On 27 August 2013, a tall, spirited nine-year-old girl with long, well-brushed hair boarded an overnight coach in Barcelona. Nada Itrab was bright and observant. At school, she regularly came top of her class. Even now, she carried a notebook, eager to record the things she would discover on this trip. She had been given a camera, too – a cheap, lilac-coloured digital model which, since she was unused to luxuries, seemed to her like a treasure.
In eight hours, Nada would be at Barajas airport in the Spanish capital, Madrid. She would take her first flight, heading for Bolivia’s largest city, Santa Cruz de la Sierra. To her, the trip was an adventure, like something from the storybooks that she read at her local library in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, a city just south of Barcelona. The daughter of undocumented immigrants from Morocco, Nada had lived there since she was four.
Only one other person was travelling with Nada. Grover Morales was a neighbour with a saintly air. In La Florida, the poor neighbourhood in which he and Nada’s family lived, Morales made a point of greeting everyone, regardless of race or faith. He read religious books, not just the Christian Bible, but also the Torah and the Qur’an. He made Nada’s family food. He had installed a bath for them with his own hands. For Morales, a Bolivian man in his mid-30s, this was a business and family trip. He was going home to pick up jewellery and bring it back to sell, or so he said. He offered to take Nada as a reward for her excellent schoolwork. They would be back in a week. Her parents signed a notarised document permitting Nada to travel with him.
Nada was excited. When she returned for the new school year a few weeks later, she would not have to pretend, as she usually did, that her family had spent the summer at the seaside rather than eking out their little money at home. She would have a real story to tell. But she was also nervous. She knew things about Morales that others did not. At the cybercafe where her family used the internet, she had found a video of him entering a trance in his place of worship, with his hair whipping across his face as he worked himself up to an ecstatic frenzy. That scared her. As a nine-year-old, she also did not understand the weird, unsettling things he occasionally did when her parents left them alone. Why did he end some rough-and-tumble games by lying, fully clothed on top of her? But this trip was approved by her parents. Surely, nothing bad would happen.
The security camera pictures from Barajas airport capture the moment that Nada and the white-shirted Morales line up to board the plane. The image of this bright child waiting in her spotty dress at the airport is heartbreaking. The best that can be said about what followed is that she survived. That alone is a triumph – a tribute to Nada, along with a small number of others who came to her rescue.
Nada is now 21 – a serious, hard-working law student at Barcelona University. As she grew up, she found very few people were interested in asking her what happened after she stepped into that aircraft. It is only in recent years that she herself has begun to find out the full details of a nine-month-long ordeal that she tried very hard to forget. It is a process she has chosen to undertake publicly. In some ways, the hours we have spent talking over the past few months form part of her process of recovery, but they also reflect Nada’s own ambition to confront the stigma and campaign against the global trafficking of children. “I don’t want to just be the girl who got kidnapped,” she told me.
Staring into the camera at the immigration desk at the airport in Santa Cruz, Nada flashed a tired smile, her hair ragged from the trip. On the airport bus into the city, she stared out of the window. In Spain, 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’ 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.
Morales had claimed to be wealthy, but his mother’s home outside Cochabamba was a dump. They spoke Quechua, an Indigenous language that Nada didn’t 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.
Morales rang Nada’s 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.
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 “the worst night of my life”. Over the next few weeks, during the day Nada would skip rope with Cristina’s daughters and borrow their Barbie. At night the abuse continued.
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.
Unbeknownst to her, Nada’s 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.
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.
Nada told me such stories as if from a distance, like a bemused spectator. “I use the logical part of my mind to repress the emotional side,” she said. “I can tell all this so coolly because I don’t feel it.” 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.
After more than six hours driving north-east, the bus dropped Nada and Morales near a town called Entre Ríos. From there, they hitchhiked to a rural settlement known as Villa Unión. Morales used his knack for starting conversations with strangers, then drawing them into his confidence. Within two days, he persuaded a farmer, Santos Rodríguez, to employ them and they moved into his house, with his wife and two daughters.
The next morning Nada was given a machete. She should have been starting back at school in L’Hospitalet. 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’t working hard enough, he beat her with a belt.
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. “I thought that was my only way out,” 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.
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.
