Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population, Poverty & SDGs

MEXICO: 120,000 Missing Children

Adrián Reyes

MEXICO CITY, Jul 27 2005 (IPS) - Four-year-old Ian was kidnapped from his home near Mexico City. His body, showing signs that he had been severely beaten and sexually abused, was found shortly afterwards under a hotel room bed by the cleaning staff.

Ian, who was kidnapped on Jul. 15, is just one of more than 120,000 children who have gone missing in Mexico, a country of 104 million people, since the Attorney General’s Office began to keep statistics in 1996.

The little boy’s body was so disfigured that his mother was only able to identify it by the shoes that he was still wearing, the president of the Mexican Association of Stolen and Missing Children, María Elena Solís, told IPS.

The police tracked down and arrested the killer, who turned out to be a neighbour who had been involved with Ian’s mother at one point.

The neighbour confessed that he knew the boy was at home alone, and took advantage of the circumstances to seize him, to take revenge against his mother, said Solís.

Solís created the Association in 1996, a year after her two granddaughters, aged eight months and two years, were kidnapped for the purpose of selling them to a couple with fertility problems. The girls were located and rescued thanks to swift police action.

“I have suffered the loss and experienced the anguish and the desperation, I understand the pain of thousands of couples who have had a child abducted,” said Solís.

The activist cited another case, that of Axel, who was taken from his home near Mexico City in January along with his eight-year-old sister and six-year-old brother. The kidnapper, a friend of the children’s father, approached them when they were home alone and invited them to go shopping.

He took them to the northwestern state of Sinaloa, where he beat Axel to death and then left his sister and brother in the Angel de la Guarda shelter.

“When we found them, the two surviving children told us that their father’s friend hit their brother in the stomach and told him that he didn’t like him,” said Solís.

In nearly a decade of work, the Association has helped recover 274 missing minors of the 500 cases they have taken up. In most of the cases, the children have been found alive. But in some cases, help arrived too late, and only the body was found.

In January 2003, a man kidnapped four-year-old Abel. The press gave the case heavy coverage, which apparently made the kidnapper nervous, so he decided to kill the boy, said Solís.

But 70 percent of missing children have been taken by their father or mother during separation, divorce or custody battles, said lawmaker Angélica de la Peña of the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD).

The remaining 30 percent are stolen with the aim of selling them to national or international “adoptive” parents or illegal adoption rings, exploiting them in child pornography or sex exploitation rings, or in a small proportion of cases trafficking their organs in the United States, said de la Peña, chair of the Special Commission on Children, Adolescents and Families.

Few of these children are rescued, the legislator pointed out.

Guillermo Tamborrel, a legislator from the conservative governing National Action Party (PAN) and a member of the Commission for Attention to Vulnerable Groups, said penal code reforms adopted by Congress in April stiffened the penalties for those who injure or exploite children as part of criminal acts.

The sentences now stretch from 25 to 50 years in prison, he noted.

Child trafficking rings tend to sell newborns and children under three to childless couples, while children aged four to 11 are often put out on the streets to panhandle in large cities, and 12 to 18-year-olds are sold to sexual exploitation rings, said Tamborrel.

“Civil society organisations have documented cases of children who have been sold for 30,000 dollars. Investigations have also found that a majority of thefts of children for the purposes of selling them are carried out among the poorest sectors of society,” he added.

Sometimes impoverished parents even sell their own children, or “rent” them to people who put them out to beg. This phenomenon is more frequent among rural indigenous groups who migrate to large cities, said Tamborrel.

To help reduce the risks facing children in Mexico City, municipal authorities, Green Ecological Party legislators, and workers from the soft drink company Cooperativa Pascual Boing launched an educational campaign in 2004 on the dangers posed by organised child trafficking rings.

The awareness-raising campaign provides simple safety recommendations to children and parents.

It underlines, for example, that children should not be left alone at home or in a car and should only be allowed to play in safe places, special care should be taken when hiring domestic help, children’s photos should not be published or distributed, and financial or economic information should not be given to strangers.

Since last year, the Mexico City government has been distributing identity cards for children that include a recent photo, fingerprints, a lock of hair for possible DNA testing in case of necessity, and the personal particulars of the adult who assumes the responsibility of taking care of the child when he or she leaves public school in the afternoon.

Mexico’s leading TV stations Televisa and TV Azteca support organisations that are dedicated to the search for missing children, airing ads or announcements without charge.

The TV stations broadcast photos of missing children during prime time, asking for help in finding them. It was these announcements that helped investigators solve the cases of Ian and Abel.