A California man has been arrested for arranging for his 14-year-old daughter to marry a neighbor in exchange for US$16,000, 100 cases of beer and several cases of meat, police said.
Authorities in Greenfield, a farming community on California’s central coast, said they learned of the deal after Marcelino de Jesus Martinez, 36, asked them for help getting back his daughter after payment wasn’t made.
Martinez was arrested on Sunday. He was scheduled to be arraigned yesterday in Monterey County Superior Court on felony charges of procuring a child under age 16 for lewd and lascivious acts, statutory rape and cruelty to a child by endangering health, the prosecutor said.
The prosecutor’s office said Martinez did not have an attorney of record yet.
Police also arrested the intended groom, 18-year-old Margarito de Jesus Galindo, on suspicion of statutory rape, but prosecutors have not decided whether to charge him. Police did not return a message on Tuesday for information on whether Galindo had an attorney.
Martinez is a member of an indigenous Mexican Trique community. Greenfield police Chief Joe Grebmeier said the case highlights an issue confronting local authorities in that arranged marriages with girls as young as 12 are not uncommon among the Trique.
He hesitated to say the girl was being sold into marriage, as the money was intended as a dowry and the beer and meat were for the wedding. But, he added, the arrangement violates California law, where the age of consent for marriage is 18, and with parental approval, 16.
“This is certainly not the first such case I’ve heard of,” he said of the marriage involving an underage girl.
Members of the indigenous community protested the news reports and public discussion of the case, saying they were painted in a very negative light.
“No one put a ‘for sale’ sign on this girl, and that’s how it sounds,” said Rufino Dominguez, an indigenous immigrant and head of the Greenfield office of the Binational Center for the Development of the Indigenous Communities.
He said arranging marriages and exchanging goods that will contribute to the wedding party are common, but money is not usually part of the transaction.
A string of rape and assault allegations against the son of Norway’s future queen have plunged the royal family into its “biggest scandal” ever, wrapping up an annus horribilis for the monarchy. The legal troubles surrounding Marius Borg Hoiby, the 27-year-old son born of a relationship before Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit’s marriage to Norwegian Crown Prince Haakon, have dominated the Scandinavian country’s headlines since August. The tall strapping blond with a “bad boy” look — often photographed in tuxedos, slicked back hair, earrings and tattoos — was arrested in Oslo on Aug. 4 suspected of assaulting his girlfriend the previous night. A photograph
The US deployed a reconnaissance aircraft while Japan and the Philippines sent navy ships in a joint patrol in the disputed South China Sea yesterday, two days after the allied forces condemned actions by China Coast Guard vessels against Philippine patrol ships. The US Indo-Pacific Command said the joint patrol was conducted in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone by allies and partners to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight “ and “other lawful uses of the sea and international airspace.” Those phrases are used by the US, Japan and the Philippines to oppose China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the
‘GOOD POLITICS’: He is a ‘pragmatic radical’ and has moderated his rhetoric since the height of his radicalism in 2014, a lecturer in contemporary Islam said Abu Mohammed al-Jolani is the leader of the Islamist alliance that spearheaded an offensive that rebels say brought down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and ended five decades of Baath Party rule in Syria. Al-Jolani heads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is rooted in Syria’s branch of al-Qaeda. He is a former extremist who adopted a more moderate posture in order to achieve his goals. Yesterday, as the rebels entered Damascus, he ordered all military forces in the capital not to approach public institutions. Last week, he said the objective of his offensive, which saw city after city fall from government control, was to
‘KAMPAI’: It is said that people in Japan began brewing rice about 2,000 years ago, with a third-century Chinese chronicle describing the Japanese as fond of alcohol Traditional Japanese knowledge and skills used in the production of sake and shochu distilled spirits were approved on Wednesday for addition to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list, a committee of the UN cultural body said It is believed people in the archipelago began brewing rice in a simple way about two millennia ago, with a third-century Chinese chronicle describing the Japanese as fond of alcohol. By about 1000 AD, the imperial palace had a department to supervise the manufacturing of sake and its use in rituals, the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association said. The multi-staged brewing techniques still used today are
RSS