Baby Drama

As my avid readers know, I'm currently staying with friends in a small apartment building about 1/2 block from the school in Mexico City where I teach. This is giving me a closer look into the lives of my neighbors than I had when I lived in the condo complex in Metepec. (although, in metepec, I did notice that the men dressed up in suits and smoked by their cars at 10am, watching the portero wash their cars, and then their wives would get all dressed up in athletic gear and walk back and forth on the small road in front of our condos at 11am. This, apparently, was how upper-middle-class Mexicans assert their economic status - they dress well, and mainly separate themselves from the working class Mexicans who wash their cars and their kitchens.)

The apartment building where I am right now is mainly other teachers from my school, but there are 2 apartments with Mexicans - one apartment with 2 single women and one apartment with a Mexican family.

The apartment with 2 single women is only occupied occasionally. The women likely live in a small town near DF, but work or go to school in the city. So they share a cheap apartment to sleep in when they're in town. This is common in Mexico City. It has the most jobs of anywhere in Mexico, but it's crowded and dirty, so people try to work here but live somewhere else.

The apartment with the family is kind of crowded. A 20-something man with his dad, his pregnant wife, and his preschool-aged son are living in an apartment that we consider to be for 1 person (maybe a married couple). They do not have a car. This family seemed nice, and pleasant, and relatively happy, if crowded.
This weekend a huge family drama played out. I speak enough Spanish to get the gist. The wife had her second baby, her family came to visit, and then she left with them. She did not take her children. There was lots of confusion. What exactly happened is basically speculation on our part (we do have some biased details) but through this, I did learn a lot of facts about Mexican society:

1. The local police can be called on in domestic disputes. While they may or may not show up, when they do, they will do basically what U.S. cops do - take down some names, make sure no one is dead, and dispel the situation. Then leave. They will not talk with the children or ask about their welfare.
2. Mothers in Mexico have complete custody of their children. (We had to consult our Mexican co-workers to get this info.) Whether or not they married the mother of their children, fathers are generally not consulted in custody disputes.
3. A mother has to have physically left her child for at least 2 months before she can be considered absent. Children are only considered abused or malnourished if they are routinely hospitalized. Children are only considered neglected if they lack basic food (1 tortilla with beans every 3 days is considered basic nutrition), shelter (anything with a roof counts, even if there is no electricity or running water), and clothing (1 complete outfit with any kind of footwear - even flip-flop sandals - counts).

Some things I already knew about the child welfare system:
4. Once DIF takes the child into custody, any family member without a criminal record can claim custody of the child. As less than 1% of all crimes in Mexico are ever punished, very few "criminals" have a record. Once that person has claimed custody of that child, DIF rarely follows up to be sure that s/he is still caring for the child. (keep in mind that "caring" is a minimal requirement)
5. Less than 100 children from Mexico are adopted outside of the country every year, mainly by Mexicans living abroad and/or married to U.S. citizens who claim responsibility for their distant relatives. Mexico does not want to admit that they have trouble caring for their own children.

So basically, an infant and a toddler have been abandoned (perhaps only temporarily) by their mother in the apartment next to me. The mother has the right, at any time in the next two months, to retrieve the children and take them away from their father forever. In the meantime, it's unclear who will care for them. Even if the father does a great job in caring for these children, and loves them immensely, he doesn't have any right to the kids. If neither the father nor the mother want the children, it will be years - if ever - before permanent caring custodians can be found.

All of this while thousands upon thousands of caring individuals could and would take these children into their homes and care for them.

Today, I am praying for that family and thousands of others for whom the "system" has failed.