Poor Mexican parents rue handing children to shelter
Overwhelmed and impoverished, Maria Evelia Zamora tried to give her son a better life at The Big Family, but now regrets sending him to the Mexican shelter accused of large-scale child abuse. In a notarized contract she keeps in a tattered black plastic bag, Zamora agreed to pay 30 pesos ($2.30) a month to the shelter and signed over custody of her then eight-year-old son with just three visits a year, promising not to reclaim him before his 18th birthday. The petite mother of four, who lives in poverty like half of Mexico's 120 million people, said she felt she had no other choice when her son started rebelling, stealing and fighting. "We brought him here so he could study," said Zamora, who hesitates when asked how old her son is today. She and her family are among the hundreds that agreed to these conditions, trusting in the good reputation of the shelter's octogenarian founder and director, Rosa del Carmen Verduzco, whose work regularly won praise and funding from local and national politicians. But dozens of these families have now gathered outside the shelter in the western town of Zamora, ruing the day they signed their strict contracts and trying to get their children back after authorities raided the facility Tuesday. Verduzco and eight employees have been arrested over allegations that hundreds of minors were kept at the shelter in squalid conditions and subjected to abuse and sexual assaults. - $2,000 to reclaim children - Authorities say the shelter's 607 residents, including 438 minors, slept among rats and insects and ate rotting food, but family members were not able to confirm the allegations, telling AFP they were always greeted at the entrance and never invited inside. "They told us it was a good place, that the children studied and learned a trade. We liked the things 'Mama Rosa' said, that the kids wouldn't be able to leave the shelter or take drugs," said Alvaro Vazquez, who made the 800-kilometer (500-mile) trip from the southern state of Guerrero to reclaim his 17-year-old grandson. Elderly and missing several teeth, Vazquez described being overwhelmed by the delinquent teenager after taking custody of him from his mother, who had turned to prostitution. When enrolling him in Alcoholics Anonymous at 14 years old failed to change the boy's uncontrollable behavior, the government's social services department suggested sending him to La Gran Familia two years ago. Vazquez had only seen his grandson twice since, always under the supervision of a shelter employee, he said. Norma Ortiz, a domestic worker from the western town of Tancitaro, had a similar experience. "There was always a young woman listening, but one of my sons managed to tell me under his breath that he wanted to come home, that he didn't like it," she said. Ortiz wanted to get her children back, but was told she would have to pay a penalty of nearly $2,000 for each broken contract. She agonized over the decision for a year before deciding she simply could not do that with her $46 weekly salary, she said. "Now I regret it," she said through tears.
