CHILDREN FACE LITTLE CHANCE OF ADOPTION

MARK STEVENSON

Associated Press

AGUA PRIETA, Mexico - Many people in this dry border region took the news of the child-smuggling ring as confirmation of old fears: that Americans are stealing Mexican children and selling them for adoption in "El Norte."

The reality is more mundane, but no less troubling.

The 17 children in the case who were given false names, smuggled into the United States and offered for adoption belong to an underclass of thousands of youngsters in Mexico.

Their parents can't care for them, and yet few will be adopted legally because of bureaucracy, a cultural stigma against adoption by Mexican couples and wariness of adoptions by foreigners. Many children in orphanages will be there until they're old enough to go out on their own.

The case came to light in May with the arrest of two New York women and a Mexican lawyer who allegedly charged up to $22,000 a child for using falsified papers to place Mexican children with U.S. couples.

Attorneys for lawyer Mario Reyes Burgueno, who had offices both in Agua Prieta and just across the border in Arizona, say he believed he was helping create a future for children whose mothers prostitutes or desperately poor couldn't care for them.

He pleaded innocent in June to U.S. charges of alien smuggling, mail fraud and wire fraud. The women pleaded guilty July 16 in New York to breaking U.S. immigration laws.

Reyes' arrest revived fears among Mexicans that children are being kidnapped and sold north of the border. Such suspicions led to the lynching of two Mexican men alleged kidnappers in southern Mexico last year.

But as details emerge of the operation that Reyes was involved in, it becomes increasingly clear the parents weren't unsuspecting, the children weren't stolen or mistreated, and as one local official confirmed all of the youngsters apparently went to good homes in the United States.

While Reyes' profits were excessive in some people's view, he apparently was just working around an adoption system that has all but ceased to function in Mexico.

One of the mothers who gave her child to Reyes was Araceli Mendez, a teen-age single mother from Papantla in the state of Veracruz, 1,060 miles southeast of Agua Prieta.

Mendez said she was directed to the lawyer's Mexico City offices by a friend who spotted a newspaper ad offering to take children for adoption.

"I wasn't able to give my daughter the things I wanted her to have like an education," Mendez said. "I was pregnant and alone, and I was afraid my mother would find out" about the pregnancy.

For people like Mendez, the social pressure against unwed mothers was too great, Mexico's legal adoption system was too daunting, and promises of a better life for their kids from adoption middlemen are too attractive.

Many Mexican children, especially those with poor parents, lack birth certificates, which are a requirement for any adoption. Custody proceedings are lengthy and expensive. Meanwhile, prospective parents are required to take lengthy tests and classes and usually must hire a lawyer.

And then they face social condemnation if the children don't look like them. So most Mexicans are interested only in "children that physically resemble them," said Laura Perez, spokeswoman for Mexico's national child welfare agency.

To top off the problems, the process by which welfare agencies take formal custody of children can take years. By the time the legal steps are completed, children have almost always passed their fifth birthday, which means Mexican couples don't want them, Perez said.

Enter the Americans. "Foreigners are much more flexible," she said. "They will take older children or ones who aren't perfect."

But Mexico places even more legal restrictions on foreign adoptions, and Perez admits Mexico "gives preference to adoptions by Mexicans."

Armando Zozoya, a lawyer representing a Mexican woman arrested in the adoption ring case, blames that on a cultural factor: Mexico doesn't want to have an image as an exporter of children.

"It's a misplaced sense of nationalism," he said. "The authorities are acting, without really saying it, (as though) they don't want children adopted by foreigners."

With looser rules, neighboring Guatemala, which has large numbers of street children and a high poverty rate, has become the fourth-largest source of children for U.S. adoptions, behind Russia, China and South Korea.

Whatever the reasons, successful legal adoptions by foreigners are a rarity in Mexico. There were only 206 in 1998. The same year, Mexican couples adopted 553 children through government agencies and an unknown number through private agencies, which are allowed to place children with Mexican couples.

That total was from a population of about 10,000 children living in registered orphanages, and many times more in unregistered charity homes. An additional 14,000 live on the streets of Mexican cities, according to a recent study by Mexican and international child welfare agencies.

The government must approve all adoptions by foreigners, and sets high standards for documentation. That's why many agencies in Mexico look for pregnant women who will sign their children away at birth or, as Reyes allegedly did, fake some of the paperwork.

Meanwhile, thousands of children are stuck in places like Casa Elizabeth, a nonprofit, 55-bed orphanage on the dry plains of Sonora state 30 miles south of Agua Prieta. In its 13 years, Casa Elizabeth has placed exactly one child in adoption, an infant boy who now lives in Flagstaff, Ariz.

"When they come here, this is their home," said the orphanage's director, Gaby Soto. "We assume they'll stay here until they grow up or leave. We've had kids go off to university after spending their childhood here."

Tere and Carmen, two lively, bright-eyed twin girls who have spent five of their six years at Casa Elizabeth, may soon overcome the odds and be adopted by an American couple. "It looks good," Soto said of the paperwork on the case.

Given all the obstacles to adoptions, Reyes argues he was helping children like Tere and Carmen. Prosecutors say he was charging thousands of dollars for that help and violating the law along the way.

They say he had doctors register the babies at birth under the names of their adoptive parents, or of his employees. They allegedly applied for false replacement birth certificates and visas for older children.

Caption:

ELIZABETH DALZIEL/The Associated Press * Living in orphanage:

Twin 6-year-olds sisters Tere, left, and Carmen, who have spent five years at

the Orphanage Casa Elizabeth in Imuris, Mexico, eat in the cafeteria.