Quechua infant taken without consent from her Indigenous Parents

international | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Friday February 18, 2005 00:19 by tahira faune alford - imc tahira at indymedia dot org

Quechua infant taken without consent from her Indigenous Parents

2/16/2005 11:39:39 PM Eastern Standard Time

  
From New York State:

An Indigenous Quechua infant was forcibly taken from her Indigenous parents without their consent.  
 
The family went to court to get their infant back yesterday, and representatives of Defensoria de los Pueblos Indigenas del Ecuador en America (DEPIEA) came to translate and to advocate for the family.  The court denied the family the right to have proceedings translated into their Quechua language, although there was a Quechua translator present.  The parents speak Quechua and some Ecuadorian Spanish.  The judge left the choice of translating proceedings into the parent's language up to the court-appointed lawyers for the family.  They refused the Quechua interpreter, calling it a "matter of trust", for they would not be able to understand what the interpreter and family were saying.  So the court proceeded without the family understanding what was being said around them, though this time, they did at least have an Ecuadorian translator which made it easier for them to understand the Spanish, though after court, they told the translator that they really did not understand what was going on.
"It was decided that they as Indigenous parents were unfit to raise their own child", says DEPIEA Quechua translator and advocate Nicholas Chango.  The last case in which Chango advocated for a family's child to be returned from the state resulted in the child's return to the family within 5 days.
  It is still unclear why or how the state became involved with this family.  The Mother had returned from work and was getting ready to take her Little One to the clinic for a check up, when the Preventative services worker and a social worker came to their home and said they were there to take the baby to the Hospital. The family said, "No, no, we are taking our baby to the Hospital."  The social worker then called the police and they came to the families home, and while the parents were in the very next room trying to communicate with the social worker, the police overpowered the babysitter and took the Indigenous couples three month old daughter away to child services. 
 
  Preventative services do not have to be accepted into the home unless court appointed, and they were not in this case.  The Mother may not have been told in a way that she could understand (she understands Quechua and Ecuadorian Spanish, not the more rapid dialects that many translators speak) that the woman from Preventative services coming to her home was not just a helpful someone coming over to help, this was someone entering the home to report back to Child Protective services.  The mother did not have to invite her in to her home, although as they'd met in the hospital setting where she gave birth to her baby, she trusted this person. The mother saw this person as coming to help, not to eventually take her newborn daughter away to a foster care system.   

  For the past five months, the parents have not even been allowed to know the location of their own infant daughter. The foster care worker brings the family their baby to a clinic for a one hour supervised visit per week.  The child's mother brought bags of clean new clothes for her baby girl to be dressed in to the foster care system.  The father comments that when they are allowed to visit their baby, she is only dressed in old and worn clothes, and does not appear to be cleaned well. The baby's father keeps saying in his language, "I was robbed, I was robbed, they took our Baby."  When the Mother was asked by translator what was the reason she was given when they took her baby, she looked stunned.  She knew of no reason for anyone to be allowed to take her infant daughter from her.
The baby was chubby and healthy, as the father says "Sono, Sono", when she was taken away from her parents.  While she has been in the foster care system, they have watched their child's health deteriorate: she was able to hold her head up by herself when taken away, and after being taken, she was no longer able to do that.  Her weight dropped drastically after being taken from her parents.  The infant is also internally bleeding from the liver, and further details cannot be released at this time.  She is starting to regain strength physically, though infancy is the time when a baby bonds with her mother and learns to feel secure.    

  Many Quechua families are forced to move north to find work because their rainforest territory is being encroached by multinational developers like Chase JPMorgan.  Here in the land of the American dream, a young family has been ripped apart, an infant daughter kept from her loving Indigenous parents.  Yesterday's court proceedings left many involved asking questions, and the American dream was shattered in a New York courtroom.