagonist in a story that she would cover as a journalist. She thought of her, as she told me, like \u201ca second daughter\u201d. The relationship filled an emotional need for Sala, now 56, after three decades of reporting on victims of crime and catastrophe. It has become an all-consuming, emotionally exhausting and, so far, financially draining project. \u201cI\u2019ve told a lot of stories of hardship and seen young girls die,\u201d Sala told me. \u201cIf I can help just one of them make it, then it will be worth the effort.\u201d<\/p>\n
T<\/span>hrough all this, Nada continued living with her family in La Florida, even though her father\u2019s frightening rages and the evictions from their squatted apartments continued. Though Sala was convinced that her family were, in fact, the greatest danger to Nada\u2019s future, Nada wanted to support her mother, and be present for her two younger brothers.<\/p>\nThere was another reason for not leaving home. Nada had discovered religion while at school. Aged 16, she had watched TikTok videos of people reciting the Qur\u2019an, which had soothed her anxieties. Her parents were not religious, but she began reading the Qur\u2019an and hadiths, the sayings and deeds of Muhammad, finding lessons about forgiveness, love and peace. The trick, she said, was \u201cto answer evil with goodness\u201d. In her mind, that meant pardoning her parents and even Morales. Strangely, her encounter with him had not put her off religion. \u201cMy first contact with God was when I asked how someone like him could claim to believe in God, and that was the day he stabbed me through the foot,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Early in 2024, Sala found a women\u2019s refuge that offered a small studio flat in a town outside Barcelona. But Nada worried that this contravened an Islamic duty to her family. One day that summer, after visiting a contemporary art museum in Barcelona, she wandered into the Santa Maria del Mar basilica, a soaring 14th-century gothic building. A Roman Catholic priest was standing near the altar, inviting people to confess. She decided to ask for his help. Perhaps he could advise her?<\/p>\n
In the confession box, once more, she discovered the power of her story. As she spoke, the priest wept in great, gulping sobs. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anyone cry like that,\u201d she said. \u201cHe was really suffering.\u201d When the priest recovered, he advised Nada to move out. \u201cYou need to escape, and start a new life.\u201d When police turned up at the family\u2019s squat to evict them in November 2024, she finally accepted the offer of the studio. When Nada moved in, she felt joyful and free. It was the first time she had experienced domestic peace \u2013 and only she had the key.<\/p>\n
There was another pull on her attention. Her mother had found her a job as the receptionist in a block of self-catering apartments popular with wealthy eastern European and Russian mafia members. The men loved her; one took her shopping, and to exclusive restaurants. Sala and Nada argued about whether she should ever accept anything from them. Eventually, Nada tired of these men\u2019s attention. \u201cWhen they see you are poor, they think they have power,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n
If Nada had felt tempted by luxury, it wasn\u2019t just because that was the opposite of poverty, but also because the plan with Sala seemed to be stalling. Nobody wanted their documentary \u2013 or not with the campaigning seriousness they insisted it should have. Publishers shrugged at their book proposal. \u201cIf she had been white and not Moroccan, things would have been different,\u201d said Sala.<\/p>\n
By now, Nada was heavily invested in the project. With Sala\u2019s encouragement, she switched to law and international relations. This fitted her new aims and was more fulfilling, but was riskier in terms of future employment. What if the plan didn\u2019t work? With no family safety net, failure could still mean a squat in La Florida.<\/p>\n
Since Sala\u2019s old media contacts didn\u2019t seem interested, Nada went directly to Uri Sabat, one of Spain\u2019s best-known YouTubers. When Sala found out, she was furious that Nada had blown the exclusivity of her personal story, fearing that it had hurt the chances of landing the documentary or publishing deal that was meant to set her up to finish her studies and give her independence. They did not speak for a month.<\/p>\n
Once they had patched up their differences, Sala steered Nada on to popular mainstream morning television talkshows. On the first of these appearances, on Antena 3 in early September 2025, Nada told her story, explaining that she forgave Morales (who had by now died in jail). \u201cWhen you forgive, you don\u2019t do it because the other person deserves it,\u201d she explained. \u201cI do this because my heart deserves to live free of rancour.\u201d The studio audience applauded enthusiastically.<\/p>\n
Since they were in Madrid, Sala took Nada to see Hidalgo. The entire UCO headquarters seemed thrilled by her visit and Nada discovered that her case was legendary. Several artefacts recovered with her \u2013 a pocket Qur\u2019an and notebook kept by Morales \u2013 had long been displayed in a glass cabinet. \u201cIt was a special case from the very start,\u201d Hidalgo told me. \u201cAny other child would have died. But she is a chameleon. She can adapt to anything.\u201d Seeing her again was an emotional high. \u201cIt was the same Nada \u2013 so very bright and quick,\u201d he said. Nada had a lump in her throat, as she tried not to cry. \u201cI could see how much my life had meant to them,\u201d she said. Hidalgo invited her to come back and help him train agents dealing with trafficking victims.<\/p>\n
