The Girls and the Wild | Translation

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The following English translation was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence

[Daniel Alarcón]: Hello, ambulantes.

Before we begin, I want to ask you to help us with something that I know you’re going to like. It’s for a special episode. We know there are many listeners who are curious about Radio Ambulante’s editorial process or the history of the organization… Even about the stories we’ve already done. These are questions that reach us through our contact channels or that people ask us when we attend a conference or event.

So, we came up with the idea of doing an Ask Me Anything, ask me whatever you want. An episode where we answer any doubt or curiosity you have about Radio Ambulante. For that, we want to ask you that if you have any question you’ve always wanted to ask us, send it to us in the form of a voice note to a WhatsApp we have opened. You can find the link and the number (+1 555 917 9841) in the episode notes.

Please only send audio notes, hopefully not too long either. And say your name and where you’re listening from before the question.

Thank you very much, we already want to hear you.

Here’s the episode.

[Daniel Alarcón]: A warning before we begin: this episode contains scenes of violence. Listener discretion is advised.

This is Radio Ambulante, I’m Daniel Alarcón.

In December 2019, the twins Ana and Lichi Oviedo Villalba were 13 years old and excited, because their vacation plans were different from the usual. Instead of spending the summer visiting their mother in Asunción, Paraguay, as they did every year, they would travel to a remote area in the north of that country to meet some relatives.

At that time, Ana and Lichi lived on a farm in a small town in northeastern Argentina, right on the border with Paraguay. There were many of them: three of their maternal aunts and thirteen cousins. Most of those living in the house were women, almost all Paraguayan, with deep roots in their Guaraní culture. It was a kind of clan, quite isolated from the rest of the community.

This is Ana, who is 20 years old today.

[Ana]: We didn’t even interact with the neighbors. Literally, if someone came to the house who wasn’t family, we referred to that person as a stranger.

[Daniel A.]: The distrust was a security measure taken by their aunts, because the twins’ family was no ordinary family. Their parents were in prison for being founding members of the guerrilla group Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo, known as the EPP. It is a far-left organization that operates in northern Paraguay and, since the early 2000s, has been behind numerous kidnappings, extortion schemes, and violent attacks. It once had up to 35 members. A small but violent handful of armed men and women that the State classifies as a terrorist organization. The EPP has been linked to more than 80 murders—among military personnel, police officers, and civilians—and around twenty kidnappings.

And that is why, from a very young age, Ana and Lichi spent every summer in prison, alongside their mother.

[Ana]: We actually became very good friends there with the daughters of the other inmates. It was easier to connect with them than with the children we knew outside.

[Daniel A.]: Prison had always been a familiar environment for them because they had been born there. Carmen Villalba, their mother, had been detained for three years on a kidnapping charge when she became pregnant with the twins during one of the conjugal visits by her husband.

And even though Ana and Lichi were physically identical and almost no one could tell them apart, Lichi had a more dominant personality. She was always the first at everything. Even at birth, by two minutes. Ana always followed her…

[Ana]: My mother says that I would watch Lichi crawl, and I wanted to crawl too, but I couldn’t. So I would drag myself along behind her.

[Daniel A.]: The twins lived with their mother in prison for their first months of life. But when they turned one, Carmen decided it was best to send her daughters out of the facility. Ana and Lichi spent their childhood moving from house to house, between Paraguay and Argentina. Sometimes with the maternal family, other times with the paternal side. Being together was the only constant: one for the other.

They learned that looking out for each other was the best way to cope with the complicated path their parents had chosen.

[Daniel A.]: But let’s go back to the trip. That December 2019, when school ended, Ana and Lichi were offered that visit to the north of Paraguay.

The idea came from their younger cousins, Lilian and María, daughters of two of the twins’ aunts. Both were 11 years old and wanted to travel to where their fathers were, men they had never met. They were also EPP guerrillas and lived in a camp.

EPP members don’t have a fixed location: they move, jumping from one camp to another to avoid detection. They survive by hiding in the contrasting landscape of that part of Paraguay: plains, dense jungles, hills, rivers, and streams.

The territory is fragmented between large ranches and indigenous and farming communities that live on the margins.

This is Myriam Villalba, Lilian’s mother and aunt and guardian of the twins.

[Myriam Villalba]: They are very neglected, very abandoned departments, with a lot of poverty, and where the one with money is the one who gives the orders, who tramples over others, and who does whatever he wants.

[Daniel A.]: The State is present in that area with an elite unit of military and police who patrol the region and are always looking to eliminate what remains of the EPP.

But despite being a conflict zone, that is exactly where Myriam and the other aunts were going to send the girls.

[Myriam V.]: We were kind of dreaming of a camp, I don’t know what, but the truth is they went without us thinking about the consequences that it could have.

[Daniel A.]: A trip conceived, according to Myriam, as “a summer camp.” Although it is hard to imagine how that visit could fit that description.

The Argentinian journalist Cecilia Diwan, along with our producer Aneris Casassus, investigated this story. I’ll leave you with Cecilia…

[Cecilia Diwan]: The trip was decided, so the preparations began. To Ana, it felt like quite an adventure.

