About a month ago, CCTV images of a woman in a shopping mall carrying off a toddler who was not her own were broadcast on Mexico’s most popular television news show, introduced by the anchor as a rare chance to see child-stealing in action. And that was about that. A few days later, an English six-year-old called Madeleine McCann went missing in Portugal — and in Britain the media hurricane is still swirling. The difference is that in Mexico the need to protect children from the robachicos — or child snatchers — lodged itself in the collective parenting consciousness a long time ago. The recent airing of grainy images of little Jose Maria Martinez’s abduction was seen merely as a reminder not to get lax. Few need the prod.
Go to Mexico City’s main zoo on a Sunday and the place throbs with excited small children bursting with energy but rarely getting under your feet. Many are literally attached to their parents by short, brightly coloured leashes sold at the entrance. Try hurrying down an escalator in the metro and you are likely to be stopped in your tracks by a mother-child wall. The kid may come up to his mum’s chest, but there is no way she is releasing his hand to let anybody past. Drive around the city’s wealthier barrios and you will almost certainly get stuck behind parents triple parking outside schools, scuttling their offspring past walkie-talkie-wielding guards through high metal gates. Private hospitals know that without bank-like security around their nurseries, many patients would take their custom elsewhere.
But for all the fear and the precautions, nobody in Mexico seems to know precisely how much of a problem child stealing really is. The federal authorities keep no statistics, and few states do. A recent security company estimate put annual abductions at 3 000. That figure is dominated by kidnappings — not just of children — but it none the less feeds parents’ anxieties. And many parents will never get so much as a ransom demand.
Maria Elena Solis formed the National Association of Stolen and Disappeared Children, which she runs from the front room of a Mexico City low-income housing estate, after tracking down her own grandchild, who had been abducted and sold into adoption. Other motives, she told me, include family feuds, sexual abuse and sexual slavery. Solis goes to great efforts to enlist the media in her search for missing kids, and getting last month’s mall disappearance on prime-time TV was a bit of a coup. But few today are aware the little boy is still missing. Still fewer will remember his name.
But while Mexicans simply absorb real cases into their general terror of child snatchers around every corner, the response to rumours that they are close to home can be much more dramatic. Two years ago, two undercover policemen who had been taking pictures near a primary school were lynched on live television. The story had spread that they were stealing children.
About the same time rumours of a baby nabbed from its mother’s arms near where I live reached my mother-in-law. For months afterwards she refused to leave the house with her grandchild.
A society unable to cope with contemporary dangers? Not so, say anthropologists, who see deep cultural roots in such extreme reactions, perhaps going back to the prevalence of child sacrifice in pre-conquest Mesoamerica.
Every society has its parenting nightmares, but the robachicos must be one of the hardest to keep from spinning out of control. — Â