Hundreds of minors were kept in squalid conditions and subjected to abuse
(Photo: AP)
Zamora: Mexican authorities on Saturday moved 161 children and six adults out of a shelter where investigators say hundreds of minors were kept in squalid conditions and subjected to abuse.
Police raided the home, known as "La Gran Familia" and located in the western town of Zamora, on Tuesday amid reports that five kidnapped children were being held there.
They found those children and much more: 400 minors and 200 adults living among large piles of rotting food and other fetid trash, as well as horror stories about sleeping amid rats and insects -- and even being forced to perform oral sex on adults.
The shelter is operated by Rosa del Carmen Verduzco, an octogenarian known as "Mama Rosa."
The children and the adults were moved to shelters operated by the DIF, the state-run family services office, in three other states and Mexico City, DIF head Laura Vargas told reporters late Saturday.
"We are going to give them a dignified place where they can live with better conditions," Vargas said, speaking from Zamora.
The remaining residents will be moved to other shelters next week, Vargas said.
- Friends in high places -
Verduzco, who founded the shelter some 60 years ago, was hospitalized due to hypertension and kept under police guard pending charges after the raid. By late Saturday all charges were dropped and Verduzco was allowed to go free.
However six of the eight workers who had been arrested with her were jailed, local media reported, citing attorneys for the workers.
At least one of those detained has confessed to sexual abuse, investigation spokesman Tomas Zeron has said, adding that some of the children at the shelter reportedly suffered physical abuse such as beatings or were kept in isolation with little food.
Prominent Mexicans rushed to Verduzco's defense, including former president Vicente Fox.
An open letter signed by leading intellectuals -- including writer Elena Poniatowska, journalist Lydia Cacho, historian Enrique Krauze, as well as French 2008 Nobel in literature Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio -- demanded recognition for Verduzco's work helping children over the years.
Krauze, writing on Twitter, even decried the "unprecedented public lynching of an innocent person" in reference to Verduzco.
Relatives however have a starkly different view, claiming that Verduzco demanded money to let them see their children and registered infants born in the shelter as her own.
- Growing up in the shelter -
Most of the children were dropped off at the shelter by their desperately impoverished parents.
Mexican DIF officials are discovering as they interview shelter residents that many of them grew up in the shelter and never left, sometimes never stepping outside of the building.
"There are many [adults] who have never gone out and for them we shall seek to train them and give them work," said Michoacan state government Salvador Jara.
Jara said that officials worry about separating children or young adults that lived so long together.
A group of parents and relatives tried to prevent DIF workers from moving children from Zamora to a shelter in Guadalajara.
Some have camped outside the facility since the raid, pleading to get their children back and telling investigators that shelter workers prevented them from seeing their youngsters for long periods of time.
( Source : AFP )
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