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. “Now you are my wife,” he said.
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.
In 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 – 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.
In late December 2013, four months into her ordeal, Nada and Morales returned to his brother Fidel’s house in Cochabamba. As Nada listened to drunken neighbours celebrate New Year and calendars flipped to 2014, Lt José Miguel Hidalgo of Spain’s 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.
Nada’s case had landed on Hidalgo’s 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’s brother Fidel – owner of the Cochabamba house – who also now lived in the Barcelona area. Wiretaps were placed on Nada’s parents’ phones, and on those of his brother.
Nada’s 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 – who drank, raged and bullied his wife – 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.
As he investigated the case, Hidalgo’s 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 – slowed by bureaucracy and fraught relations between a rightwing Spanish government and Bolivia’s leftwing president, Evo Morales.
On 28 January, Hidalgo and a colleague finally reached Bolivia and two days later, police raided Fidel’s house in Cochabamba. When they arrived, they were greeted by Cristina, who informed them that Morales and Nada had left the previous day. “It was like in the movies,” said Hidalgo, when we met recently at the Civil Guard headquarters in Madrid. “You get so close, and then they disappear.”
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 – 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.
As Hidalgo was making his way to Fidel’s 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.
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. “Like something from the 12th century,” Nada recalled.
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.
On 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. “The sad truth is that she had already been in the hands of an abuser for six months,” 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’s family knew she had been kidnapped. Her story had been kept out of the media.
Three 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’s garden. She sounded upset when Cristina said that they had already eaten it.
The call at least proved Nada was alive. Cristina’s 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.
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 León, who held sway over the coca growers (some of whom grow legally, while others produce for the cocaine trade). “He took it as a matter of honour,” Hidalgo said, who also bought the farmers 500 kilos of sugar as part of the deal. León 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.
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.
The men tied Morales’s 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.
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. “In and out, without cutting the engines,” the pilots at the Chimore airbase had told him.
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. “Are you Nada?” 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.
Hidalgo 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.
The 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’s 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’s life in return for a promised share of Morales’ jewellery.
Hidalgo consulted his wife, then bought Nada a colourful Monster High rucksack. She was delighted. He was impressed by the girl’s resilience and intelligence. One of her main concerns was whether she would have to repeat the school year. “She was very bright, lively and grasped things really quickly,” 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 – 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.
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’s hand. For a few brief minutes, she was allowed to see her parents, but not alone. “I’d never seen my father cry before,” 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’Hospitalet. Her ordeal was far from over.
Newspapers 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 “abandoning” their child, the story seemed to be over.
In late 2022, Neus Sala, a seasoned Catalan broadcast journalist, made one of her regular visits to the Civil Guard police’s headquarters in Madrid. While there, she spoke to Hidalgo, whom she had known for more than three decades. After leading some of Spain’s most famous murder and kidnapping investigations, Hidalgo is now a comandante and helps manage the Civil Guard’s 700-strong UCO unit from an airy office at its Madrid headquarters, where – when I visited late last year – a photo of Nada sits on a bookshelf. In his conversation with Sala, he recalled Nada’s rescue as a career highlight. The girl was now 18, they realised. What had happened to her? Sala was determined to find out.
Nada Itrab was easy to find. Local news sites had reported that a girl with that name had recently won a €500 prize for the best senior year school essay in L’Hospitalet. 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?
Nada told me her instinctive reaction was “no”. 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.
By coincidence, Sala had also grown up in L’Hospitalet. In fact, they later discovered, they had both lived as children in the same apartment block, opposite the Barcelona regional metro’s Can Vidalet station. They arranged to meet at the station at midday on 27 November 2022.
Sala waited in the winter sun with her small black lurcher dog, Pistón. 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.
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’s homes (where, initially, Hidalgo visited from time to time) in towns outside Barcelona until she was 14 and then returned Nada to her parents’ squat – despite their declared guilt in the Bolivia fiasco. Four years later, Nada still lived there.
Returning 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’s homes. She lived in fear of her father’s temper, going to bed early without eating just to avoid him. She kept a knife under her pillow. At the local Rubió i Ors high school, Nada’s teachers saw her crumbling as she struggled at home and fought to get top grades. She suffered severe anxiety attacks.
