A 14-year-old Mexican girl who was taken by authorities and sent screaming to live in the US was returned home on Wednesday after DNA tests showed she is not the daughter of the Houston, Texas, woman who claimed her.
The case of Alondra Luna Nunez drew international attention after a video of the distraught girl being forced into a police vehicle last week circulated in media and on social networks.
The Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Mexican officials were carrying out a court order to send Alondra to Dorotea Garcia, a Houston woman who claimed the girl was her daughter who had been illegally taken to Mexico by her father years ago.
Alondra’s family insisted authorities were mistaken, but their pleas were ignored.
“It is terrible that they could do this do you,” the mother, Susana Nunez, said at an evening barbecue in Guanajuato, where two dozen family members celebrated the girl’s return with balloons, streamers, sizzling steak and chorizo.
Alondra laughed and hugged her brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles. As the sun went down, family and friends lit candles and recited the rosary on a sidewalk. Alondra wept as an elderly neighbor swept her into an embrace that lasted for minutes.
“At first I was very upset because I had never been so far away from my parents,” Alondra said.
However, she said she was optimistic the mistake would be remedied.
“So after a while I calmed down a bit,” she said.
Garcia, speaking to a Houston television station, said the first time she saw the girl, “I saw my daughter.”
She gave few details about how she ended up leaving Mexico with the girl, although she said she knows many will not look kindly on her actions.
“The people who know me don’t need me to give an explanation for what happened,” she said later. “Whatever explanation I give won’t change the minds of people in Mexico or here.”
Mexican agents assigned to Interpol took Alondra from her middle school in Guanajuato State on April 16 and transported her to a courtroom in the neighboring state of Michoacan, according to a statement from the Mexican Attorney General’s Office.
In court, Alondra’s parents and Garcia each presented birth certificates and gave testimony, before the judge ruled in favor of Garcia, ordering the girl into her custody, according to the Michoacan court.
Alondra, upon returning to Mexico, said she asked for a DNA test and the judge turned her down.
The judge who ruled on the case said it was not within her duties to order a DNA test.
“We as judges are only responsible to resolve the case with respect to recovering the minor,” Judge Cinthia Elodia Mercado said. “We don’t do investigations or make inquiries.”
Meanwhile, Alondra Diaz Garcia remains missing.
Reynaldo Diaz is suspected of abducting her from Houston in 2007, according to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
A felony warrant has been issued for his arrest.
Alondra recorded a video, posted to social media, in which she looked calm and happy.
“I’m fine. I see that the United States is nice. I don’t understand anything they’re saying, because everything is in English,” she said in the video.
She on Wednesday said that she was only trying to reassure her family and did not really feel fine.
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