For six years, Nancy Baladán has ridden her motorcycle along Uruguay’s country paths and urban highways in search of answers about the night that altered her life forever.

On 3 December 2016, her daughter Milagros Cuello received a phone call. It was already 11pm and the 16-year-old was in bed. But something about the call made her get up. “I’ll be back in five minutes,” Milagros told her father before setting off on foot to the main square of their town, Pando.

Those few minutes turned to hours. And then weeks, months and years. The family never saw Milagros again.

Before this tragedy, Baladán, now 53, lived a contented life running a kiosk in Pando, which is about 30 kilometres north of the capital, Montevideo, in the department of Canelones. Afterwards, she turned into a detective-cum-law-student, because no one in law enforcement cared that her daughter was missing.

During her quest to find Milagros, the sixth of her nine children, she has followed rumours and clues, from slums and brothels to ditches and empty fields. She has swallowed her fear and travelled to all 19 departments of Uruguay, as well as to Argentina and Brazil.

Her detective work led to the arrest and conviction of three men, who were jailed in 2019 for sexually exploiting Milagros. “I fought for two years to get them to court, investigating. I crossed paths with them on the street,” she said of the perpetrators.

But she still hasn’t found the answer she desperately wants: where is her child?