While most families connected to the allegations of sexual abuse at a local kindergarten have been reluctant to talk to the press, the parent of one child has been willing to speak out on details of the incidents that led to the lodging of criminal complaints and subsequent events.
This week, he told his story in a private interview with the Guadalajara Reporter.
Ramiro, whose last name is omitted for reasons of privacy and security, explains that his young stepdaughter began to display disturbing behavioral changes back in March.
“She suddenly started wetting the bed,” he began. “She cried a lot more than usual. She began rejecting hugs and kisses at bedtime saying it disgusted her. And she didn’t want to go to school anymore.”
Concerned that the child was being bullied, he went to observe what was happening on the playground during recess. He saw nothing to cause alarm. But a few weeks later the little girl broke out in dance at home, wriggling sensuously as she stripped off her clothes. “She told her mom that she had learned the racy moves from her English teacher who demonstrated by opening her blouse and exposing her breasts,” Ramiro recalled.
With more prodding the child disclosed that another teacher, assigned as the kindergarten’s director, brought her boyfriend into the classroom and showed the kids how they kissed. She said that after the class, she was shown movies of animals copulating, and that the youngsters were dressed up in animal costumes and paired up to simulate sexual acts while the teachers and another man captured the scenes with electronic tablets.
Horrified by the story, Ramiro’s wife contacted several other mothers who told her their children repeated similar accounts. Faced with denials by the kindergarten staff and the apparent indifference of town administrator Ana Luisa Raygoza, whose son attends the same school, 11 families joined together to seek guidance at Ciudad Niñez, a child protection agency run by Jalisco’s Family Development System (DIF) with ties to other relevant arms of the state government. Personnel there encouraged concerned parents to denounce the suspected abuse to criminal justice authorities.
Ramiro said that the agent attending them at Chapala’s public prosecutor’s office seemed to downplay the matter, asking the children leading questions to suggest the innocence of their teachers’ and implicate the culpability of family members instead.
He acknowledged that the Chapala government offered to transport the children to the Jalisco Forensic Institute in Guadalajara for psychological and physical exams to determine if they had suffered sexual misconduct. It was there that the driver, Gilberto Cárdenas, allegedly tried to coerce the parents into keeping their suspicions under wraps. Some weeks later, families learned that the exam results had been mistakenly delivered to authorities in El Salto rather than Chapala, delaying timely action by prosecutors.
On July 17, Jalisco Attorney General Almaguer announced that three of the youngsters tested positive for psychological symptoms of sex abuse. Hours later the English teacher was arrested. Ramiro wonders why the kindergarten director and others implicated in the case remain free today.
In the aftermath of last week’s explosion of media reports, state agencies are offering counseling sessions in San Nicolás to all children and families that may have been victimized or stigmatized by the sordid tales emerging in their small town.