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Does anybody have any first-hand, further information on this Times article below or the process?
Guatemala System Is Scrutinized as Americans Rush in to Adopt
By MARC LACEY
GUATEMALA CITY — There are business hotels and tourist hotels, and
then there is the Guatemala City Marriott. Catering to American
couples seeking to adopt, it is a baby hotel of sorts, as the crush of
strollers, the cry of infants and the emotional scenes that play out
regularly in the lobby testify.
"Oh! Oh! Oh!" shouted a woman from Kansas the other day as she scooped
a little girl she hoped to adopt from the arms of her foster mother
and held her up toward the chandelier. "You're just the cutest little
thing."
Not far away, a woman from Texas was beaming at another soon-to-be
adopted girl near the reception desk and comparing notes with an
Illinois couple, who had just picked up their new chubby-cheeked,
black-haired son.
Guatemala, where nearly one in every 100 children is adopted by an
American family, ranks third behind much larger nations, China and
Russia, when it comes to providing babies to American couples.
The pace of adoptions and the fact that mothers here, unlike in other
places, are sometimes paid for their babies have brought increasing
concern and the prospect of new regulation that may significantly
reduce the number of Guatemalan babies bound for the United States
next year, or end it altogether.
Critics of the adoption system here — privately run and uniquely
streamlined — say it has turned this country of 12 million people into
a virtual baby farm that supplies infants as if they were a commodity.
The United States is the No. 1 destination.
While the overall demand for international adoptions has increased
over the last decade, adoption from Guatemala has outpaced many other
nations. From 1995 to 2005, American families adopted 18,298
Guatemalan babies, with the figure rising nearly every year. Though
most families are undoubtedly unaware of the practices here, foreign
governments and international watchdogs, like Unicef, have long been
scrutinizing Guatemala's adoption system.
In other countries, adoptive parents are sought out for abandoned
children. In Guatemala, children are frequently sought out for foreign
parents seeking to adopt and given up by their birth mothers to baby
brokers who may pay from a few hundred dollars to $2,000 for a baby,
according to interviews with mothers and experts.
Most babies that find their way to America are conceived in the
countryside. Some of the birth mothers have brought shame on the
family by becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Others are married but had
affairs after their husbands emigrated to the United States.
Inevitably, the pregnancies were not planned.
Poverty is a way of life in these villages, and infant mortality, at
36 per 1,000 births in 2002, is among the highest in the hemisphere.
Those children who survive have a rough start, with almost half of
them chronically malnourished. Guatemala's adoption system is run not
by judges, courts and bureaucrats — as in most other nations — but by
some 500 private lawyers and notaries, who hire baby brokers and
maintain networks of pediatricians and foster mothers to tend children
awaiting adoption. They form a powerful and well-heeled lobby.
"We're rescuing these children from death," said Susana Luarca
Saracho, one of the country's busiest adoption lawyers, who has fought
for years to keep the current system in place.
"Here, we don't live — we survive," she said. "Which would a child
prefer, to grow up in misery or to go to the United States, where
there is everything?"
To adopt any foreign child, Americans must clear numerous bureaucratic
hurdles in the United States, including approval by the Department of
Homeland Security. Often, in the baby's home country, the adoptive
parents must make several court appearances.
In Guatemala, the required paperwork can often be handled in one
visit, with newly constituted families sometimes spending less than a
week in a Guatemala City hotel before leaving for the United States.
So many adoptive parents pass through the Marriott — hundreds per
year, employees say — that diapers, wet wipes and formula are
available in the gift shop, next to the postcards and Guatemalan
curios.
"Everyone who goes to a hotel here sees the scene: North Americans
meeting with Guatemalan children," said Manuel Manrique, Unicef's
representative in Guatemala. "Most people think, 'How great that those
children are going to have a better life.' But they don't know how the
system is working. This has become a business instead of a social
service."
The adoptive parents are often so emotionally involved in the process
that they do not adequately investigate the inner workings of this
country's system, adoption advocates acknowledge. The American couples
at the Marriott were reluctant to talk or give their names.
"There is sometimes a great deal of naivete on the part of adoptive
parents," said Susan Soon-keum Cox, a vice president at Holt
International Children's Services, an American nonprofit agency that
works in Guatemala and elsewhere, and who was herself adopted from
Korea by Americans in 1956. "It's don't ask, don't tell."
The system is not without controversy in Guatemala. Josefina Arellano
Andrino is in charge of the government department that signs off on
all adoptions but, for now, is permitted to halt only those involving
false paperwork or outright fraud. She relishes the prospect of
additional oversight.
