It’s been 49 years, almost half a century, without Alberto. this lost tallest, tallest, has proof. Alberto Pérez Elvira disappeared on July 2, 1973, in Lanzarote. “So many years, so many pains and so many questions: How is it possible to know nothing on such a small island?” Her sister, Belén Elvira, voices her call. The mezzo-soprano, a disciple of Plácido Domingo, shows his paw and heart when speaking of him. He narrates and sings. He moved everyone like then with Magdalena’s Aria For the Telecinco program ‘Got Talent’ by Andrea Chénier.
“It was my hardest performance,” he recalls. “Look, I sang in the Verona Arena, with Placido Domingo at La Almudena (Madrid)or in Wigmore Hall London…but my mother is there, to people’s families disappeared with posters and tears… it was so emotional, it was incredible”.
He did not win the competition, but reached the semi-finals and achieved his goal: he shocked everyone, showed the drama in prime time He suffered by many missing relatives, under the watchful eye of several families with a missing relative, who attended as a bystander accompanied by Paco Lobatón. “For me, My brother is like a hero. That inaccessible person that everyone is looking for and that my mother is not always with… I think that maybe she sees it when I go on stage. What if he’s alive?”
fifty years ago
July 2, 1973. Alberto Pérez Elvira dropped out of school in San Bartolomé, a small town in Albertito, Lanzarote. He does it, as usual, on his blue bike. “My family ran a restaurant called ‘El Cazador’, and we went there after school. We stayed until half past seven and then we went home,” says Belén, who has heard the story many times. She was a month old baby when her brother disappeared.
The children’s mother, Maria, had not gone to the bar that day. “If there were days when he was weaker, I wouldn’t have gone upstairs in the afternoon.” 13-year-old Alberto, the oldest of five siblings, had to go. “There was always work to be done: ‘Make a change, Albertito’; Something like that”.
“At two in the morning, they found his blue bicycle with a flat tire, nine kilometers away,” his sister says.
The afternoon passed and Alberto did not come. The clock struck 8 pm and he did not come. “My father was stunned and asked a client to go to his house and ask my mother if Alberto was sick or had any ailments,” Belén says. It did not last long; The boy’s school, restaurant, and home were nearby, around the central square. “Albertito didn’t come.” This is where it all started.
Alarms went off. “They went out to look for him,” says Belén. “They were at the pier, to see if the ship had gone or if they had taken it…”. there was no trace. “At two in the morning, nine kilometers from his house, on the road between Güime and Playa Honda, they found his blue bicycle with a flat tire. It’s on its way to the airport, it’s heading to the sea…” They shouted his name and kept calling: “didn’t show up.”
as chef in Las Palmas
The family went to the Civil Guard barracks. “Very little was done back then,” Belén denounced. “Everything on the islands was very dangerous.The investigation team consisted of one person, his name was Curro, and he was solely responsible for everything.“, mint.
A taxi driver, a neighbor, said he saw the boy at an intersection. “He said you told him: ‘Albertito, where are you going?’ Investigations ended: “Simply, my brother wasn’t there, that’s all.”
Years passed… There were calls, many; landscapes, all: “but no police.” They contacted from Las Palmas,” they said. There was a guy working in a hotel kitchen that could be him. My mother went there alone, got on the plane alone. It was wrong …”, Belén sums up. “Every year someone would come and say they saw him. It was a fairground, we went to the fair, he…” Albertito was never there. Everything went dark until the color came on.
a french ship
One day he said, “I remember sitting in front of our house when I was 8 or 9 years old and a boy in a pink sweater passed. On the back of his trousers was a string, like a string with which farriers clean themselves. My bike’s chain broke and I was fixing it with another brother who was at the house at the time. The boy in pink looked at me and walked past me. He came back, he turned around and it happened again”, portrays Belén.
“Like me I grew up with all that obscurity, With all this pain, I called my mother: ‘mom, a boy…’. He escaped. ‘Where where?’ He went to look for her, but he didn’t come.”
“An elderly man contacted my mother and told her that a boy working in the kitchen of a French ship claimed to be Alberto,” says Belén.
Immediately after, “An old man from Arrecife (Lanzarote) contacted my mother. that you were with a boy and told him he was working on a French ship and which is he was The missing boy,” Belén says. come back but that many people were behind his disappearance. and it didn’t show up.
María, Alberto and Belén’s mother, reacted immediately. He wrote a letter to Mr. “Alberto, read the letter. When the man finished his work, he said he said ‘but I can’t come’ and said, ‘I saw my mother and a sister the other day’.
The family united everything: pink boy “Rogue or not, my brother or someone else, there was someone,” says Belén, “that boy said he saw me, and I, I’m telling you, I said I saw him.”
Intelligent, bright and very mature for his age, Alberto stood out in San Bartolomé. “There were foreigners who went to my father’s bar and said, ‘But leave this boy to me, how smart is he! I’m taking him to Germany for a while…’ One German woman in particular was asked. “No results”, Belén grieves. The investigation had taken root.
a sergeant’s daughter
“We tried everything to find my brother.” They drew hypotheses, options, endings. They found motives, doubtful. “There was someone who went to a restaurant a lot, became a millionaire overnight and stopped going.. My father was always a suspect, human trafficking makes a lot of money…” he said.
Another of Alberto’s thoughts, father, Civil Guard. “My mom found some letters my brother wrote to a girl. they would run away, they would run away together, they would live their loveBethlehem remembers. The girl was the daughter of the sergeant of the San Bartolomé Civil Guard.
“When my mother saw this, she called the sergeant’s wife and said, ‘Look what’s going on. Let’s order.’” Shortly after this call, the boy He disappeared. “Something happened there. After talking to them… Or is it? caught the child’s attention and went overboard Or something happened, my father said, but then it doesn’t match the man who saw him…”.
a sect
Belén thinks aloud, the sergeant continued through town and nothing more was heard. Your daughter didn’t disappear. I want to find it, but I don’t know if it will, in case it has any information that might help.”
There was also talk that Alberto’s disappearance might be related to a cult, someone tried to seduce him. “Along with the letters, my mother found books on the occult. He had bought them unknowingly from the Círculo de Lectores, and loved to read.
“There are some bones!”
Years passed between estimates. The talks stopped. Decades later, the silence broke, “‘Oh, Bethlehem!’ They found some bones on Mount Emina”, she still remembers her mother’s call. “He saw it in the press about six years ago and he told me he was very scared. He went on his bike because there was a tidal wave in the mountains, where Emina Albertito played, there was a big water tank”.
The media reported that the remains were thirty years old and probably belonged to a teenager. They called the Civil Guard and discovered, not without shock, “there was no record of my brother’s case. Those bones on the mountain didn’t match our DNA because they don’t even have it. They told us that the bones belonged to some Guanche, they were a hundred years old, they stayed there.”
Half a century later it still has no answers and no files. “Shortly before my father died—he died six years ago— We went to the Civil Guard“, regretful Belén. “Before he died, he wanted to access the file…” The file did not exist. “The only thing recorded: a person with a DNI, without a license and without a license. no document.”
Your father’s father died while he was waiting, “He’s looking at the door for my brother to come,” Belén interrupts. Alberto’s mother “has gaps, things she doesn’t remember…He overcame the hysterical blindness that accompanied him for months, but if something affects him today, it will attack him there.“.
They were all marked. “If my brother was robbed, they stole our childhood. If he was killed, they killed us alive, they killed our rights, our family, the right to share, to enjoy.” “I would have been 62 today” they dream of reunion, it gets darker, “but there is hope”.