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Profile and disappearance
Source: Archivo DEF
María del Carmen Cash (DNI: 30276289) was a 29-year-old clothing designer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She lived in Barracas, a working-class neighborhood, and was known for her passion for design. Friends and family described her as a vibrant individual, friendly, energetic and always smiling.
Cash had planned a trip to the northern province of Jujuy—a distance of 900 miles from her home—, to meet up with a Juan Pablo Dumón. Dumón, a Jujuy native, had met Cash during a yoga class in 2008. Dumón had reportedly offered Cash a project to sell the clothes she designed, and a workshop to manufacture them. On July 4th, 2011, Cash left her apartment, headed for the Retiro bus terminal, and boarded a bus headed towards the capital of Jujuy province, San Salvador de Jujuy. Dumón said he was not aware of the trip and that it took him by surprise.
However, María Cash did not make it to Jujuy. Near the end of her trip, she stepped off her bus in San Miguel de Tucumán, 200 miles south of her original destination. The following day—July 5th—, Cash took a second bus headed towards Jujuy, but once again interrupted her trip, and got off in the small town of Rosario de la Frontera, 125 miles from Jujuy. There, she had a telephone conversation with Dumón, in which she notified him of her visit, and claimed that "there were people [she] did not like in the omnibus", thus why she left it.
She then hitchhiked a ride on a truck which left her in Santiago del Estero, 155 miles south—in the opposite direction. Later, Cash exchanged several text messages with Dumón, in which she reportedly told him about her current whereabouts, and that she had no money to continue traveling, which prompted him to send her a prepaid bus ticket that she would use the following day.
On Wednesday, July 6th, María boarded her third and final bus. This time, she did reach San Salvador de Jujuy's bus terminal. At 9 AM, Cash called Dumón's sister, Paula, from a borrowed telephone, asking to be picked up at the bus station; however, both siblings were working and unable to do so. Cash ended the phone call and never communicated with them again. During the afternoon, they texted her offering to pay for a taxi, but she never replied. She reportedly seemed normal during the phone calls.
That same day, a mechanic workshop owner declared that she asked him for a phone charger to charge her cellphone and call her family, she had trouble with the signal so he offered his own phone. María called her parents, claiming to be in anguish and out of money, and saying that she wanted to return to Buenos Aires. Minutes later, the call ended abruptly. That's when her family decided to file a report with a brigade in Salta.
[It should be noted that there's confusion as to whether Cash called her family from a parlor, of from the mechanic workshop owner's phone, or if she called her friend's sister from the latter. The time at which she held the call with her family is reported to have been past 5 PM.]
It is believed that between 6 PM and 6:30 PM, María left Jujuy. She boarded a taxi by herself, and instead of going to Juan Pablo's house, she went to National Route N°34, the interprovincial border between Jujuy and Salta. There, multiple witnesses saw her trying to hitchhike a ride on the side of the road.
From this point, the story gets fuzzy. Near midnight, Cash was seen on a CCTV in the AUNOR toll, at the east entrance of Salta's capital, roughly 70 miles from Jujuy. Cameras recorded her at 11:37 PM, near the booths, with only a backpack and missing her carry-on luggage. She left her backpack there.
On July 7th, around 1:15 AM, Cash entered the San Bernardo de Salta Hospital. There, she scheduled an appointment, claiming she was not feeling well, but refused to give her last name, only giving her first name and ID number. She waited at the reception for her turn, but when she was called, she was gone. At 9 AM, a freeway employee found her abandoned backpack with her ID card still inside. However, it wasn't opened until July 10th, after her disappearance had made the news.
Finally, on July 8th, the Cash's brother received an e-mail from María, where she requested the contact information for a friend's sister who lived in the province at that time. This was the last communication María del Carmen Cash had with her family. Later that day, past 2 PM, Cash was caught hitchhiking on CCTV alongside Route 34, 7 miles from Salta. Her behavior seemed erratic. Security employees warned her that standing there was dangerous, but she ignored the warnings. At around 2:30 PM, the Causarano family's Chevrolet pickup stopped next to her, and she climbed into the back of the truck. Days later, the driver stated that he stopped because of his wife, and he felt sorry for the state María Cash was in. He said:
María got off the pickup in the city of General Güemes. At the Torzalito roundabout, two gas station employees saw her seemingly lost, knocking on the doors of various trucks, as if she was looking for someone or something. When they approached her, she said:
Minutes later, a truck driver named Héctor Romero picked her up. During the trip, Cash was reportedly quiet and drank a lot of water. After driving 12 miles south, at around 5 PM, Cash asked to get off the truck near a Difunta Correa sanctuary, near the town of Pampa Blanca. Witnesses reported she appeared disoriented and vulnerable. This was her last confirmed sighting.
