International child abduction in Mexico
[5] Broadly defined, there are five principal avenues for attempting to recover children abducted to Mexico: the Hague Convention, deportation/expulsion, criminal extradition, domestic Mexican family law and other, mostly extralegal, options.
In cases where taking the child back out of Mexico to the home country is sought the decision can be subject to the same lack of enforceability pending the exhaustion of all appeals that plagues Hague Convention applications.
Experts say the corruption extends from ordinary citizens to high reaches of government and that most Mexicans have become accustomed to paying bribes and to the notion that the average police officer will try to shake them down in some way.
[14] In addition to being unable to locate children or adjudicate child abduction cases, Mexico also has one of the highest general kidnapping rates in the world, with dozens of adult U.S. citizens among the victims.
[citation needed] In cases of international child abduction an amparo can be filed at any point and effectively blocks progression of legal procedures until it has been heard, often many months, or even years later.
In theory this gives the treaty sufficient legal clout to be effective but, in practice, the lack of implementing legislation leads to many divergent and contradictory interpretations of the Convention which is intentionally vague in certain areas to allow for it to apply to a broad range of cases.
In both cases the Mexican family filed amparo appeals blocking enforcement of judicial decisions ordering the children returned home to their surviving custodial parent in Spain.
This type of bilateral cooperation is part of a broadening recognition of the responsibility both nations share in addressing problems in the region, and is most notably demonstrated in the Mérida Initiative, the $1.4 billion aid package to help Mexico interdict illicit drugs, arms and human trafficking.
The US State Department has a virtual monopoly on information in such cases, but refuses to act as a vigorous advocate for left-behind American parents while also preventing the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children or anyone else from playing that role.
What a perfect time for us to say we are going to save your entire country, we are going to lend you billions of dollars and shore up your economy, but you know what, since that meeting with President Clinton we now have on record over 3,000 murders and fugitives down there and we do not know how many kids".
I would also like to thank Mr. Lampson from Texas as the Chairman of the Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, and Mr. Ose from the State of California, who have devoted much of their time to raising our level of awareness of the growing problem of international child abduction.
These left-behind parents have put their faith and trust in an international agreement, The Hague Convention, which is clear and explicit on the obligation of signatory governments to return an abducted or wrongfully retained child to his or her country of habitual residence.
"the principal reason other nations, whether they are signatories to the Hague Convention or not, refuse to cooperate with the United States in returning abducted American children is that there are no real consequences for failing to do so."
In recognition of the fact that the US State Department would not voluntarily inform Congress, U.S. courts, law enforcement authorities, family law attorneys or the general public about the gross noncompliance of foreign countries in adhering to the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, Congress enacted an annual reporting requirement obligating the State Department to publish a detailed annual report on the reliability and effectiveness of the Convention in protecting and securing the return of abducted American children in foreign countries hoping that the law would make available a unique and vitally important source of information to parents, courts, governments and attorneys worldwide.
The USCA observed noncompliance in the areas of law enforcement and judicial performance, and experienced serious difficulties communicating with the Mexican Central Authority (MCA) that resulted in costly inconvenience for LBPs and significant delays in processing return applications.
Two main factors, we believe, contributed to this problem: first, too few law enforcement agents have been assigned to cover large territories and populations; and second, an apparent lower priority has been given to international child abduction cases compared to other, increasingly violent criminal activity.
The MCA and the state Supreme Courts of Nuevo León and Guanajuato collaborated with the U.S. Embassy to carry out two judicial seminars in late September, involving USCA and academic experts from Guadalajara and Mexico City.
In the few cases that led to the return of the child to the United States, the LBP retained a private attorney with a greater understanding of the Convention's principles than Mexican public prosecutors have tended to exhibit.
Mexican judges have also abused the "amparo", a special type of constitutional challenge, which results in additional delays to Convention cases and increases the LBP's legal costs.
Mexico must recognize the critical need to devote more resources to locating missing children and bringing abducting parents to justice in order to become compliant with the Convention.
Abuses of the Amparo appeal system during this reporting period often led to excessive delays in Convention cases and further increased the legal costs incurred by the left-behind parent.
In addition to difficulty locating children, the Department also continues to note occasional abuses of the amparo system, as discussed in the "Notable Issues and Cases" section of this report.
The Department is encouraged by a recent decision by a Mexican federal judge, which overcame an amparo allowing a child to immediately return to the United States, and hopes this precedent will continue.
They have held joint meetings and telephone conference calls with Mexican state representatives and left-behind parents, and have worked together to review the status of long outstanding cases.
The training opportunities and judicial conferences organized by the Department for Mexican officials seem to be reaping benefits; the past year again saw a high number of court-ordered returns from Mexico to the United States.
In the last report, Mexico was upgraded to "not fully compliant" from an earlier designation of "noncompliant" to reflect an increase in the number of successful returns and the GOM's efforts to address some of the Department's long-held concerns.
Though the MCA has begun to work more closely with the various branches of local law enforcement, including Interpol, we have not observed a substantial change in the frequency with which children are found.
We have made numerous appeals to the Mexican Government to invest greater funding and attention towards international child abduction-related issues, including strengthening the MCA, offering more training for judges, and allocating more resources for locating children.
A group of Mexican judges and Central Authority officials visited Washington in December 2002 for a U.S. Government-arranged program focused on familiarization with Hague implementation in the U.S.[53] From the United States.
Several of the cases cited above, and the issue of implementation of the Convention in general, were raised at the Binational Commission meetings in 1999 and 2000 and by the Ambassador in a discussion with a Foreign Ministry Under Secretary in February 2001.