[Ana]: Lilian and María were very excited and we wanted to go along with them. The four of us were very close friends. The enthusiasm came more from that, from accompanying them to meet their fathers.

[Cecilia D.]: Even though Ana sometimes wondered whether the decisions her family had made were the right ones, her aunt Myriam told her that her family did what they did because they cared about those most in need.

[Ana]: I grew up listening to Aunt Miriam telling me that—I mean, we have no reason to renounce our people. She always says that. I grew up hearing that and it greatly influenced my thinking. And no, I never, ever renounced them.

[Cecilia D.]: Myriam still remembers what she used to tell Ana about her mother, Carmen…

[Myriam V.]: Her dream was that children would truly no longer go hungry, and that was what drove her to join a guerrilla movement.

[Ana]: She told me that was the reason she was in prison, that she was fighting for the people living on the streets. Whether the path she chose was right or not, I don’t know, but it was the path she chose.

[Cecilia D.]: For Ana, not asking questions—much less judging her family—gradually became a kind of unspoken rule. She decided not to talk about them with anyone outside the family. She preferred to keep a low profile.

Tania, one of Ana’s older cousins, also decided to join the trip to visit her relatives. She was 18 years old at the time. This is Tania.

[Tania]: We always wanted to go to Paraguay to see our family members, to meet them. I had only heard about them. I didn’t know them. But I did love them very much.

[Cecilia D.]: But despite the excitement, Ana had one concern: school.

[Ana]: My concern at all times was getting back for school.

[Ana]: And they told me, yes, yes, let’s go. The planned timeframe was a maximum of the summer vacation.

[Cecilia D.]: So on December 22, 2019, the girls set off from Argentina toward northern Paraguay. There were six in the group. There are a lot of names and ages, yes. But it is important to keep track of them for this story. They were: Ana, whom we have already heard of, and her twin sister Lichi, both 13 years old. María and Lilian, age 11; and Tania, the older cousin, age 18. The adult in charge was Laura, María’s mother.

I want you to understand just how isolated the place was where the girls were going to spend their vacation. To get there, they traveled nearly 800 kilometers by bus. And when they got off the bus, a pickup truck was waiting for them, which—after passing through several checkpoints—left them in the middle of the countryside. It was already nighttime, and the girls walked straight ahead, in the dark, toward a tree. There, their family members were waiting for them in silence, hidden among the vegetation.

[Ana]: I remember they spoke very softly, because out there everyone speaks softly, and then they came close, they hugged me, and I didn’t know who was hugging me because I couldn’t see anything.

[Cecilia D.]: They were her maternal uncles and aunts. The group also included the parents of the younger cousins, Lilian and María. Tania, the older cousin, says it was an incredibly emotional moment—they were finally all together.

[Tania]: Seeing them was a very beautiful moment. It was like a long-held dream that had finally come true.

[Cecilia D.]: They began to walk for a long while, until they reached a stream. It was bitterly cold and the girls were exhausted. So they improvised a camp with tarps and hammocks, and rested for a while. This is Ana.

[Ana]: When I woke up to the morning light, I could finally see people’s faces.

[Cecilia D.]: The days passed in conversation and hikes through ever-changing landscapes. They crossed areas that had been deforested, where thin new vegetation was beginning to sprout. But as they advanced, the scenery closed in around them in forests of ancient trees. They crossed the territory at an exhausting pace for the girls.

[Ana]: That is something they apologized for a lot. Because we had come to see them. But we had to keep walking, we had to keep moving from place to place, precisely because it was dangerous to stay in one spot for too long. That’s what they explained to us.

[Cecilia D.]: Before leaving, the girls had been told that their days with the EPP would be very different from what they were used to.

[Ana]: I knew it wasn’t going to be a normal dynamic, but I hadn’t imagined it to be like this. There’s a big difference between having an idea of something and actually living it. It was quite different out there…

[Cecilia D.]: The guerrillas taught them how to regulate their breathing to make the treks less exhausting. They also showed them how to cut branches that blocked their path. These were survival lessons to pass through the jungle unnoticed. But they were never told what to do in a dangerous situation.

[Ana]: I mean, we knew that the situation could arise, but they always made it clear that they would be there with us if anything happened. But formally, I never really knew exactly what I was supposed to do if we came across the Paraguayan military.

[Cecilia D.]: Every time they changed location, they had to leave the site as if no one had ever been there. They also had to camouflage themselves with nature. Ana told us they always wore civilian clothes and never wore military uniforms.

Each person carried their own luggage and food, and utensils were distributed among everyone.

The girls, little by little, adapted to the day-to-day life of the guerrilla group. Here is Tania again:

[Tania]: We adapted to that way of life, which meant, for example, finding water from rivers or streams and obtaining food. We spent a lot of time reading, studying, sewing, and doing crafts.

[Cecilia D.]: Sometimes they would see military helicopters passing in the distance. But for Ana, hiding from the police was something natural. Being daughters of the EPP’s founders, Ana and her twin Lichi had grown up under the surveillance of the security forces.

