Jennifer Aguilera-Hurtado snuggles with daughters Teresa, 9, left, and Hannah, 4, at home in Albuquerque. The girls were kidnapped by their father in 2008, and Aguilera-Hurtado has fought since then to bring them home. Last week, she was able to do that. Photo Credit - Marla Brose/Journal
Someday, she will ask her two daughters what it was like living so far away, so alone, locked in a Mexican orphanage and an international custody battle, gone for nearly 3 1/2 years.
Someday, she’ll tell them how hard she fought to get them back, how in those years she never gave up and how, eventually, a disparate group of people from here to Cancún, from her bosses at MVD Express to former Gov. Bill Richardson, helped her undertake a risky rescue mission last week to bring the girls home to Albuquerque.
For now, Jennifer Aguilera-Hurtado and her girls, Teresa, 9, and Hannah, 4, have other things to talk about, mostly in Spanish. Hannah was just a toddler in 2008 when her father fled with them to Cancún after her parents’ bitter divorce. Spanish is all she knows.
“Te amo, Mama,” she chirped as she scampered around grandmother Charlene Suranie’s home Thursday, hours after they landed in Albuquerque. I love you, Mom.
Aguilera-Hurtado has waited years to hear those words again in any language.
I told you their story in September 2010, how it took the State Department two years to find the girls in Cancún, how once they were found in April 2010 Aguilera-Hurtado sought help through the Hague Abduction Convention, an international treaty that provides a civil mechanism for parents to lawfully bring their children home.
In 2009, Aguilera-Hurtado had obtained a U.S. judge’s order awarding her sole custody of the girls and denying her ex-husband visitation rights. But in Mexico, that hadn’t mattered.
She was forced to go through Mexico’s cumbersome judicial system, while the girls remained in a state-run orphanage, which a local newspaper reported had been accused of abusing its young wards by locking them in solitary confinement for days as punishment.
“They didn’t have toys there,” she said. “All they ate was rice, beans and burritos.”
I revisited their plight again in October, and this time I nudged Richardson to use his international negotiating skills and ties to Mexico to step in and speed up the process.
With a bit of nagging from his assistant Caitlin Wakefield, he did.
“I pressed the governor to do something about this, despite his heavy travel schedule,” Wakefield said.
What followed over the next four months was a series of correspondences between Richardson and Mexican Ambassador Artura Sarukhan, who in turn alerted the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs, which in turn contacted the judge and the judiciary council of Quintana Roo, the state in which the girls’ custody case was being tried.
In addition, Las Cruces Mayor Ken Miyagishima offered to contact several Mexican dignitaries he was familiar with to see what could be done to help.
Finally, on Jan. 27, the email Aguilera-Hurtado had been waiting for came. It notified her that her daughters would be released to her on Feb. 1.
Four days later, she was on her way to Cancún with a plane ticket paid for by Richardson.
Aguilera-Hurtado describes those next hours like something out of a spy novel. U.S. State Department workers secured a hotel room and ground transportation for her and ordered her to stay hidden and disguised in a wig and sunglasses.
Officials feared her ex-husband would find out about the plan and try to derail it. In numerous local newspaper articles, he had been portrayed as a sympathetic father being wronged by the big, bad United States and a corrupt Mexican judicial system.
“It was scary as heck,” Aguilera-Hurtado said. “That day was my ex-husband’s day to visit the girls, and we needed to be out of there before he showed up.”
They barely made it, whisking the girls quickly into an awaiting van and flying through the streets of Cancún to the airport, where a problem with Aguilera-Hurtado’s credit card arose.
“And so while all that is going on, we find out that my ex-husband is on his way to the airport and here we are trying to get everything done so we can get on the plane,” she said. “I have never been more frightened in my life.”
As luck would have it, just as the ex-husband stormed into the airport, the girls were in the bathroom with a State Department worker and Aguilera-Hurtado was surrounded by other State Department workers and local police.
“He turned right around and left,” she said.
Inexplicably, Aguilera-Hurtado’s credit card would not go through to purchase the three return-trip plane tickets. Frantically, she called her mother, Suranie, who gave the ticket agent her credit card number. When that, too, didn’t work, Suranie offered her debit card. When that went through, she rushed to the Bank of Albuquerque, which agreed to immediately cover the charge with a loan.
“They knew the story about the girls,” Suranie said.
Moments later, a photo taken by a State Department employee of Aguilera-Hurtado and the girls just before boarding the plane in Cancún was transmitted to Suranie’s cellphone
“It was such a relief,” Suranie said. “We have prayed so long for this.”
Aguilera-Hurtado and the girls spent their first night back in the United States in St. Paul, Minn. – the destination for the first flight out of Cancún – and flew home the next day, this part of the trip paid for by Aguilera-Hurtado’s bosses, Melissa Stark and Janice Lucero of MVD Express.
“I call them all my guardian angels,” Aguilera-Hurtado said.
As we sat Thursday in Suranie’s living room scattered with wrapping paper under a hastily decorated tree – the girls have missed the last four Christmases – Teresa and Hannah raced around the house with their new clothes and toys and the remnants of their first trip to McDonald’s.
They seemed excited, yet at ease, playing with Emma, Suranie’s very patient dachshund, and giving me a tour of the house, chattering in Spanish and proudly showing off their new clothes, neatly put away in a dresser.
Aguilera-Hurtado’s fiancé, Alex, looked on with a contented but stunned look. Already, the girls call him Papa.
“I’ve had months to prepare for this,” he said. “But how can you? I’m just going to jump in with both feet.”
There is much to do. Teresa has only had a year of schooling. She cannot read. Neither girl had medical records.
“It’s going to be pretty interesting around here,” said Suranie, who had planned to put her four-bedroom home up for sale, because it was too big for just her. Now, it is just about right.
Teresa curled up on her mother’s lap and played with the cross necklace around her mother’s neck.
“Siempre contigo?” she asks again and again. Always with you?
“Yes,” her mother assures her. “Always.”
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline Gutierrez Krueger at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
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