"Babies are being sold, and we have to stop it," she said. "What's
happening to our culture that we don't take care of our children?"
Alarmed to see so many foreign adoptions in Guatemala, members of the
Council of Central American Human Rights Attorneys, who were meeting
at the Marriott in August, issued a statement questioning whether the
country's system "converts the child into an object, like a piece of
merchandise."
Key to that business are jaladoras, as the baby brokers are called
locally. They ply the Guatemalan countryside looking for pregnant
women and girls in a fix. Adoption is presented as the perfect answer,
one that will leave the child with a wealthy family and the mother
better off as well, by paying for her medical bills and providing some
direct money surreptitiously.
Although most countries forbid paying mothers who put up their
children for adoption, it occurs regularly here, an open secret that
mothers are told to deny if anyone asks.
"They gave me some money," a 12-year-old mother acknowledged on
condition of anonymity in an interview in October at a government
office when asked if she had been compensated for giving up her baby.
"I don't know how much. They gave my father some money, too."
Her father, interviewed separately, denied he had received anything.
The payments strike many in the adoption world here as a form of
benevolence. Some American couples say that if they are going to pay
$25,000 to $30,000 for an adopted child — which they routinely do in
the fees that go to American adoption agencies, Guatemalan lawyers and
others involved in the system — shouldn't the birth mother get
something?
The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions has an answer.
Guatemala's president, Oscar Berger, signed the treaty in 2002, and
after years of legal challenges the nation's Constitutional Court
ruled definitively this year that the country must abide by it.
The treaty states that international adoptions should come only after
a loving home, preferably with the child's relatives, is sought in
country. It also aims "to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or
traffic in children" and limits payments to "only costs and expenses,
including reasonable professional fees."
Several signing countries, including Canada, Germany and Britain,
already restrict Guatemalan adoptions because of apparent breaches.
The United States has said it plans to join the convention next year.
At that point, officials say, Washington intends to stop approving
adoptions from countries that do not meet the treaty's standards.
"Guatemala is the principal concern that we have," said Catherine
Barry, a deputy assistant secretary of state for consular affairs.
Baby brokers tread carefully as they seek pregnant women in the
countryside, where many villagers believe what is apparently a rural
myth that there is an active market overseas for children as organ
donors.
A few months back, in a village outside the provincial town of
Nahuala, two women and a man went house to house selling baby slings,
pieces of cloth used to carry infants across the back. It was a ruse,
neighbors recounted, to find out who would give birth soon.
The traveling salespeople talked one young woman in the hillside
village of Xolnahuola into giving up her baby. She was single and
despondent and they offered her about $750, the villagers said.
When the three returned as the pregnant woman's term neared its end,
her parents, who opposed giving up the child, alerted neighbors, who
gathered angrily at the scene. The two women's hair was forcibly cut
off, a traditional form of Mayan justice meant to shame offenders. The
baby brokers were taken away by the authorities and later released.
In early October, villagers in Ixtahuacan killed one person with
machetes, captured another 12 and set fire to five cars when fear
spread that a gang of child snatchers was in the area. The police said
it remained unclear whether the outsiders had actually been looking
for children.
Ms. Luarca, the adoption lawyer, said such episodes have nothing to do
with the children she handles, who come from poor mothers who cannot
afford to raise them and who give them up willingly without payment.
"We're not a criminal organization," she said of Guatemala's adoption
lawyers. "What we are doing is a good thing. At this moment in time it
is the only way out for these children. I look forward to the time
when they can grow up well here."
In her opinion, though, that time has not arrived. New regulations
will "create a bureaucratic labyrinth," she says, and she continues to
lobby lawmakers to preserve the current system.
Around the corner from her office, Ms. Luarca runs an adoption home,
clean, orderly and with attentive nannies roaming among the rooms.
With the prospect of tighter rules, business is surging. Seventy
children are there, the older ones in miniature bunks and the many
babies wrapped in blankets in cribs.
They came from mothers not unlike a teenager who was encountered at a
government office, signing away her baby to a Pennsylvania couple, and
a bit melancholy to be doing so. She and her baby, like all birth
mothers and their children, must have their DNA tested for the
American Embassy to approve the adoption.
"I hope she has a nice family and lives a happy life," said the
17-year-old mother, who would not give her name. Fidgeting as she
spoke, she said she hoped that her daughter, Antonietta, would return
one day to visit her and that the adoptive parents would keep the
newborn's name.