After this, María's family began the search for her, alongside the Ministry of Security through its Sistema Federal de Búsqueda de Personas Desaparecidas y Extraviadas (Federal System for Searching for Missing and Lost Persons), which did area sweeps in the Cabeza de Buey area and alongside Route 34. A cash reward was also offered for any information about her whereabouts.
Foul Play?
The official investigation into the case was criticized for its slow start. María's family, particularly his father—Federico Cash—, conducted much of the early legwork, as authorities initially treated the case as a voluntary disappearance. It was only in 2012 that the case was reclassified as a potential human trafficking case in 2012, moving to Federal Court No. 2 in Salta under Judge Mariela Giménez and Prosecutor Eduardo Villalba.Cash's disappearance took the media by storm, and it did not take long before claims of foul play began surfacing. During the multiple witness interviews across the 14 years since her disappearance, investigators have noted that several witnesses "may have given false accounts or contradicted themselves" to distort the search effort and hinder the case. Some of these accounts claimed to have seen María in various locations, such as the village of Portezuelo, La Rioja, or the San Bernardo Hospital in Salta again.
A month after her disappearance, employees from the San Bernardo Hospital—who had originally testified to Cash's presence in the early morning of July 7th—denied that she was ever there. Time later, Jesús Chuquisaca, a pulmnologist from San Salvador de Jujuy, claimed Cash had made herself present at his private practice on July 8th, between 7 PM and 7:30 PM, suffering from sinusitis and bronchial catarrh. He stated that:
However, María Cash's brother, Máximo, denounced the claim was false, asserting that both the invoice and the guestbook had a false addition. It was also pointed out that it is impossible for María to have traveled from Chuquisaca's office to the center of Salta in an hour and a half. Máximo said:
One of María's brothers also later claimed that:
Héctor Romero, the truck driver who had claimed to have driven María Cash to the last place she was seen, was arrested on November 26th, 2024. As mentioned earlier, Romero had supposedly picked up Cash at the Tortalito roundabout, in General Güemes, while driving a white Mercedes-Benz truck with a trailer and the inscription "Catita."
At the beginning of the investigation, Romero had not collaborated with the authorities nor Cash's family, and was only identified by a witness who saw María get on his truck. The trucker then gave various differing accounts of that encounter, for which he was arrested in suspicion of being related to her disappearance.
However, what is perhaps the most pressing issue is related to the messages that the Cash family received years after the disappearance, and the fate of Federico Cash. In early 2014, Federico Cash received a number of text messages from an unknown number. One of those messages read:
And another said:
These messages were reported to the police, who found out that they had come from a phone number owned by María's friend, Juan Pablo Dumón. He was never investigated, even though the lawyer who reported the messages described him as being "being linked to strange contacts."
If María's disappearance was not tragic enough, and those messages not concerning enough, what happened a few months later was another macabre piece added to the puzzle. On April 28th, 2014, while driving north during the evening along National Route 152, in La Pampa Province, Federico Cash was involved in a fatal car crash, near the town of Puelches. He was 70 years old, and was on the 33rd consecutive month of traveling throughout the country following leads on his daughter. Inside his car, police found missing person pamphlets for María.
Federico Cash was driving a Renault Clio, which crashed head-on against a married couple's Peugeot 207 which was driving in the opposite direction. Cash died on impact, while the couple had to undergo urgent medical treatment. The Cash family lawyer, Víctor Barone, stated that Federico was very excited because he had recently obtained legal status for his Foundation. "He was happy because from there he would be able to do many more things to help other people," he said. No investigations were made about the accident.
In 2017 and 2018, two forensic teams found remains in Argentina and Bolivia and subjected them to various tests, but none yielded positive results. In 2020, with the aim of resuming the search and at the request of the family, a portrait of María Cash's current appearance was released in November 2020:
What Happened to María Cash?