[Ana]: And it was precisely because I had lived my whole life being pursued that I wasn’t afraid to be out there. I associated it with the state I had always been in.

[Cecilia D.]: After more than two months moving around the jungle, March arrived and the girls began to organize their return to Argentina as planned. It was time to get back to school. But something unexpected happened: the pandemic hit. They found out through the radio, the only means of communication they had in the jungle.

[Ana]: I didn’t know how long this situation was going to last. I felt very anxious. I remember I even cried.

[Cecilia D.]: Aunt Myriam, whom we heard a moment ago, searched from Argentina for ways to bring them back.

[Myriam V.]: In fact I looked, I looked hard for a way to contact them. What’s more, I wanted to cross over myself, but there were clandestine crossing points along the river. However, the other side was completely militarized, so there was no way.

[Cecilia D.]: Time kept passing without the girls being able to return home to Argentina. By mid-year, the routine was always the same: walking, staying in camps for a few weeks, then moving again. They covered hundreds of kilometers.

On the morning of September 2, 2020, Ana woke up very early and made breakfast. She was uneasy—the atmosphere within the group had grown tense over the past few days.

[Ana]: Two or three days before, we had gone to collect firewood and we saw a helicopter.

[Cecilia D.]: They had already sensed the presence of the military during those nine months in the jungle. But it had never been such a close threat. Tania felt that something was wrong.

[Tania]: There was a lot of noise from helicopters above us. I felt that it was going to be a very strange day.

[Cecilia D.]: With helicopters circling, the area was no longer safe for them, so they decided to move.

They split into two groups: some stayed behind to erase the traces of their stay, while others began climbing the hillside. Among those who left the camp were the twin Lichi, Aunt Laura, María—one of the younger cousins—and a few EPP members. Ana, Tania, and Lilian stayed behind to clean up with their relatives.

At one point, their little cousin Lilian walked a few meters away to look for branches to use as a broom.

[Ana]: When suddenly that noise started.

[Cecilia D.]: Gunshots. Stunned and disoriented, Tania and Ana hid behind a tree to dodge the crossfire.

[Tania]: They fired at us, and what we did hear them say was “regalo,” “regalo”—they were shouting it when they hit Lilian.

[Cecilia D.]: A shot hit Lilian, who was 11 years old.

[Ana]: And then I hear her scream. It wasn’t a word—it was like a scream of fear, just a scream—and then they, I don’t remember exactly how to pronounce the word in Guaraní, but in Spanish it means something like “surround.”

[Cecilia D.]: Hidden, Ana and Tania listened closely to the soldiers’ conversations.

According to Tania, the shot left her cousin immobilized, and then about six soldiers surrounded her and took her with them.

[Tania]: They wounded her, she was screaming, and they were taking her away.

[Cecilia D.]: I asked her if she had been able to see where they had shot her cousin, but she said no…

[Tania]: I could only see that her back was red.

[Cecilia D.]: From where they were, Ana saw one of her uncles take the rifle he always carried over his shoulder and, with a gesture, ordered Tania and her to run. Ana told me that her uncle then fired at the soldiers in an attempt to recover Lilian. But it was too late, the soldiers had already taken her.

As they escaped, Ana was overwhelmed by the gunfire and for a moment became disoriented.

[Ana]: My ears were ringing, and they started to hurt, and my vision was blurring.

[Cecilia D.]: They reached a hill and began to climb it. It was steep and difficult to scale. Only then, in that moment, did Ana stop to process everything that was happening.

[Ana]: And the first thing I thought about was my mother. At that moment I said two things to myself: that I could die at any moment, and that if I died, I would never see my mother again.

[Cecilia D.]: A 13-year-old girl thinking she will never see her mother again. But reality came crashing down on her. She thought about her twin, Lichi, who—as we mentioned—had left the camp just minutes before the shooting began.

[Ana]: I was worried about Lichi, because I hadn’t managed to see her. I didn’t know what had happened to her.

[Cecilia D.]: After a long time moving through the jungle vegetation, hiding along the way, Ana and Tania finally found their relatives—pale-faced. Ana looked around anxiously, searching for Lichi and the others who were missing: her cousin María and her Aunt Laura. But they weren’t with them, and she panicked.

[Ana]: I was trembling all over and I started to lose my vision. It was like fear had taken hold of me.

[Cecilia D.]: But she knew that, as so many other times, the best thing was to endure.

[Ana]: I didn’t ask anything. Nothing. Because of how I grew up. I learned not to ask questions. Not to ask when I’m not supposed to ask.

[Cecilia D.]: In silence, they walked without direction, crossing paths with boot prints like those worn by the military. After several hours, they found a marijuana growers’ camp that appeared to have been recently abandoned. They had probably fled when they heard the gunshots. There were pots, food, hammocks, and a radio. They took what they could and kept walking with the sound of helicopters in the background. At around 6 in the evening of that same September 2nd, they stopped.

[Ana]: We turned on the radio and every channel was celebrating.

