Missing Kids: The Mexican Connection : Children: Couple say son is among those abducted to Mexico. Mexican officials say kids also are taken to U.S., especially in illegal adoptions.

It has been 4 1/2 years since Bernice Abeyta put her infant son, Christopher, to bed in his crib, 4 1/2 years since she last saw him.

That was July 13, 1986, around midnight. Christopher slept with his parents in the master bedroom of their home in Colorado Springs, Colo. Four other children slept peacefully elsewhere in the house. No one heard anything unusual. But when Bernice Abeyta got up at 6 the next morning, 7-month-old Christopher was gone.

The front door had been left unlocked all night, as it often was, and a basement window was open. Abeyta recalls that when she found her son missing, she ran through the house, “tore up the beds and yelled (to her family), ‘Do you have Christopher?’ ”

Most of the more than 9,400 children classified as missing or abducted in the United States are believed to be somewhere in the country. The Abeytas, however, think their child is one of a small but growing number who end up in Mexico, where the children are harder to trace--and to return if found.

Likewise, Mexican officials say, an unknown number of abducted Mexican children are taken legally and illegally across the border into the United States. Of particular concern, they say, is the trafficking, or illegal adoption, of Mexican children by American couples through shady lawyers and adoption rings.

“This is an international social problem that affects the United States and Mexico,” says Bernice Abeyta, 47, a plump, pale woman with shoulder-length blond hair. “The only way to attack the kidnaping of children is to work together.”

Why do some abductors head for Mexico? Authorities and parents agree that it is the closest, easiest country to cross into--one where you don’t need papers, or where you can buy them.

For the Abeytas, the past 4 1/2 years have been an odyssey of frustration and despair.

Both are temporarily devoting themselves full time to the search for Christopher and have made a mission of trying to improve U.S.-Mexican efforts to find kidnaped children.

Their task is difficult. There is no centralized agency in Mexico to register and search for missing children, as exists in the United States, and no clear network for the two countries to work together, they say.

U.S. and Mexican officials agree.

“The problem is the lack of a central information network, (which) makes it difficult to locate a child in Mexico,” says an official at the U.S. Embassy.

The major problem in the United States is abduction by parents who were not granted custody of their children during divorce proceedings, says the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. In some cases, the abducting parent has relatives in Mexico and may leave the child with them. In other cases, an American parent will simply move to Mexico with the child and “go underground,” he says.

“A non-custodial parent removing a child from the custodial parent is a crime in many (U.S.) states, but in Mexico it is not a crime anywhere. That makes recovery difficult,” the official says.

Sometimes the U.S. Embassy may locate a child and make visits to check on his or her welfare, but it has no power to send the child back to the United States. As a result, the official says, Washington is urging Mexico to sign the Hague Convention of mutual support in kidnap cases, which requires signatories to return found children to their country of origin.

At the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, a bulletin board is plastered with photographs of 22 missing people, most of them children, whose relatives suspect are in Mexico. The State Department has 44 active investigations of missing children believed or known to be in Mexico.

At the Mexican Foreign Ministry, an official says he has no numbers on kidnaped or missing Mexican children thought to have been taken to the United States, but he calls the problem “even greater” than for American children abducted to Mexico.

Even if a case makes it to court, he says, “many times a judge in the United States will decide a Mexican child is better off in the United States than in Mexico (on the basis of) subjective criteria that we don’t share.”

The official says Mexico and the United States would begin negotiations early this year to set up an official system for handling abduction cases between the countries.

In California, statistics are scarce on abduction cases that may be linked to Mexico. Michael Kelly, a field representative in Sacramento for the state Justice Department’s Violent Crime Information Center, says: “We have had several reports of children allegedly being abducted to Mexico, but it’s a very small number in relation to the total number of missing children cases.”

Of the 1,188 juveniles named by the center as missing in the state, 810 are classified as runaways, with 192 parental abductions and 14 abductions by strangers. California and Mexico share information on missing-persons cases.

