investigation and search were critical, not only in the interests of justice, but also to protect the life and wellbeing of Mayra Angelina Gutiérrez. Second, the case concerned the disappearance of a woman amid a high incidence of murders and violence against women in Guatemala. And third, because from the outset the complaints suggested the possibility of a forced disappearance. 119. The Commission notes that the disappearance was reported on April 9, 2000, by Mayra Angelina Gutiérrez's brother. There is nothing in the record to show that any search for Mayra Angelina Gutiérrez was ordered in the hours immediately after the report was filed. According to the record, the first efforts to look for her began on April 11, 2000, in response to a habeas corpus petition lodged on that date. Bearing in mind the above-described standards on the need for an immediate response in such cases, as well as the critical nature of the first few hours, the Commission considers that the failure to conduct a search for 48 hours after the State was made aware in the first missing person’s report that she could be in serious and imminent danger, in itself constitutes a breach of the duty to investigate with due diligence. 120. In second place, the Commission notes that these violations continued not only during the initial months, but also throughout the investigation, and in the decisions on the habeas corpus petitions. The Commission underscores that the efforts made in the days following the missing person's report merely consisted of the dispatch of official letters to various officials in the framework of the habeas corpus petitions lodged, which proved fruitless because in response to those letters the relevant authorities said that Mayra Angelina Gutiérrez was not in state custody. The Commission has no information regarding specific follow-up measures. So it was that during the entire month of April 2000, on one hand state authorities formally processed the habeas corpus petitions without taking specific steps to search in concrete locations, while the agency in charge of the investigation simply collected information and conducted a single search in pursuit of a solitary line of inquiry which had to do with Mayra Angelina Gutiérrez’s alleged romantic liaisons. The way in which the relevant authorities approached that line of inquiry is analyzed in paragraph 137 below. For the purposes of this section, those were the only investigative procedures during the first month after the disappearance was reported. There is no information to suggest that immediate measures were ordered in pursuit of other plausible lines of inquiry that emerged in the wake of the missing person’s report. 121. The Commission notes that this lack of diligence led the petitioning organization to file a new habeas corpus petition on May 3, 2000, almost a month after the disappearance. That petition was processed and dealt with following the same formalities as the previous one; in other words, there was merely a repetition of official letters to state entities, with a note taken of the response that Ms. Gutiérrez was not being deprived of her liberty at any detention center. In May, the second month after the disappearance was reported, apart from multiple contradictory public statements by state agents, the authorities in charge of the investigation simply conducted raids at two locations and, six weeks after the disappearance, checked Ms. Gutiérrez's migratory movements. In July, the fourth month after the alleged victim was reported missing, a statement was taken from one of Ms. Gutiérrez's neighbors. 122. The Commission notes that the paucity of initial steps taken in the investigation during the first four months after the disappearance was reported progressively diminished over the rest of the investigation up to the present. Thus, the record shows that no other steps were taken to find the alleged victim over the remainder of 2000. Toward the end of that year the special inquiry procedure was ordered, in which context the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman was instructed to conduct the investigation. It was only then that the habeas corpus petitions were denied, in disregard of the urgency with which such remedies should be addressed. There is nothing in the record to show that the Ombudsman's Office took effective steps to search for the victim, and the few procedures that it does contain have to do with the hypothesis concerning the purported romantic liaisons. Indeed, a report from the Ombudsman's Office of May 4, 2001, on that hypothesis gave rise to a detention order for the alleged victim's supposed former partner. Over the remainder of 2001, nothing was done to pursue the investigation. 123. The slow pace of the investigation and the failure to adopt measures to find the victim and elucidate what happened became increasingly sluggish over the ensuing years, even lapsing into spells of complete inactivity. 25