[Cecilia D.]: Celebrating the success of the army’s operation against the EPP… It was then that they learned more details about what had happened that morning. The then-president of Paraguay, Mario Abdo Benítez, came on the radio saying this…

[Mario Abdo]: We were able to locate a camp where we believe much of the group known as the Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo was based. We have a great deal of evidence. There are two confirmed casualties. This morning, confirmed.

[Cecilia D.]: Ana and Tania listened closely. The president clarified that there had been two confrontations in which two women had died, but he did not give their names.

Ana began processing the information she had just heard:

[Ana]: What we could be sure of was that one of those casualties was Lilian. We didn’t know who the other one was, and they said two women.

[Ana]: And so I narrowed down the options. Either María, or Aunt Laura, or Lichi. I remember sitting down against a tree and thinking: well, Lilian is gone. Who was the other one? Which, which, which one will be worse to lose?

[Daniel A.]: But there wasn’t much time for questions—they had to keep running. They could feel the security forces close on their heels.

A break and we’ll be right back.

[Daniel A.]: We’re back. After the confrontation in which they lost Lilian, the group was adrift. Everyone was devastated after hearing on the radio that the President of Paraguay had said there were “two women killed from the EPP.” Even so, they had to keep moving. 

[Cecilia D.]: On September 5th, three days after the confrontation with the military, Ana, Tania, and the rest of the group turned on the radio again and heard that those who had died were not adult guerrilla fighters but minors. That was when the names were given: Lilian Villalba and María Villalba, Ana’s cousins. They were only 11 years old.

Everyone broke down.

[Ana]: Everyone was crying, crying, Tania was crying and my aunt was crying. And they hugged me and I cried too. And the one I couldn’t see was my uncle. And then I saw him. He, I mean, he was always like that. He was always strong. And I remember that he sat down behind a tree. He sat down. He didn’t smoke, but there he sat down to smoke. He was crying.

[Cecilia D.]: Ana needed to step away to process the news: her younger cousins Lilian and María were dead, and she still had no idea what had happened to her twin, Lichi. She couldn’t believe all of this was actually happening.

At nightfall, the group continued moving in silence. The anguish over the girls’ deaths was mixed with fear of what was to come.

[Cecilia D.]: Four days later, while searching for water at a stream, they came across a member of the EPP. Behind him appeared the rest of the group. Ana and Tania saw that they were carrying someone on an improvised stretcher made of branches and a tarp. It was Lichi.

[Ana]: It brought me such relief. She was very pale—I remember that—her lips were the same color as her face, and she looked at me and smiled. I remember that.

[Tania]: She had a wound that had torn through a lot of muscle and skin. She was pale, with dark circles under her eyes. She couldn’t walk.

[Cecilia D.]: When the two groups reunited, everyone began greeting each other. Ana went over to Lichi.

[Ana]: Between the two of us, we weren’t very sentimental, so they set up a hammock for her and I went over and sat near her, and there was just silence.

[Cecilia D.]: There were no hugs between them, they just looked at each other and smiled.

Shortly afterward, Aunt Laura joined them. Ana noticed her grief over the death of her daughter, María, but didn’t dare bring up the subject. As always, she asked nothing and commented on nothing. They simply greeted each other and began talking about Lichi’s wound. Laura showed Ana how to tend to it and asked her to help.

During dinner, Ana found a moment alone with her sister. It was then that Lichi told her what she had experienced. She said that when the shooting started, she was in a higher part of the jungle with her cousin María, Aunt Laura, and other EPP members. Everyone ran, but they were quickly intercepted by soldiers positioned at the top of the hill, who began firing at them. A bullet hit María in the leg, leaving her completely immobilized.

[Ana]: They were aiming at us, she told me.

[Cecilia D.]: Lichi started to run but didn’t get far. A bullet pierced her leg and she fell to the ground…

[Ana]: Lichi fell much further ahead than María. She managed to run. María didn’t.

[Cecilia D.]: Amid the gunfire, a member of the EPP managed to reach Lichi, picked her up, put her on his shoulders, and carried her out.

[Ana]: And he looked back and saw María. María was also shot, just like Lichi was shot in the leg. And Lichi saw her trying to move. She told me she was crying.

[Cecilia D.]: Lichi told Ana that she saw the soldiers capture her cousin María alive.

The official version, however, is very different…

[Nimio Cardozo]: I am Chief Superintendent Nimio Abel Cardozo Espínola.

[Cecilia D.]: Cardozo is the head of the Anti-Kidnapping Unit of the Police and arrived at the site shortly after the confrontation ended. According to him, on that September 2nd, the military were attacked by guerrillas while patrolling the area. They had intelligence suggesting that EPP leaders were there.

[Nimio C.]: While conducting their combat reconnaissance, they were met with gunfire by the group in the camp, because they had been detected.

[Cecilia D.]: In other words, according to this version, the soldiers spotted armed individuals in the distance and issued a warning. But the guerrillas opened fire on them.

I also spoke with Colonel Carlos Casco, head of Military Intelligence and the one who had marked the coordinates of the camp. Casco told me that only after the situation had calmed down did the soldiers approach the area and confirm that two female guerrillas had been killed. This is Casco…

[Carlos C.]: They were in uniform. They were armed. They had a belt around their waist, they had pistols.