On 14 September 2025, Barcelona\u2019s La Vanguardia newspaper ran a story about their reunion and told of Nada\u2019s double tragedy: first the kidnapping, then her abandonment by the Catalan authorities. The article brought their project back to life. Suddenly, publishers and television producers wanted to talk.<\/p>\n
A<\/span> few days later, I began travelling regularly to Barcelona from my home in Madrid to meet Nada. I was curious about her backstory, her ambition and her relationship with Sala. We spoke for hours, sitting across the small dinner table at Sala\u2019s house \u2013 a two-storey home tucked down a private alley close to the Parque G\u00fcell with its outlandish Gaud\u00ed decorations. Conversations were often three-way affairs, with Sala present. Nada felt at home here, nipping into the kitchen to make herself hot chocolate. Their bond had been strengthened by the up-and-down nature of their project, including disagreements. Sala was straight-talking and loving, fretting about Nada\u2019s eating or chastising her for overdressing for television appearances. \u201cYou can\u2019t turn up looking like Angelina Jolie!\u201d Nada shrugged. She always arrived immaculately dressed and made up. Her calm and candid eloquence hid a fidgety energy. To begin with, she toyed with anything on the table, including my tape recorder.<\/p>\nThese conversations became like watching a box being slowly opened. Nada was excavating her own past, reading police and court documents for more details about what happened to her, preparing to sue the Catalan government for \u20ac300,000 for negligence (from an intern placement at a law firm in Barcelona) and digging up memories with the help of psychologists. She was filling huge gaps in her life, while trying to understand them. She struggled, especially, to work out her parents \u2013 whom she did not want to discuss.<\/p>\nNada on a visit to La Florida.<\/span> Photograph: Jordi Matas\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn some ways, things were happening too quickly. During this time, she appeared on more TV shows, her polished presence and moderate tone contrasting with the horrors of her story. The American Spanish-language channel Univision broadcast a report on her. By now, she was receiving three emails a week from abused girls and young women around the world, including some from the Aeminpu cult. Nada wrote back, or had video chats with them, though she could do little more than listen and express sympathy. At the same time, she was studying for her law degree, writing her book with Sala, interning at the law firm and preparing her claim against the Catalan government. By December, she was exhausted and clumps of hair began falling out. She was determined to tough it out, but her body was betraying her.<\/p>\n
O<\/span>n a sunny winter morning, we drove in Sala\u2019s utilitarian grey Toyota Proace van, with her dog Pist\u00f3n, to La Florida and walked around the cemetery where Nada used to fill water bottles. For Sala, whose father is buried here, this was a first \u2013 Nada always asked to stay away from her parents\u2019 barrio<\/em> when they met. Even now, Nada fretted about bumping into her father, since her parents were angry about her television appearances. (By January, when she had used the book advance to buy her family furniture, their attitude had softened. \u201cThey now realise that I will inevitably tell my story, and have changed,\u201d she said.)<\/p>\nWe visited the rundown block where Morales had been their neighbour and wandered past the apartment with broken windows where her family now squats. As we walked, Nada declared that La Florida would be one of her causes, too. \u201cI\u2019m proud of this place,\u201d she said. She recalled the delinquency, drugs and fights (one year, youths torched the Christmas tree in the main plaza), but also remembers it as a neighbourly place, full of life.<\/p>\nAs we drove away from La Florida, Nada told me her dream was to speak to the UN about the need to fight child trafficking. This determination has a cost. The last time we met, at the end of January, Nada was going through a punishing, intensive round of therapy to overcome her dissociation from what has happened to her. Some of the pain locked away more than a decade ago was now beginning to show. It was like removing a mask, she said, and very scary. \u201cI consider myself strong,\u201d she told me. \u201cSo, if I\u2019m suffering, imagine what it\u2019s like for someone who doesn\u2019t have the things I now have.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nada\u2019s way of coping involves throwing herself harder into her fight. In a recent WhatsApp message, she told me that she had a letter ready for the well-known human rights barrister Amal Clooney, who has represented Nadia Murad (a Nobel peace prize winner, like Nada\u2019s other heroine, Malala Yousafzai). \u201cI want to ask her advice,\u201d Nada said. She was going to send it once this article was published. Knowing Nada, it will be on its way tomorrow.<\/p>\n