The wind on the Altiplano is a razor’s edge, dry and unforgiving, especially in the winter. For more than four decades, it has whistled a lonely tune across Lake Titicaca, a silent witness to a mystery that has haunted the very soul of the Andes. On a crisp July morning in 1983, a group of 14 students and their teacher vanished from the face of the earth, leaving behind a trail of strange clues and a legacy of unanswered questions. Their story, buried by time and silenced by official decree, has remained a painful whisper—until now.

It began on Tuesday, July 12, 1983, at 6:45 a.m. in the quiet, southern cove of Ichu, Peru. A small white bus, a familiar sight on school trips, pulled up to a weathered wooden dock. From it emerged 15 students from the National School 43 of Ilave, full of youthful energy and the quiet anticipation of a day on the sacred lake. They were bundled in hand-knitted sweaters, their handmade leather backpacks filled with notebooks and warm thermoses, and their ages ranged from 11 to 13. The purpose of their excursion was simple: to explore the cultural and geographical wonders of the region.

But this trip was different. The official itinerary, which included visits to the famous floating islands of Amantaní and Taquile, was abruptly changed. A local guide, Elías Catacora, proposed a new route—a shortcut to a little-known island called Colyata, a place that didn’t exist on any official map. He promised a faster, more historically rich, and less touristy experience. The accompanying teacher, a woman known only as Miss Vilma, agreed. At 7:22 a.m., according to the fuel log at the fluvial station, the group boarded a small wooden boat with an outboard motor, the Inti 2, and set off toward the east. They were never seen again.

The final radio transmission from the Inti 2 came at 9:06 a.m., a brief, routine check-in from the guide confirming that all was well. The lake, according to local fishermen, was calm. There were no distress calls, no reports of a sudden storm. But when the afternoon stretched on and the group failed to return, a concerned teacher from the school began to make calls. By 4 p.m., a search and rescue operation was launched by the Peruvian Navy. By nightfall, it was clear that the boat had not reached any of its intended destinations.

For the next six days, the search was relentless. The Navy deployed four boats, two helicopters, and tactical divers, sweeping over 22 square kilometers of the lake. They questioned fishermen, guides, and smugglers. They flew over the area with thermal cameras. Nothing. Not a single piece of wreckage, not a floating paddle, not a scrap of clothing. The lake had swallowed them whole. The only trace they ever found was a single, handmade leather backpack floating near the Chifrón peninsula, tangled in totora reeds. It belonged to Luis Ancashi, a seventh-grade student. Inside, the notebook was dry, but it held a chilling, inexplicable drawing: a triangular island surrounded by small human figures with their arms outstretched.

The discovery only deepened the mystery. A preliminary forensic report stated that the notebook had been in the water for no more than 48 hours. This was impossible; nine days had passed since the disappearance. The Ministry of Education released a vague statement, but local whispers began to paint a different picture. The guide, Elías Catacora, had a history of proposing unapproved routes. The island of Colyata hadn’t been on any official map since the 1940s.

The desperate parents, many of them Aymara who spoke little Spanish and had lost faith in the authorities, organized their own search party. They pooled donations from local merchants and formed a communal tent on the beach. One father, Basilio Mamani, built a handmade raft and began to comb the less-traveled parts of the lake. He found something strange: a thick rope tied to a green plastic float with a rusted metal plate on it, carved with the initials “EC.” He handed this evidence to the authorities. It, too, disappeared without a trace.

On July 28, 1983, Peru’s Independence Day, the regional government officially closed the case. The prefect blamed a “probable accident,” a sudden storm, and a drift to the Bolivian side of the lake. But the locals knew the weather had been calm, and they knew the Inti 2 had not followed its usual course. That night, the families lit 14 candles on the shore in a somber vigil. Fourteen, not fifteen. The accompanying teacher, Miss Vilma, was not among the remembered.

In mid-August, a local journalist, Nilo Fernández, began his own investigation. He was young, ambitious, and had lost a cousin in the tragedy. For weeks, he traveled to Aymara communities, collecting firsthand accounts and secretly copying school documents that would later vanish from public archives. On his nightly radio show, he read aloud a chilling letter, purportedly written by one of the missing students days before the trip: “Miss Vilma says we will see things not in books. She says we must be quiet. If anyone asks, we went to Taquile, but she is taking us where no one goes.”

The letter was never authenticated, but it cast a dark shadow over Miss Vilma. Her contract was temporary, and she had no known relatives. When Nilo tried to interview the school director, he was briefly arrested for “interfering in an official investigation.” His show was canceled, his personal files seized, and his name appeared on a list of “subversive radicals” by the armed forces. The case began to be actively silenced.

But one thing they couldn’t erase was a group photograph taken before the students boarded the boat. In it, Miss Vilma is the only one not smiling. She is looking to the side as if listening to something out of frame. She holds a backpack, identical to the students’, but with the tag turned backward.

In October, three months after the disappearance, the water level of Lake Titicaca dropped unusually low. A local boy, herding llamas with his grandfather on the northern shore of Soto Island, found something incredible. Another backpack. It was partially buried, as if it had been intentionally sunk. Inside, it was dry and smelled of moss. There was a piece of dry barley bread, a wooden ruler, and a legible, damp notebook. The tag read, “Félix Coarita, Sixth Grade B.” Félix was another name on the list of the missing. But Soto Island was in the opposite direction of the boat’s planned route. The authorities claimed the backpack was unrelated to the case, perhaps thrown in years earlier. But Félix’s mother, Eulogia Quispe, told the press, “I sewed that tag myself. That is my thread. I prepared his lunch that morning. I know what I made with my own hands.” Her testimony was recorded but never broadcast.