[Cecilia D.]: Casco’s and Cardozo’s version is that Lilian and María were combatants. And they maintain that they only found out they were minors when forensic experts examined the bodies.

[Nimio C.]: At no point did we know there were minors present.

[Cecilia D.]: The State admitted that the operation was not filmed, in violation of its own regulations. Without footage showing how they were dressed or whether they were armed, it is impossible to know what really happened.

We’ll come back to these conflicting accounts… But for now, let’s return to the jungle…

The day after the reunion, the two groups resumed their march together. They maintained their usual routine: moving through the jungle vegetation to avoid detection. But for safety, they decided to travel only at night. Lichi was still being carried on the stretcher because her wound had barely begun to heal.

In early October—a month after the confrontation and ten months into the trip—they arrived at a camp where they stayed for four weeks. The atmosphere was different from the beginning. The grief over Lilian’s and María’s deaths had changed everything, and the fear of being detected was constant.

[Ana]: I remember that Lichi cried a lot, precisely because it was hurting her. The only things she could do were eat more than the rest of us and take painkillers—ibuprofen-type things. She literally had a hole in her leg and there wasn’t much we could do about it.

[Cecilia D.]: When she cried, her uncle would get upset and tell her she had to endure it.

[Ana]: The context and the situation don’t allow for crying, he would say. Everything was about enduring. You had to endure the backpack, you had to endure the thirst, you had to endure the heat, you had to endure the walking.

[Cecilia D.]: And there was also the pain to endure.

The adults, the guerrillas, and the girls—even the 13-year-olds with a hole in their leg.

The girls, as they always had, complied without questioning, without asking. They tried to endure however they could.

In time, Lichi managed to walk again with the help of improvised crutches made from branches. And since she was recovering, her relatives decided it was time for the girls to return to Argentina. The group split up: Ana, Lichi, Tania, and Aunt Laura said goodbye to their EPP relatives. Eleven months earlier, six had arrived in northern Paraguay; now only four would be returning to Argentina.

They were assigned around three guerrilla escorts to accompany and protect them. The journey was long and challenging, but the group was confident they could hide in the hills.

[Ana]: Near there is an indigenous community. And my understanding was that we were going to try to get out precisely through that community. They told us that the military would rarely go in there because the terrain was very rugged.

[Cecilia D.]: They walked slowly and carefully. Ana helped Lichi with her crutches and carried both of their backpacks.

They walked like that for almost three weeks toward the indigenous community, hoping the residents would help them leave the jungle. The landscape began to change and, since they no longer passed through guerrilla camps, they had neither water nor food… They had to learn to hunt.

[Ana]: I would hunt small birds and that’s what Lichi ate. It helped her recovery. And further along—I remember once I caught a monkey, and everything we caught, we ate. But almost everything went to Lichi.

[Cecilia D.]: And so the days went by… Until on the night of November 20th, they saw a drone flying over the area.

[Ana]: And that’s when I got worried. Because something felt off. I had been through a situation like that before, and something felt wrong.

[Cecilia D.]: As they moved forward, they noticed another drone watching them. They immediately heard men shouting and, even though they couldn’t make out exactly what was being said, they quickened their pace. But it was difficult because Lichi was on crutches. Suddenly, the hillside lit up. This is Tania again…

[Tania]: To me, it looked like a Christmas tree. It was like this green thing covered in little lights. And they started shooting, and they fired and fired and fired.

[Cecilia D.]: Those little lights were, in fact, dozens of drones. The military uses them to detect body heat and direct their fire. In addition, the soldiers had also fired flares to illuminate the hillside.

Desperate, Ana, Tania, Lichi, and Laura decided to leave their belongings behind and escape together by rolling down the hillside. The EPP men who had been guarding them stayed behind to fight the soldiers. The girls escaped through a narrow section of the jungle, with a stream running alongside it. Ana remembers that Lichi grabbed her by the shoulder and said…

[Ana]: If they come, leave me behind, she told me.

[Cecilia D.]: Ana tried to calm her down. There was no way they were going to leave her. They decided to continue along the stream, which was quite deep, and followed the current. That way Lichi could move faster. Besides, it was a muddy area and they didn’t want to leave tracks. Tania was terrified…

[Tania]: At that moment I felt like we could be killed at any second. Your body starts sweating from fear. Your pulse is racing. I could feel the blood coursing through my body. It was a very strange experience.

[Cecilia D.]: Trying to stay hidden, they waded through waist-deep water. Until they reached a rocky section of the stream and found a large hollow in a boulder. They decided to stay there, in silence. They knew that any sound they made could give them away. They were close…

[Tania]: We could hear the sounds of the jungle, the sound of the helicopters. There were also moments during the day when they kept shooting. At one point we could hear them talking, we could even smell their cigarette smoke.

[Cecilia D.]: They waited for the EPP members who had been guarding them, but they never appeared. They would later learn that those men had died during the confrontation with the military.

The four of them—cousins Ana, Lichi, Tania, and aunt Laura—remained hidden, motionless, in the hollow of the rock, barely speaking a word. Lichi broke the silence only for a moment, in a whisper.