Both prospects, those involved in the process say, are unlikely.
Guatemala System Is Scrutinized as Americans Rush in to Adopt
By MARC LACEY
GUATEMALA CITY — There are business hotels and tourist hotels, and
then there is the Guatemala City Marriott. Catering to American
couples seeking to adopt, it is a baby hotel of sorts, as the crush of
strollers, the cry of infants and the emotional scenes that play out
regularly in the lobby testify.
"Oh! Oh! Oh!" shouted a woman from Kansas the other day as she scooped
a little girl she hoped to adopt from the arms of her foster mother
and held her up toward the chandelier. "You're just the cutest little
thing."
Not far away, a woman from Texas was beaming at another soon-to-be
adopted girl near the reception desk and comparing notes with an
Illinois couple, who had just picked up their new chubby-cheeked,
black-haired son.
Guatemala, where nearly one in every 100 children is adopted by an
American family, ranks third behind much larger nations, China and
Russia, when it comes to providing babies to American couples.
The pace of adoptions and the fact that mothers here, unlike in other
places, are sometimes paid for their babies have brought increasing
concern and the prospect of new regulation that may significantly
reduce the number of Guatemalan babies bound for the United States
next year, or end it altogether.
Critics of the adoption system here — privately run and uniquely
streamlined — say it has turned this country of 12 million people into
a virtual baby farm that supplies infants as if they were a commodity.
The United States is the No. 1 destination.
While the overall demand for international adoptions has increased
over the last decade, adoption from Guatemala has outpaced many other
nations. From 1995 to 2005, American families adopted 18,298
Guatemalan babies, with the figure rising nearly every year. Though
most families are undoubtedly unaware of the practices here, foreign
governments and international watchdogs, like Unicef, have long been
scrutinizing Guatemala's adoption system.
In other countries, adoptive parents are sought out for abandoned
children. In Guatemala, children are frequently sought out for foreign
parents seeking to adopt and given up by their birth mothers to baby
brokers who may pay from a few hundred dollars to $2,000 for a baby,
according to interviews with mothers and experts.
Most babies that find their way to America are conceived in the
countryside. Some of the birth mothers have brought shame on the
family by becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Others are married but had
affairs after their husbands emigrated to the United States.
Inevitably, the pregnancies were not planned.
Poverty is a way of life in these villages, and infant mortality, at
36 per 1,000 births in 2002, is among the highest in the hemisphere.
Those children who survive have a rough start, with almost half of
them chronically malnourished. Guatemala's adoption system is run not
by judges, courts and bureaucrats — as in most other nations — but by
some 500 private lawyers and notaries, who hire baby brokers and
maintain networks of pediatricians and foster mothers to tend children
awaiting adoption. They form a powerful and well-heeled lobby.
"We're rescuing these children from death," said Susana Luarca
Saracho, one of the country's busiest adoption lawyers, who has fought
for years to keep the current system in place.
"Here, we don't live — we survive," she said. "Which would a child
prefer, to grow up in misery or to go to the United States, where
there is everything?"
To adopt any foreign child, Americans must clear numerous bureaucratic
hurdles in the United States, including approval by the Department of
Homeland Security. Often, in the baby's home country, the adoptive
parents must make several court appearances.
In Guatemala, the required paperwork can often be handled in one
visit, with newly constituted families sometimes spending less than a
week in a Guatemala City hotel before leaving for the United States.
So many adoptive parents pass through the Marriott — hundreds per
year, employees say — that diapers, wet wipes and formula are
available in the gift shop, next to the postcards and Guatemalan
curios.
"Everyone who goes to a hotel here sees the scene: North Americans
meeting with Guatemalan children," said Manuel Manrique, Unicef's
representative in Guatemala. "Most people think, 'How great that those
children are going to have a better life.' But they don't know how the
system is working. This has become a business instead of a social
service."
The adoptive parents are often so emotionally involved in the process
that they do not adequately investigate the inner workings of this
country's system, adoption advocates acknowledge. The American couples
at the Marriott were reluctant to talk or give their names.
"There is sometimes a great deal of naivete on the part of adoptive
parents," said Susan Soon-keum Cox, a vice president at Holt
International Children's Services, an American nonprofit agency that
works in Guatemala and elsewhere, and who was herself adopted from
Korea by Americans in 1956. "It's don't ask, don't tell."
The system is not without controversy in Guatemala. Josefina Arellano
Andrino is in charge of the government department that signs off on
all adoptions but, for now, is permitted to halt only those involving
false paperwork or outright fraud. She relishes the prospect of
additional oversight.
