How deep do Arizona’s child welfare records woes go?

Backlog raises fears cases could be revisited, revives questions about agency Did every parent involved receive their due process in child-welfare trials?

How many Arizona children have been needlessly ripped from their parents? Or haven’t been reunited with them? Or adopted to another family because critical information was never uploaded to their files?

It’s impossible, at this point, to answer these questions. And that’s the problem.

The Arizona Department of Child Services asked this week to put pending child-welfare trials on hold while it reviews 95,000 documents that had never been properly assigned in its computer system.

The backlog of documents – which could include everything from counseling assessments to substance abuse records, and which key parties may or may not have seen – built up over 21⁄2 years, potentially impacting at least 3,800 cases. That includes 139 finalized adoptions. DCS Director David Lujan said the problem may not be as severe as it looks, noting that critical documents could have

The state Department of Child Safety’s request this week for judges across Arizona to “suspend any trials and severance proceedings” on the docket in the next two weeks because of computer glitches relating to documents is unsettling.

A review revealed that thousands of documents were not made discoverable in more than 3,800 cases, including about 140 adoptions that were finalized.

The problem apparently dates back to February 2021, when the state first implemented a database software program called Guardian.

That means the number of cases affected could be exponentially greater.

While I appreciate the transparency from the department and the immediate stay on pending proceedings, the ramifications of this lack of discoverable

men from their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters and tortured them in the most horrific way.

These five friends who shared a love of cycling and boxing and fútbol and the great Lionel Messi, according to the Spanish media outlet El País, had recently gone together to see the movie “Oppenheimer” and were last seen at a festival in the city of Lagos de Moreno.

It is now believed that one of Mexico’s criminal syndicates kidnapped the young men, took them to a nearby ranch, and forced one of the boys to stab his friends and saw off their heads.

While Mexicans still hold out hope that the boys will be found, relatives have identified them in the video images that were posted online, and CBS reports that Mexican authorities have found four decapitated bodies in a building near where the kidnapping took place.

A fifth body may have been found in burning car nearby, reports CBS. Mexico is mourning.

Tens of thousands of votive candles have been lit across the country for the childhood friends Jaime Adolfo Martínez Miranda, Dante Cedillo Hernández, Diego Alberto Lara Santoyo, Roberto Olmeda Cuellar and Uriel Galván González.

In a press briefing on Wednesday, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, called the killings “very regrettable.”

That hardly begins to describe the nation’s despair.

AMLO is near the end of his six-year term as one of the most powerful presidents to rule Mexico. His popularity rating is high – in the 70th percentile – and it is widely reported he hopes to shape his legacy in the year he has left.

He rode into office promising to quell the violence that erupted when earlier Mexican administrations more forcefully challenged the cartels. He summed up his soft approach to the narcos in a slogan “Abrazos, no balazos” (“hugs, not bullets”).

“But his ‘hugs, not bullets’ paradigm has claimed more lives than (former President Felipe) Calderon’s ‘war on drugs,’ ” explained Arturo Sarukhan, Mexican ambassador to the United States from 2007 to 2013, writing in Foreign Affairs.

The cartels have taken over roughly one-third of the country, according to U.S. military estimates. They have insinuated themselves in the major institutions and industries in Mexico and now routinely bully and intimidate the country.

AMLO “tolerates criminality and violence to justify the militarization of the country,” writes Denise Dresser, a professor of political science at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, in Foreign Affairs.

“He has displayed a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of critics, including those in the media. Reports of Mexican democracy’s death may be exaggerated; it is not dead. But it is grievously ill.”

Evil that kidnaps and tortures and decapitates the children of Mexico cannot be hugged.

It must be crushed.

If AMLO does not marshal the forces of his nation to start to destroy the cartels, those five young men will be his legacy.

And his eternal shame.