[Ana]: She told me that if we made it out of there alive, she promised she would love me more. We didn’t do things like hugging or kissing. But I remember she hugged me. And she kissed my forehead. And that’s how we fell asleep. The situation was already bad, but it could clearly get worse.

[Cecilia D.]: When they woke up it was daytime and they could still hear noise and voices. They stayed hidden there for about two days, without eating or drinking anything. And when things calmed down, they left the spot.

They made Lichi a walking stick out of branches and continued walking, lost, for several weeks. It was very difficult to find food because they were in a deforested area. All four were extremely weak, barely able to stay on their feet. But knowing they were probably close to the indigenous community they had been searching for, they decided that Ana and Tania would go ahead to ask for help. Lichi stayed behind with Aunt Laura.

[Ana]: She was sitting there, and I waved goodbye to her. I remember that Tania and I left, and a little while later it started to rain.

[Cecilia D.]: Hours passed and, having found no one, they decided to return to Laura and Lichi. They had left trail markers to find their way back easily, but they quickly realized the rain had erased them completely.

[Ana]: Tania and I stopped and said: which way do we go? And I said to myself at that moment: if I make the wrong choice here, I will regret it for the rest of my life. I don’t even know why I said that. But I told Tania: you tell me which way we should go. And Tania said: this way.

[Cecilia D.]: And they set off in that direction.

[Daniel A.]: A break and we’ll be right back.

[Daniel]: We’re back… Cecilia Diwan continues the story.

[Cecilia D.]: Ana and Tania were completely disoriented in the middle of the jungle. They didn’t know which direction to walk, but they kept moving forward. And so the hours and days went by. They searched for Laura and Lichi for weeks. They were very weak and still couldn’t find food. One night, while sleeping, Tania heard Ana calling out Lichi’s name in her dreams.

[Ana]: Then Tania managed to wake me up and said: what happened? She told me you were screaming, you were saying her name, and I didn’t know why. I never believed in spiritual connections or anything like that. But in that moment, I may have felt something.

[Cecilia D.]: Ana felt certain that something terrible had happened to her sister.

One afternoon, while walking, they recognized the landscape. It was the last place they had all been together. They began to search the area and discovered that beneath a tree there was a plastic bag covered with a few branches. They opened it, and inside there was money, a notebook, and some loose pages written in Lichi’s handwriting. Tania remembers that their hopes soared.

[Tania]: At first we were very happy because we thought Lichita was nearby and that we were going to find her close.

[Cecilia D.]: They began to read the pages. They were letters that Lichi had written to her mother, Carmen. In the texts, Lichi was very worried and wrote about how Ana had gone for help but hadn’t come back. She also mentioned that their Aunt Laura, hours after Ana and Tania got lost, had gone out to look for them and never returned. The letters had dates on them, and since the girls were wearing watches, they calculated that Lichi had stopped writing about 15 days earlier.

[Ana]: I saw that and panicked. I started running. Lichi could be anywhere—alive or not, she could be anywhere. So I started screaming, calling out to her.

[Cecilia D.]: Since Lichi was injured, they knew she couldn’t have gone far, so they began searching for her tracks.

[Ana]: At the very least I wanted to find her body, because I thought: if I find her body, at least I’ll know what happened to her. If I find her body, at least I’ll be able to bury her.

[Cecilia D.]: There were no signs of Lichi, but there were military boot prints. At that moment, they feared she had been captured or killed. They cried a lot, until Tania tried to convince Ana that her sister had managed to escape to Argentina. She was injured and weak—it was hard to believe—but they needed to believe it to keep walking. From that point on, Ana stopped registering clearly what was happening, and Tania, her older cousin, began making all the decisions.

[Tania]: Anita is a very strong person. I feel that without her I would not have been able to endure all the terrible things we were going through. But it was a very difficult situation. And naturally, losing her sister was not okay. So we tried to find a way to get back home, because we had no strength left. None. We had no way to figure out how, no idea, no clues, nothing. And the situation was pretty critical. We could have been killed at any moment.

[Cecilia D.]: Aware that they needed help to get out, they began following a stream to try to reach the indigenous community. Luck began to turn in their favor. They found fruit, and before long they spotted people swimming. Despite fearing they might be turned in, the girls decided to trust them and approached…

[Ana]: When you look at someone the way we looked at that moment, you think: they must be connected to the EPP.

[Cecilia D.]: The people were from a local indigenous community and understood the situation immediately when Tania explained it to them. They were surely moved by the sight of two such weak girls. And they decided to help.

[Tania]: They took us by motorcycle up to a certain point. And from there, a ranch worker said he would take us, he would take us. Through him we were able to pass through that security checkpoint.

[Cecilia D.]: In that region of Paraguay it is common to find private security checkpoints set up by ranch owners along the roads. That is why the worker who was driving Tania and Ana in his pickup showed his ID so that the girls could pass through without being registered…

The man drove about six hours to the city of Limpio.

[Ana]: We had money with us, and since it was post-pandemic, everyone on the street was wearing face masks. I remember we went into a pharmacy and bought masks. And I remember that people stared at us a lot.

