Thread: Mothers who allegedly sold babies endured difficult lives

Mothers who allegedly sold babies endured difficult lives
June 21, 2008 - 11:01PM
By Jeremy Roebuck, The Monitor

RIO BRAVO, Tamps. - Erika Perez Quiroz admits the home she hoped to welcome her niece into doesn't amount to much.

Fifteen to 20 people squeeze between its cracked clapboard walls each night. And the smell of freshly bathed children does little to mask the surrounding stench of burning trash.

But at least here, she said, the child would have grown up with family.

Her sister had other ideas.

A 21-year-old product of Rio Bravo's cramped western colonias, Patricia Perez Quiroz simply left home one day - eight months pregnant - and came back several weeks later without a child.

"She told us the baby died," Erika said in Spanish. "Then, she said (the baby) was with the father, and then, (that the baby) was sick in the hospital."

Mexican authorities have since identified Patricia as one of nine Rio Bravo women who admitted to selling their newborns to a man accused of working as an international baby broker.

Investigators believe Amado Torres Vega, 64, of Harlingen, purchased children like hers for $2,500 to $3,000 a piece and then brought them to adoptive couples in the United States for a fee.

But since his arrest last month in Reynosa, Torres has maintained that his adoption work was legitimate and has questioned the story police have told about him.

"It doesn't make sense," he said during a May 31 jailhouse interview with The Monitor. "What kind of woman would sell her baby for $3,000?"

Three weeks later, the answer to that question remains elusive.

CREEPING DESPERATION

There is little to unite the women Torres encountered though his work except a sense of creeping desperation in their lives, neighbors and family members said. That and the fact that many have now packed up and disappeared.

Some held steady jobs in Reynosa maquiladoras, while others struggled with addiction and poverty.

Some lived in tumbledown shacks, while others resided in newly built homes in middle-class neighborhoods.

Patricia's life, though, was clearly going nowhere, her sisters said.

With two other children living with her estranged husband across town, she had dabbled in drugs and kept getting involved with the wrong kind of men.

While she had a large family to fall back on, they could hardly be described as reliable. Her 12 siblings, their children and extended family spend their days milling around their front yard begging for handouts from U.S. charity workers.

Still, sister Francisca Perez Quiroz said, there are some lines the family will not cross.

"What she did isn't right," she said in Spanish. "To us, she is dead."

‘SHE COULD HAVE ASKED FOR HELP'

A few blocks down the street, Claudia Pantoja Ramirez, 30, never appeared to take much interest in child rearing, her neighbors said.

The single mother left early each morning to work in a Reynosa factory and came home late each night after the nearby clubs shut down.

In between, her children - ages 5, 8, and 12 - fended for themselves among the barbed-wire clothesline, gaping trash pit and open outhouse surroundings of her now-abandoned house.

Their situation became so bleak at one point, neighbor Catarino Vega said, that he threatened to call government social workers after observing the children cooking dinner over a trash fire.

By the time police arrived late last month saying Pantoja had sold a child to Torres, she had taken her family and left.

"I don't approve," Vega said in Spanish. "If she was in a bad situation, she could have asked for help."

Pantoja has since told state prosecutors Torres smuggled her into the United States to have her child, but upon giving birth she asked him if she could back out of their deal. A day later, she woke up to find her baby gone and $3,000 from Torres, she said.

DIRE SITUATION

Across town, Alma Yadira Alva Gutierrez's smart concrete home in Rio Bravo's new Hacienda Las Brisas subdivision stands a world away from the poor, cramped neighborhood of Pantoja and the Perezes.

But her situation was no less dire. The mother of an 8-year-old girl with leukemia, Alva, 30, told authorities she sold three children to Torres to finance her sick daughter's medical care.

On a recent visit to the neighborhood, residents told The Monitor the mother and young girl were still living in the upscale house, but Alva didn't appear to be home at the time.

A BETTER LIFE

It's difficult to challenge at least one assertion Torres made in his interview last month.

"These women were irresponsible," he said. "I did what I could to give their children a better life."

But even if he's right, his alleged actions violate Mexican law. Despite his public denials of wrongdoing, police say he has confessed in private to illegally purchasing children.

He remains in a Tamaulipas jail pending trial on child trafficking charges. If convicted, he could face up to 12 years in prison.

State prosecutors have also filed cases against six mothers including Pantoja and continue to pursue charges against others. It remains unclear how many of the women Torres worked with are in custody, said Licensiado Oralia Mancha Barrera, a Tamaulipas assistant state attorney

But no matter the hardship these children may have endured had they stayed with their birth mothers, Patricia Perez Quiroz's mother-in-law, Socorro Treviño, can't fathom a childhood lived any other way.

"A better life?" she said in Spanish while surveying the dilapidated house around her. "If that was the case we would have given everyone here up for adoption.

"What better life is there (for a child) than with the mother?"

La Frontera staff writer Martha Leticia Hernández contributed to this report.


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