Many hypotheses have been put forward as for Cash's ultimate fate.One of the first hypotheses put forward was that María had a psychotic break, which would have explained most of her behavior, particularly her actions on July 7th and July 8th. She might have felt paranoid, which would explain why she left the first bus she was traveling on, claiming that there were "people she didn't like" in it. From this hypothesis, it is believed that on the night of July 8th, Cash walked into the mountains, perhaps looking for some place to rest, but got lost, after which she might have suffered an accident or been attacked by wildlife. The psychosis theory is also supported by her file, which claims that:
However, others believe that, psychotic or not, María might have boarded another bus or vehicle and traveled elsewhere around the Cuyo región or beyond. Due to the easeness with which could cross towards Bolivia, which was relatively close to her general location—some 170 miles—, some hypothesize she might have crossed the border, perhaps under coercion, and that she might still be in Bolivia or elsewhere.
Another hypothesis is that María was kidnapped into a human trafficking network. However, this hypothesis has been discredited by many, including her family, given that these cases usually involve teenage girls, and María, aged 29, would have been too old to catch any trafficker's interest. On top of that, her family believed it would have been uncharacteristic of her to not fight back against any coercion or threats linked to such a possibility.
In January 2017, María Cash's name made the news again, after two messages appeared written in the walls of two gas stations in the southern provinces of Argentina. One was found in the village of Garayalde, Chubut, and the other in the village Cañadón Seco, Santa Cruz, 135 miles apart. One of these SOS messages read:
After these messages surfaced, the Cash family sent copies of María's handwriting to the Gendarmerie for comparison. A few days later, it was confirmed that the handwriting was not that of María Cash. However, her mother—María del Carmen Gallegos—believed that the messages could have been written by someone who was with her daughter. Others believed it could have been another missing woman, who used Cash's name to draw attention to her own disappearance. However, it is simply believed that, not unlike previous cases of supposed SOS messages, this was just a prank.
While some believe that María might have simply disappeared voluntarily, for any given reason, peradventure the most plausible outcome is the one most would expect by now: María Cash is dead.
During mid-2013, her family received an anonymous call from a woman who pointed at Héctor Romero, the aforementioned truck driver, as guilty for her murder. At that time, the claim was relayed to the police, but Romero was ultimately not investigated for a lack of proof. However, as mentioned earlier, since Romero has since been detained, it would seem as if this lead might have been true all along.
The unknown woman had claimed that "[Romero] had not been properly investigated", and that María Cash's body was dumped in El Tunal Reservoir, just 50 miles from her last known location. At the time, the police sweeped the area, but came out empty-handed. Now that Romero has been detained, though, new investigations are to be carried out in an attempt to find María's body. Nonetheless, the case has had no true new leads in over a decade, and the fact that nothing was found from all the previous investigations might just indicate that whatever comes next might also lead to a dead end.
Relevant links (in Spanish):
- María del Carmen Cash @ Personas Buscadas, Argentine Government
- Video recording of María Cash on July 6th, 2011.
- Last video recording of María Cash hitchhiking on July 8th, 2011.
- El País sigue buscando a María Cash (The Whole Country Keeps Looking for María Cash) | Jujuy al Momento, July 18, 2011
- "No descartamos ninguna hipótesis", dijo el hermano de María Cash ("We Don't Discard Any Hypotheses", said María Cash's brother) | La Nación, July 20, 2011
- Amenazaron al padre de María Cash y le advirtieron que su hija "murió porque andaba en cosas raras" (María Cash's Father was threatened and told his daughter died for "being involved in strange things.") | Uno Santa Fe, January 10, 2014
- Falleció el papa de María Cash(María Cash's father died) | infobae, April 29, 2014
- La familia de María Cash, expectante por los mensajes de ayuda: "No parece ser la letra de ella" (The Cash family, expectant from the help messages: "It doesn't seem to be her handwriting") | infobae, January 18, 2017
- Los mensajes encontrados en la Patagonia no son de María Cash (The messages found in Patagonía are not María Cash's) | infobae, January 21, 2017
- 12 años sin María Cash: del brote psicótico a la red de trata, en qué estado está la causa (12 years without María Cash: From the psychotic outbreak to the trafficking network, what is the status of the cause?) | El Destape, July 8, 2023
- Caso María Cash: a 13 años de su desaparición, los investigadores ponen el foco en el lugar donde desapareció (María Cash Case: 13 years after her disappearance, investigators focus on where she disappeared) | Diario Perfil, July 8, 2024
- Declararon dos empleados de una estación de servicio que vieron a María Cash antes de su desaparición: “No estoy perdida” (Two employees from a gas station who saw María Cash before her disappearance testified: "I'm not lost") | infobae, November 9, 2024
- Caso María Cash: el llamado anónimo que recibió la familia hace diez años y dio un giro a la causa (María Cash case: the anonymous call the family received ten years ago that turned the case around) | TN, November 29, 2024