[Cecilia D.]: Of course, two teenagers with torn, dirty clothes and shoes attracted a lot of attention.

[Ana]: We were already in a city, a normal environment, but we were completely on edge.

[Cecilia D.]: With the money they had taken from the bag they found with Lichi’s letters, they paid for a taxi to Asunción, about 30 minutes away. There they bought clothes and food. But everything they ate, they vomited. They were too weak.

At the bus terminal they boarded a coach to Encarnación, a city on the southern border with Argentina. It was a six-hour journey to get there. Once there, they paid a man to take them across by ferry. They couldn’t go through customs because they had lost their documents in the jungle.

On December 23, 2020—exactly one year after their departure—they arrived in their town in the Argentine province of Misiones. It was four in the afternoon when Ana and Tania walked through the farm gate and took their last steps toward home. That was where their aunts and cousins lived.

[Ana]: I think the first person who saw us let out a scream. And the other children came running out. And they all hugged us. And it was truly a very emotional reunion. I don’t remember much—everything was happening so fast.

[Cecilia D.]: Ana was very weak and had trouble staying on her feet. Her little cousins helped her get to the living room. Her Aunt Myriam, who already knew from the news that her daughter Lilian and her niece María had died, was surprised to find that some of them had managed to come back.

[Myriam V.]: So the first thing I thought was that at least everyone had managed, managed to save themselves, right? And then I found out that wasn’t the case…

[Cecilia D.]: Of the six who had left exactly one year ago, only two had returned… If for Myriam it was a devastating blow, for Tania and Ana it was absolutely crushing to walk into that house and see that Lichi and their Aunt Laura were not there. They had hoped they might have escaped.

They began talking through everything that had happened. Myriam told the girls how she had learned about the deaths. She told them that on September 2nd she had heard in the media that two adult women from the EPP had died in a confrontation with soldiers. The same news that Ana and Tania had heard on the radio in the jungle that day. But two days later, Myriam received a phone call from the Argentine consul in Paraguay.

[Myriam V.]: Just as I was learning more about the news, I received the call and was told that it was confirmed they were my girls.

[Cecilia D.]: Initially, the bodies were buried as unknowns. But the press revealed that the two supposed guerrilla fighters had Argentine documents, and the diplomatic pressure changed everything. At Argentina’s request, Paraguay had to exhume the remains, and only then—after forensic tests—was it confirmed that they were 11-year-old girls, and their names were made known.

The consul handed over some photographs showing the condition of the girls’ bodies. Myriam told us that from the images you could see that skin had been removed from the areas where the bullets had struck, in order to erase any traces of gunpowder. Without that evidence, it is impossible to know whether they died in combat or whether they were, in fact, executed at close range.

[Myriam V.]: Where there were traces of gunpowder and all that—they cleaned the whole body, removed all of it.

[Cecilia D.]: At this point, Myriam could only think of one thing…

[Myriam V.]: As a mother, the only thing I could say was: I hope she died instantly, that she didn’t suffer through all that pain, because of the way they left those little bodies. For a long time I kept all those photos, but they affected me deeply.

[Cecilia D.]: That same day, while Myriam, Ana, and Tania were trying to piece together what had happened in the jungle, they saw a news report on television.

[Myriam V.]: On the news I saw that Laura had been arrested. She had lost about 20 kilos—she was skin and bones. And to be honest I didn’t recognize her at first, but then yes, I realized it was Laura who had been captured.

[Cecilia D.]: Aunt Laura spent weeks searching for her nieces. Until, on December 23rd, she came across soldiers in the jungle. And despite the risk it posed for her, she decided to ask them for help finding the girls. The authorities immediately detained her. The prosecutors offered to help look for them. By that time, Tania and Ana were already back in Argentina. Only Lichi was still missing.

[Myriam V.]: And she gave them rough coordinates of where it had been, the areas… But these people were never interested in searching for her.

[Cecilia D.]: Laura was detained in Paraguay on charges of terrorism and breach of duty of care.

Myriam was a lawyer and decided to bring the cases of Lilian, María, Lichi, and Laura to various international human rights organizations.

Following Myriam’s complaints, international delegations were organized to search for Lichi, but they encountered numerous obstacles along the way. However, they managed to obtain the testimony of a man from an indigenous community, who told them he had seen a girl matching Lichi’s description.

[Ana]: The only testimony they were able to obtain there—because soldiers were constantly surrounding the area—was that they had seen a girl with the characteristics they described: she was limping and was being escorted by uniformed men and put into a pickup truck. That was the testimony they managed to get.

[Cecilia D.]: While trying to reconstruct Lichi’s trail, aunt Myriam began examining all the available evidence. She wanted to expose the many irregularities throughout the case… from the shooting itself, to the handling of the girls’ bodies, and even the destruction of the clothing Lilian and María had been wearing—supposedly due to COVID-19 protocol—despite no evidence that they were infected.

[Myriam V.]: It is truly very painful to see how an entire government, an entire State, acts with such impunity. Because the case of Lilian and María was never investigated. There is not a single person who has been jailed or prosecuted in connection with that case.