The trail of strange clues continued. On November 9, 1983, a letter was sent to the head teacher who had organized the trip. It was a single, crumpled sheet of paper with a typewritten message: “Colyata is not an island. It is a door. Elías knew. She knew too. We saw the circles.” The letter was handed over to the police, but no formal investigation was opened. Officials dismissed it as a prank. The head teacher, however, knew better. The letter had been sent to her home, an address not on any public record, but one that only five people, including Miss Vilma, had access to from the travel committee.

A retired military officer who worked at a nearby meteorological station came forward, claiming he had heard strange interference on the lake’s radio frequency on the morning of the disappearance—metallic sounds like submerged chains, followed by a low humming. His recordings were given to the Navy but were never made public.

By December, the case was officially closed. The names of the children were removed from school records and archived as “deceased in a fluvial accident.” No bodies were ever found. And Miss Vilma? She was never seen again. No birth certificate, no family, no prior work records. Her only trace was a signature in the Navy’s logbook the day before the trip, listed as an “external technical official,” with a seal next to it that simply read, “Colyata.”

For decades, the story faded into the background of a nation grappling with its own internal conflicts. The story became a painful anecdote, a mournful whisper at local gatherings and silent funerals. But certain things could not be erased. In 1985, a new student was mistakenly assigned to a desk belonging to one of the missing children. Inside the drawer, he found a sheet of paper with a drawing: three concentric circles with small spiral marks inside. His teacher, out of caution, burned the page. In 1987, a tourist guide reported finding a carved stone on the eastern coast of the lake, depicting a veiled female figure surrounded by children with closed eyes. Locals warned him not to go there without permission. The guide photographed the stone, but the image was never published, and a year later, he vanished on a trip to the Island of the Sun.

In 1990, a new ministerial decree banned school excursions to unauthorized areas of the lake. While it didn’t explicitly mention the case, everyone understood. And the mothers kept waiting. Eulogia Quispe, the woman who had recognized her son’s backpack, turned her home into a small altar. She had 14 framed photos on the wall, one for each child, all with dried flowers and candles. But one candle, the one nearest the door, was different. It was made of black wax, and on its base was a folded piece of paper that only she touched. “It’s for her if she comes back,” she would say. “So she knows we didn’t forget her.” No one knew if “her” was her daughter or Miss Vilma.

For more than 30 years, the case lay dormant, forgotten by official history. Every now and then, a university student would attempt a thesis on the subject, but nothing ever stuck. Then, in 2023, the cycle was broken.

A team of glaciological researchers from the Andean Institute of Environmental Studies set up a temporary base on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca. During a routine survey, they found an anomaly in the permafrost—an accumulation of hardened textile material more than two meters deep. When they excavated, they found the impossible: three school backpacks, perfectly preserved and frozen solid. They were intact, with legible tags, handwritten names, and notebooks with ink that was still visible.

The discovery was immediately reported to the Bolivian authorities and, by protocol, to the Peruvian embassy. But before the news could be controlled, images were leaked to the press. The backpacks were covered in frost, with remnants of Andean wool and leather. One had a tag with red threads, another a piece of dry barley bread. And a third? A folded letter, signed by someone no one expected: Vilma. The note read, “It wasn’t a mistake. They opened it. I just followed them.”

The families in Ilave, Puno, and Juli reacted instantly. Although many of the original parents had passed away, their children, siblings, and grandchildren reactivated the committees, demanding that the case be reopened. The Peruvian government, under immense media pressure, announced a binational commission to investigate the Titicaca case. But the commission was never formed, and Bolivia sealed off the area, citing environmental preservation.

Still, a new detail was leaked. An independent journalist, Gabriel Soto, from the portal Crónica Andina, managed to get a few minutes inside the lab where the backpacks were stored. He photographed one of the internal tags, which was sewn with blue thread. It read: “Luis Sancasi, Seventh Grade A.” It was the same name from the first backpack found in 1983. But this was not the same backpack. The stitching was different, the leather newer, and the tag, though identical in name, had a small, hand-drawn symbol in the bottom corner—three concentric circles with spiral lines. Gabriel published the article with the magnified image and a haunting title: “Who Left Them Here and When?” Within hours, his site was hacked. His social media accounts were suspended. A week later, Gabriel Soto disappeared while filming a documentary on the Bolivian side of the lake. The last photo on his phone, recovered by his brother, showed a frozen shoreline. In the distance, a triangular stone structure, a shape that did not appear on any map, but only in a forgotten pencil drawing from a school notebook that had floated in the lake 41 years prior.

In May 2024, an anonymous tip led a team of documentarians to the ice base. They were only allowed to excavate a few more meters before their permit was revoked. But they found something more. A vertical object was buried, covered in hardened fabric. Its surface had claw marks, and inside was a soaked, almost illegible notebook. Only one page was clear. It contained a list of 14 names, crossed out one by one. At the bottom, a brief inscription: “They shouldn’t have all entered. The lake does not sleep when the circle is opened.”

Beside the notebook, the researchers found one final item: a half-melted black wax candle with strands of hair at its base. It was wrapped in a piece of school fabric with a broken tag, which was hand-stitched with a single word: “Vil…”

Today, 41 years later, the story is still not in the official history books. There are no plaques at the school, no memorials. But on the shores of Lake Titicaca, families still light candles every July 12th. Always 14. Always in silence. And among them, one candle is never extinguished—a black candle that someone lights every morning, even though no one has ever returned, and everyone says there is no one left alive.