Illegal appropriation of children in Santiago del Estero

Colectivo de Derechos de Infancia y Adolescencia
Declaration

Faced with the facts that are day by day consolidating the illegal appropriation of a baby, son of Alejandra Ibarra and Mario Alejandro Díaz, born on September 29 th 2005 in the province of Santiago del Estero, and considering that from that moment until now the child has not been restored to his biological parents, the Colectivo de Derechos de Infancia y Adolescencia expresses a strong repudiation against the mechanisms, practices, institutions and people who carried out this violation of rights, clearly stated in the Argentinean Legislation and in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has constitutional hierarchy in our country since 1990.

Law N* 24.779, in subsection a) of section 317 compels the judge “to summon the child parents in order to give their consent to grant the custody for a future adoption. In this particular case neither Alejandra nor Mario agreed in any moment to give their son to Justice. From that moment on all the judicial proceeding becomes irregular, provided that until now the definite restoring of Francisco, the child, has not taken place, not even the gradual restoring ordered by the third judge of the case Federico Argibay Berdaguer. Today, twenty days from that decision, the child continues in the hands of the presumed adopters, in an anomalous circumstance from the legal point of view.

The biological parents denounced before the Criminal Courts the abduction of the newborn and the forgery of their signature in the document giving the custody of the child. Judicial expert reports later verified that the document had been actually forged.

Six months from that crime, Mario Alejandro Díaz passed two weeks of hanger strike in the building of the provincial Court, in a desperate claim for recovering his child, but this fact was not taken into account.

We demand the immediate restoring of the appropriated child to their parents and, as to the responsibility of the institutions, we refer to article 35 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires the state parties to take “all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent the abduction of, the sale of or traffic in children for any purpose or in any form”.

Likewise, given the importance of the denounced violations, as the scale and the meticulous organization that these practices present, we also consider urgent the need to investigate and stop these nets, because as time goes by children traffic continues operating, in, as we believe, a systematic unpunished violation of the law and the Rights of Children. No judicial or political measure or decision of State would be effective, if the needs of those families who live in the exclusion and misery, sad conditions necessary for the abuses that grow and ramify over them, were not taken into account.

Deprotection and abandonment are the first engines that impel this machinery and, in accordance with this principle, we see the national and provincial state as the first responsibles, because with their absence, silence or complicity they let families, children and territories at the luck and risk of poverty. Thus, the way to any profit or business is led open.

In a country where the richest 10% takes possession of the 37% of the income and where 20% of population lives with less than 3 pesos per day, and in a province that during 50 years lived under a quasi feudal system, territory in where almost half of its population (information from Santiago del Estero y La Banda) and 66% of children under 14 years old live under the poverty line, it is not casual that a prepared net of traffic and trade of babies exists. According to a denounce made by the organization Adoptar this net has appropriated 25.000 children and has been operating for 25 years.

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