CNDH sends visitors to Sonora to investigate baby sales

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) informed that it will send visitors to Hermosillo, Sonora, to gather evidence of alleged sales of children to adoptive parents in the state.

The commission said it will monitor the investigation and issue the corresponding resolution when it concludes. So far Sonora Human Rights Commission has detected 17 cases. 

On September 2 the chief prosecutor in Sonora dropped charges against adoptive parents who paid a former official for babies taken from poor or drug-addicted mothers. Eight parents had been arrested. The ringleaders of the scheme remain at large.

Authorities say a child welfare official in Sonora took at least nine babies from poor or drug-addicted mothers and offered them for adoption with false paperwork for between US$5,000 and US$9,000. The main suspect, Vladimir Arzate, 30, worked in the office of the state prosecutor for child protection. The office had the power to take in at-risk children, but would have had to turn them over to a child welfare agency. Instead, Arzate is accused of working in collusion with a doctor, who would deliver fake birth certificates for the stolen babies under the adoptive parents' names, listing them as the biological parents, and two state police agents, who threatened mothers and relatives with addiction problems with an arrest warrant to pressure them to sign documents. 

(With information from AP)