Argentina arrests couple who adopted and later abandoned Guinea-Bissau brothers

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The Federal Police of Argentina arrested this Monday (31) a couple accused of abandoning in November 2020 two brothers from Guinea-Bissau, a country on the west coast of Africa, whom they had adopted. Natacha Perrig and Eduardo Rucci were found in a prime area on the outskirts of San Martín de Los Andes.

According to information from the newspaper La Nación, the Argentine couple adopted the brothers in August 2019, after traveling to the Portuguese-speaking nation. The biological mother of the two, who were born in 2014, would have died, and they lived in an orphanage in the capital Bissau, where the future adoptive parents stayed for a week to get to know them.

Argentine law does not allow foreigners to adopt children and adolescents from the country, but allows international adoptions, such as the case in which Argentines adopt children from other nations.

The complaint to which La Nación had access details that, in 2020, the children’s adoptive father, Eduardo Rucci, took the two boys to the Women’s Police Station in the city of Bahía Blanca, where they lived at the time, and abandoned them. “Totally disrespecting the paternal obligations to care, live together, feed and educate”, reads the complaint.

To the police, Rucci alleged that he would abandon the children for personal reasons that would make family ties and support for the family difficult, which, in addition to brothers from Guinea-Bissau, also has a biological daughter. At that time, the boys still did not have a DNI (national identity document, similar to the RG).

A few months before abandoning the children, the family posted photos of them on Facebook with messages of affection, according to the Infobae portal. One of them, accompanied by a photo of the boys, read: “We have chosen to start a new life with two beloved children joining our family!”

Despite the financial justification for leaving the children, the couple has now been detained in an upscale area, in Country Club Noregon, a private neighborhood where they are building their new home, La Nación reported. The two would be working —Natacha in a construction company, and Eduardo in the construction of containers.

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