A woman who abducted a toddler in June 2020 from a San Cristóbal de las Casas open-air market has been sentenced to 37 years and six months in prison.
Dylan Esaú’s kidnapper, identified by authorities as Margarita N., was also ordered to pay a fine of 521,280 pesos (US $25,000), according to the Chiapas Attorney General’s Office.
She will serve her sentence in the same prison where she has been in custody since her arrest in August 2020.
The child was recovered on August 13, 2020, in a rural Chiapas community in the municipality of Cintalapa, where Margarita had been keeping him. Authorities found him in good health and gave him back to his mother.
Dylan was taken from the Mercosur market on June 30, 2020, after his mother, who worked there as a vendor, sent him with his five-year-old sister to meet their grandmother, who was working at another stall in the market.
Video surveillance showed two children approaching Dylan and luring him away to a woman later identified as Margarita.
When authorities tracked down the children, one of them, a young girl, told authorities that Margarita had said that Dylan was her son and paid them 200 pesos to bring him to her.
Authorities said they found evidence of Margarita hanging around the market for two days before the kidnapping.
Officials said that Margarita told police after her arrest that she had kidnapped the boy because she could not have children of her own and was hoping to convince her ex-husband to reunite with her.
In the weeks following his abduction, Dylan’s mother held several demonstrations in San Cristóbal and Tuxtla Gutiérrez and even petitioned President López Obrador, saying that the search for Dylan was going too slowly.
The investigation ended up exposing an unrelated child-trafficking ring in San Cristóbal and resulted in the rescue of 23 kidnapped children.
With reports from Milenio