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. “It represented hope for the future,” she said.
Once more, her salvation was school. Alba Solsona, the history and geography teacher who oversaw her prize-winning essay (on Palestine – 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. “As a teacher, she forced you to be at your best,” 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.
After meeting at Can Vidalet metro station on 27 November 2022, Nada and Sala continued their conversation over a shared plate of patatas con alioli in the winter sunshine outside a nearby bar, Juanito’s. 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. “Tell me my story,” she begged Sala.
Sala was wary of provoking fresh trauma. “I’m not a psychologist,” 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. “She was a survivor,” Sala told me. She was also indignant that the Catalan government had never formalised Nada’s 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.
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’s house in Barcelona, with a surprising request. She didn’t 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. “I want my story to make abused and enslaved children visible,” she announced.
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’s 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 – 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.
Soon, 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 “a second daughter”. 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. “I’ve told a lot of stories of hardship and seen young girls die,” Sala told me. “If I can help just one of them make it, then it will be worth the effort.”
Through all this, Nada continued living with her family in La Florida, even though her father’s 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’s future, Nada wanted to support her mother, and be present for her two younger brothers.
There 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’an, which had soothed her anxieties. Her parents were not religious, but she began reading the Qur’an and hadiths, the sayings and deeds of Muhammad, finding lessons about forgiveness, love and peace. The trick, she said, was “to answer evil with goodness”. In her mind, that meant pardoning her parents and even Morales. Strangely, her encounter with him had not put her off religion. “My 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,” she said.
Early in 2024, Sala found a women’s 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?
In the confession box, once more, she discovered the power of her story. As she spoke, the priest wept in great, gulping sobs. “I’ve never seen anyone cry like that,” she said. “He was really suffering.” When the priest recovered, he advised Nada to move out. “You need to escape, and start a new life.” When police turned up at the family’s 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 – and only she had the key.
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’s attention. “When they see you are poor, they think they have power,” she told me.
If Nada had felt tempted by luxury, it wasn’t just because that was the opposite of poverty, but also because the plan with Sala seemed to be stalling. Nobody wanted their documentary – or not with the campaigning seriousness they insisted it should have. Publishers shrugged at their book proposal. “If she had been white and not Moroccan, things would have been different,” said Sala.
By now, Nada was heavily invested in the project. With Sala’s 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’t work? With no family safety net, failure could still mean a squat in La Florida.
Since Sala’s old media contacts didn’t seem interested, Nada went directly to Uri Sabat, one of Spain’s 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.
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). “When you forgive, you don’t do it because the other person deserves it,” she explained. “I do this because my heart deserves to live free of rancour.” The studio audience applauded enthusiastically.
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 – a pocket Qur’an and notebook kept by Morales – had long been displayed in a glass cabinet. “It was a special case from the very start,” Hidalgo told me. “Any other child would have died. But she is a chameleon. She can adapt to anything.” Seeing her again was an emotional high. “It was the same Nada – so very bright and quick,” he said. Nada had a lump in her throat, as she tried not to cry. “I could see how much my life had meant to them,” she said. Hidalgo invited her to come back and help him train agents dealing with trafficking victims.
On 14 September 2025, Barcelona’s La Vanguardia newspaper ran a story about their reunion and told of Nada’s 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.
A 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’s house – a two-storey home tucked down a private alley close to the Parque Güell with its outlandish Gaudí 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’s eating or chastising her for overdressing for television appearances. “You can’t turn up looking like Angelina Jolie!” 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.
These 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 €300,000 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 – whom she did not want to discuss.
In 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.
On a sunny winter morning, we drove in Sala’s utilitarian grey Toyota Proace van, with her dog Pistón, 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 – Nada always asked to stay away from her parents’ barrio 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. “They now realise that I will inevitably tell my story, and have changed,” she said.)
We 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. “I’m proud of this place,” 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.
As 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. “I consider myself strong,” she told me. “So, if I’m suffering, imagine what it’s like for someone who doesn’t have the things I now have.”
Nada’s 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’s other heroine, Malala Yousafzai). “I want to ask her advice,” Nada said. She was going to send it once this article was published. Knowing Nada, it will be on its way tomorrow.
The Guardian
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