Mexico is amongst the world's most popular sources and destinations for international child abduction while also being widely regarded as having one of the least effective systems of protecting and returning internationally abducted children within its borders.
To help protect abducted children Mexico signed on to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction in 1991, the Inter-American Convention on the International Return of Children and the Inter-American Convention on International Traffic in Minors.
Since adhering to the Hague Abduction Convention, the world's most recognized and utilized instrument for addressing international child abduction or parental child trafficking, Mexico has been repeatedly criticized for enjoying the benefit of having its treaty partners protect Mexico's own internationally abducted children, while being consistently non-compliant in fulfilling its reciprocal obligations to protect and return children abducted to Mexico. To date its procedures for enforcing its treaty obligations are unpredictable and entirely ineffective. The Centre for International Family Law Studies in Cardiff, Wales compared seven jurisdictions, including Mexico. The conclusion was that Mexico was by far the worst offender in its failure to return abducted children.
In consideration of Mexico's history of noncompliance, as documented extensively over the past 11 years in the US State Department's annual compliance reports, Texas courts made a landmark decision finding Mexico's legal system ineffective and lacking legal mechanisms for the immediate and effective enforcement of child custody orders and, furthermore stating, Mexico posed a risk to children's physical health and safety due to human rights violations committed against children, including child labor and a lack of child abuse laws.
The US State Department has posted many travel warnings for Mexico including at least one every year since 2007. In 2010, the murder of three Americans connected to the U.S. Consulate in Juarez prompted the US State Department to modify their warning to authorize the departure of children dependents of U.S. government personnel in U.S. consulates and offer financial assistance to relocating families.
Child abduction has been defined as a form of child abuse.
Recovery of abducted children from Mexico
Broadly defined, there are five principal avenues for attempting to recover children abducted to Mexico: the Hague Convention, deportation/expulsion, criminal extradition, domestic Mexican family law and other, mostly extralegal, options.
Hague Convention
The Hague Convention is widely viewed as completely ineffective in Mexico with the country being extensively cited as having problems with nearly every aspect of its implementation. Oftentimes children can not be located for Convention proceedings to start due to problems with law enforcements performance. Law enforcement has reported an inability to locate children even when parents have reported giving them the children's exact address in Mexico. Although, Mexico claims to provide free legal representation for victim parents the provided representation is often completely unable to move the case forward and will only represent the parent during the natural trial, not during appeals. Parents who have been able to gain traction in Mexican courts have turned to private attorneys. Even when these attorneys have won favorable verdicts they are not enforced if the abductor files appeals or amparos which suspend enforcement of the decision until they've been adjudicated, frequently causing years of delays. In the unlikely event that children are located, legal proceedings commence, all appeals are heard and a final return order is issued, the abductor may appeal the manner in which the order is enforced (though it is less likely that enforcement will be suspended in such cases.) Once all judicial hurdles to enforcement have been cleared law enforcement issues can arise anew due to their inability to locate children as in the case of the Combe-Rivas abduction where, after four years, the Mexican Supreme Court issued a final decision ordering the child's return in June 2009. To date the decision remains unenforced due to an inability to locate the child.