[Cecilia D.]: Actually, there is one person who has been convicted. After four years in detention, in May 2024, the Paraguayan justice system sentenced Aunt Laura to 31 years in prison. The tribunal found her responsible for transporting the girls from Argentina to recruit them into a criminal organization. The charges included: terrorism, human trafficking, breach of duty of care, and abandonment.

In a parallel proceeding, the Paraguayan justice system also charged Myriam for failing to protect her daughter Lilian and issued an international arrest warrant. However, the Argentine State granted her political refugee status, protecting her from extradition.

I asked Colonel Casco, head of Intelligence—whom we heard from earlier—about the different responsibilities involved. His response was blunt: for the colonel, those responsible for the deaths of Lilian and María, and for Lichi’s disappearance, are their own parents and relatives.

[Carlos C.]: They are responsible because they are the ones who raised these children in Argentina, who indoctrinated them, sadly, in that place, and then illegally brought them into the Republic of Paraguay to meet their relatives in the jungles here.

[Cecilia D.]: The colonel also questions the true purpose of that trip. For him, it was not a family reunion. According to them, there is intelligence gathered after the confrontation suggesting that the girls traveled to be trained as soldiers.

[Carlos C.]: They are taken abroad, right? And there they begin to receive their education, they begin to be shaped ideologically, and they bring them back, already bringing them back to be placed inside the camp.

[Cecilia D.]: He told me they found EPP records where the girls had been assigned military tasks, such as guard shifts in the early hours of the morning. While Casco describes them as child soldiers, for Ana that version is pure fiction, invented to justify the military’s actions.

[Ana]: They continue to uphold the version that there was crossfire, as they say, and that they fired at both of them—that in both cases they acted in self-defense. But it is completely implausible, because to begin with, we didn’t know how to handle weapons—we didn’t have weapons either. And both Lilian and María were shot in the back. And both of them screamed until the end, until the soldiers were standing over them. In Lilian’s case I could even hear her. And once they had her, I honestly don’t know exactly what could have happened to her, but I imagine it was something bad enough that they had to bury her as soon as they moved her body.

[Cecilia D.]: The confrontation version was also challenged by data provided by the Paraguayan Public Ministry’s own forensic doctor. The forensic expert stated that Lilian’s body had seven bullet impacts and María’s had two. He also acknowledged that the shots came from all directions: from the front, from behind, and from the sides. This suggests, to the family, that the girls were surrounded—not involved in a firefight between two sides. In a crossfire, shots are typically frontal. In forensics, receiving impacts from behind indicates flight, not combat.

The doubts raised by the case crossed borders. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child were unequivocal: they held the Paraguayan State responsible for the girls’ deaths and Lichi’s disappearance. They characterized the use of force as unjustified. They denounced “extraordinary negligence” in the destruction of key evidence—such as the burning of the girls’ clothes—and concluded that the official investigation was not aimed at finding the truth, but at closing the case without transparency. For the UN, Paraguay simply could not justify the shootings.

A family camp or training ground for child soldiers. Gunned down or caught in crossfire. State violence or failure of duty of care. The labels shift depending on who is telling the story, but the facts are immovable: Lilian and María were 11 years old when they died during an operation carried out by Paraguay’s Security Forces.

And amid investigations and conflicting accounts, one answer has yet to arrive: it has been six years since that trip into the jungle, and no one knows where Lichi is.

For Ana, life goes on—it has to…

[Ana]: From the moment I was born I’ve been moving from one place to another, and the people around me always change. But the one person who didn’t change was her. I’m still in the process of learning to live without her by my side.

[Cecilia D.]: Ana continues searching for a way to fill the void her sister left behind. 

[Daniel A.]: Ana, Tania, and Myriam Villalba left Argentina and are living in political asylum in Venezuela. Ana is studying modern languages at university and continues trying to find out the truth about what happened to her twin sister.

Carmen Villalba remains detained in Paraguay in a maximum-security prison. The EPP continues to operate, though only about 12 members remain. They still hold three kidnapped individuals, among them Óscar Denis, former vice president of Paraguay.

Cecilia Diwan is a journalist specializing in international politics. She co-produced this story with Aneris Casassus. Aneris is a producer at Radio Ambulante. Both live in Buenos Aires.

This story was edited by Camila Segura, Luis Fernando Vargas, and myself. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. Sound design is by Andrés Azpiri, with music by Ana Tuirán, Rémy Lozano, and Andrés. 

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Adriana Bernal, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Germán Montoya, Sara Selva Ortiz, Samantha Proaño, Natalia Ramírez, Lina Rincón, Juan Pablo Santos, David Trujillo, Elsa Liliana Ulloa, Franklin Villavicencio and Mariana Zúñiga.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO.

Radio Ambulante is a podcast from Radio Ambulante Estudios. It is produced and mixed in the Hindenburg PRO program.

If you enjoyed this episode and want us to keep producing independent journalism about Latin America, support us through Deambulantes, our membership program. Visit radioambulante.org/donar and help us keep narrating the region.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.