"Babies are being sold, and we have to stop it," she said. "What's
happening to our culture that we don't take care of our children?"
Alarmed to see so many foreign adoptions in Guatemala, members of the
Council of Central American Human Rights Attorneys, who were meeting
at the Marriott in August, issued a statement questioning whether the
country's system "converts the child into an object, like a piece of
merchandise."
Key to that business are jaladoras, as the baby brokers are called
locally. They ply the Guatemalan countryside looking for pregnant
women and girls in a fix. Adoption is presented as the perfect answer,
one that will leave the child with a wealthy family and the mother
better off as well, by paying for her medical bills and providing some
direct money surreptitiously.
Although most countries forbid paying mothers who put up their
children for adoption, it occurs regularly here, an open secret that
mothers are told to deny if anyone asks.
"They gave me some money," a 12-year-old mother acknowledged on
condition of anonymity in an interview in October at a government
office when asked if she had been compensated for giving up her baby.
"I don't know how much. They gave my father some money, too."
Her father, interviewed separately, denied he had received anything.
The payments strike many in the adoption world here as a form of
benevolence. Some American couples say that if they are going to pay
$25,000 to $30,000 for an adopted child — which they routinely do in
the fees that go to American adoption agencies, Guatemalan lawyers and
others involved in the system — shouldn't the birth mother get
something?
The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions has an answer.
Guatemala's president, Oscar Berger, signed the treaty in 2002, and
after years of legal challenges the nation's Constitutional Court
ruled definitively this year that the country must abide by it.
The treaty states that international adoptions should come only after
a loving home, preferably with the child's relatives, is sought in
country. It also aims "to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or
traffic in children" and limits payments to "only costs and expenses,
including reasonable professional fees."
Several signing countries, including Canada, Germany and Britain,
already restrict Guatemalan adoptions because of apparent breaches.
The United States has said it plans to join the convention next year.
At that point, officials say, Washington intends to stop approving
adoptions from countries that do not meet the treaty's standards.
"Guatemala is the principal concern that we have," said Catherine
Barry, a deputy assistant secretary of state for consular affairs.
Baby brokers tread carefully as they seek pregnant women in the
countryside, where many villagers believe what is apparently a rural
myth that there is an active market overseas for children as organ
donors.
A few months back, in a village outside the provincial town of
Nahuala, two women and a man went house to house selling baby slings,
pieces of cloth used to carry infants across the back. It was a ruse,
neighbors recounted, to find out who would give birth soon.
The traveling salespeople talked one young woman in the hillside
village of Xolnahuola into giving up her baby. She was single and
despondent and they offered her about $750, the villagers said.
When the three returned as the pregnant woman's term neared its end,
her parents, who opposed giving up the child, alerted neighbors, who
gathered angrily at the scene. The two women's hair was forcibly cut
off, a traditional form of Mayan justice meant to shame offenders. The
baby brokers were taken away by the authorities and later released.
In early October, villagers in Ixtahuacan killed one person with
machetes, captured another 12 and set fire to five cars when fear
spread that a gang of child snatchers was in the area. The police said
it remained unclear whether the outsiders had actually been looking
for children.
Ms. Luarca, the adoption lawyer, said such episodes have nothing to do
with the children she handles, who come from poor mothers who cannot
afford to raise them and who give them up willingly without payment.
"We're not a criminal organization," she said of Guatemala's adoption
lawyers. "What we are doing is a good thing. At this moment in time it
is the only way out for these children. I look forward to the time
when they can grow up well here."
In her opinion, though, that time has not arrived. New regulations
will "create a bureaucratic labyrinth," she says, and she continues to
lobby lawmakers to preserve the current system.
Around the corner from her office, Ms. Luarca runs an adoption home,
clean, orderly and with attentive nannies roaming among the rooms.
With the prospect of tighter rules, business is surging. Seventy
children are there, the older ones in miniature bunks and the many
babies wrapped in blankets in cribs.
They came from mothers not unlike a teenager who was encountered at a
government office, signing away her baby to a Pennsylvania couple, and
a bit melancholy to be doing so. She and her baby, like all birth
mothers and their children, must have their DNA tested for the
American Embassy to approve the adoption.
"I hope she has a nice family and lives a happy life," said the
17-year-old mother, who would not give her name. Fidgeting as she
spoke, she said she hoped that her daughter, Antonietta, would return
one day to visit her and that the adoptive parents would keep the
newborn's name.
Both prospects, those involved in the process say, are unlikely.
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