Peregrino

The Peregrino is a black car repeatedly associated with surveillance, flight, and the disappearances of women and girls in Santa Teresa. Its significance lies less in any confirmed identification than in its recurrence: it appears outside Oscar Amalfitano’s home as his daughter Rosa prepares to leave, while witnesses in separate cases describe black cars—sometimes identified as Peregrinos—near the moments when girls vanished. The car becomes a concrete thread through a city where the circumstances of abduction remain uncertain and the danger is not safely distinguishable from ordinary traffic.

A car at Amalfitano’s window

As dawn comes up, Oscar Amalfitano has heard Rosa recount the events that led her to leave the American’s motel. Manuel Amalfitano suggests calling the motel to find out whether police have arrived; the call goes unanswered. Oscar then urges Manuel to get Rosa out of the city and take her to an airport for a flight to Barcelona. He gives Rosa a roll of bills for the ticket and her first few days there, tells her to fetch her passport and pack, and returns to his position at the window. The money, suitcase, and hurried instructions turn the car’s presence into an immediate threat to a planned departure.

From the window Oscar spots the black Peregrino he has been looking for, behind a neighbor’s Spirit. A tall young man in jeans and a denim jacket gets out and lights a cigarette. When Rosa asks who he is, Oscar identifies him as a cop. The man leans against the hood, smoking and watching the sky grow brighter; he appears relaxed, as if at ease with another sunrise in Santa Teresa. The narrative gives no explanation of his purpose or proof of his connection to the danger, but Oscar’s recognition and vigilance make the parked car part of the pressure surrounding the family.

Oscar takes Rosa by the hand and leads her into her room to say goodbye. Manuel watches the man outside: the stranger flicks his cigarette onto the sidewalk, gets into the Peregrino, and drives away without looking toward the house. Rosa emerges with a small suitcase. Asked how they will leave, Oscar says they will go by the door. The understated answer closes the encounter without resolving whether the watcher intended to stop them. The car’s departure opens a path out, but not a reassuring one.

A recurring description in abduction accounts

The Peregrino also recurs in reports of missing girls. In the account of Andrea Pacheco Martinez, thirteen, two classmates saw her walking toward a black car as she left Vocational School 16. A person wearing sunglasses was waiting; the students thought the vehicle might have been a Peregrino or a Spirit, and tinted windows prevented them from seeing whether anyone else was inside. Andrea did not come home that afternoon. Her body was found two days later, bearing signs of strangulation and sexual assault. The tentative identification of the car is one of the few reported details about how she was taken, not a confirmed identification of a specific vehicle or its occupants.

Penelope Mendez Becerra’s disappearance brings the same description into a family’s desperate search. After Penelope failed to return from school, a classmate recalled that she might have entered a car with tinted windows and not emerged. The brother and teacher questioned the girl, who could say only that the car was expensive and black; it could have been a Peregrino or a MasterRoad. For three days Penelope’s brother walked across Santa Teresa, noting license plates as he searched among black cars. A week after she vanished, her body was found in a drainage pipe running beneath the city toward the El Ojito ravine, past the clandestine El Chile dump. The case’s uncertain car description gives the family a visible object to search for, but no reliable way to identify the vehicle or recover the girl.

Monica Duran Reyes, twelve, was also reportedly seen getting into a black car with tinted windows after leaving school. Friends proposed several possibilities: a Peregrino, a MasterRoad, or a Silencioso. According to their account, Monica did not appear to be forced; she had time to scream but did not, and even waved goodbye to a friend. Her body appeared two days later beside the Santa Teresa-Pueblo Azul highway. She had been raped and strangled. The ordinary gesture of farewell, set beside the subsequent discovery of her body, makes the car’s apparent normality part of the horror: the scene offers no clear sign that the departure is an abduction.

Recognition without identification

Across these accounts, the Peregrino is not established as a single vehicle shared by the cases. It appears alongside other possible makes—the Spirit, MasterRoad, and Silencioso—and is often named with uncertainty. The witnesses’ descriptions point to a pattern of black cars and tinted windows, but the available evidence does not establish who drove them, whether the same car was involved in different disappearances, or whether every reported sighting is accurate. That distinction matters: the repeated model name is a narrative echo and a clue to what witnesses notice, not a solved chain of evidence.

The car’s appearances nevertheless make it more than background traffic. Outside Amalfitano’s house, it carries the unease of surveillance and forces a rapid family decision; in the girls’ cases, black cars offer a recurring image of the threshold between a familiar public place and disappearance. The contrast between Rosa’s escape, organized by her father and Manuel, and the victims’ unknown journeys sharpens the object’s double association: a car can be a means of leaving danger, but a car waiting at the roadside can also be where a girl vanishes from view. The Peregrino remains a recognizable shape in the city’s fearful landscape, while the identity of its occupants—and the full meaning of its recurrence—remain unresolved.