The Abeytas are optimistic about Mexican authorities’ commitment to solving the problem after a series of meetings they had in recent weeks with state governors, local officials and Mexico City Atty. Gen. Ignacio Morales Lechuga. They also hope President Carlos Salinas de Gortari will meet with them.

Gil Abeyta, 48, would like to persuade American businesses, especially multinationals, to help fund efforts in both Mexico and the United States to find missing children. U.S. companies operating abroad “have a shared responsibility in the social problems that exist in a country,” he says.

Often, American parents’ beliefs that their children are in Mexico are based on nothing more than a vague tip from a caller to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children hot line in the United States. The center, which receives federal and private funding and works with the Justice Department, distributes photographs, descriptions of missing children and drawings of what they might look like if several years have passed.

Case supervisor Ruben Rodriguez, in suburban Washington, says the center has 9,400 active cases of missing and abducted children, 7,150 of which are considered parental abductions. He said he did not know how many children end up in Mexico.

In 1988, the National Center received an unconfirmed report that a boy resembling Christopher Abeyta had been seen at a state fair in Chihuahua. No one had any further information, but the Abeytas followed up with a trip to Mexico. They circulated Christopher’s picture--an artist’s computer-assisted rendering of what he might look like--and received about 75 tips but came no closer to finding their son.

“The truth is, after 4 1/2 years investigating, we have no real hard facts,” Bernice Abeyta says.

Colorado Springs police say the Abeytas, who were initially questioned about Christopher’s disappearance, are not suspects. The case is still open, but there are no leads.

Gil Abeyta, a bearish man with a deeply lined face, says he believes their search has been unsuccessful largely because of a lack of police manpower, but his wife is indignant.

“A parent of a missing child always feels like the police aren’t doing enough--and they aren’t,” she declares.

Bernice Abeyta believes that a woman who had what she described as a “fatal attraction” for her husband is the prime suspect. It is a topic that seems to make Gil Abeyta uncomfortable.

Police traced a series of harassing telephone calls the Abeytas received after the abduction to this woman but say they have nothing to link her to the case. They keep track of her whereabouts; she is not in Mexico now, although she was shortly after the abduction, and Christopher is not with her.

“She is just one of many suspects,” Gil says.

The Abeytas say they have found that many Mexican families hesitate to report abductions to authorities because they do not trust their police and government officials.

They also say the problem of illegal adoptions seems to be the worst in border states. They found notices in a Brownsville, Tex., newspaper advertising what seemed to be dubious adoptions in Mexico and heard of similar ads in other cities. The babies are not always abducted, however; sometimes they are the offspring of poor, uneducated teen-agers who are paid to or coerced into giving up their children.

U.S. officials acknowledge that some Americans will pay a lot of money to adopt a Mexican baby or to obtain a birth certificate that says they are the natural parents.

“It is easy to get a baby in Mexico and to get ‘legitimate’ documents that reflect non-facts,” the U.S. Embassy official says. “It is very difficult to work a legal adoption and to get a U.S. visa when the legal adoption is done. You put all of this together and you get what the Mexicans call ‘child trafficking.’ ”

Meanwhile, for the Abeytas there is only more waiting, more hoping, in their search for Christopher. From time to time, they get together with other parents of missing children through a small, nonprofit organization they head called Families of Missing Children, Bernice Abeyta says.

“You think, ‘Oh, God, I’m going crazy,’ ” she says. “But then you hear that another mother feels the same way and you realize it’s a natural feeling.

“I’d like to tell whoever has him that they have ruined my husband’s and my life,” she adds, breaking into sobs. “It’s torn up the whole family, really. We were physically sick.”

In spite of everything, the couple say they are optimistic they will one day find their son.

“We have a lot of hope that he is alive and well and that somebody is caring for him,” Gil Abeyta says. “But stranger abductions are very hard to deal with because as time goes on, it becomes more difficult to find them. They change, they grow--and they forget.”

Times researcher Christine MacDonald in Mexico City and staff writer Bettijane Levine in Los Angeles contributed to this article.