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When love and greed collide
Edmonton Journal
Adoption anguish: Foreign adoptions can bring great happiness. But in poor countries like Guatemala, grappling with a lucrative black market in babies and toddlers, they bring heartbreak as well
Hugh Dellios and Bonnie Miller Rubin
Chicago Tribune
Sunday, September 28, 2003
GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA - Renee Reilly and Yulisa Suhaira Sem Castillo live in two vastly different worlds, but international adoption has brought heartbreak to them both.
Reilly, a pediatric speech therapist from Chicago, has been waiting since the spring to adopt a Guatemalan child, a baby boy whose "sweet little face" she and her husband, Kevin, have seen only in photographs.
But six months later, the Reillys' adoption of the boy they have named Adrian is bogged down in a legal, moral and bureaucratic morass as Guatemala struggles to impose a new government-regulated adoption system.
It is a system intended to ensure no other mother suffers what happened to Sem.
One morning last month, a man with a knife kidnapped Sem's cherubic, curly-haired two-year-old daughter, Jenifer, as she was returning from the corner store with her six-year-old brother. After eight days of frantic searching, police found Jenifer in a house with two other stolen children.
They had been swept up in what child advocates say is a black market in babies and toddlers in Guatemala that involves networks of thieves, corrupt doctors, nurses, lawyers, civil registrars and foster-home mothers enticed by the millions of dollars pumped into the country by international adoptions.
"The money tempts everyone," said Sandra Zayas, Guatemala's prosecutor for crimes against women and children. Her office is investigating 110 cases of irregularities in international adoptions.
The adoption predicament in Guatemala is a struggle to figure out how to protect the Sems and the Reillys, among thousands of U.S. couples eager to begin or expand their families, who start looking abroad with no intention of getting entwined with anything that would harm children.
It is the story of two worlds at opposite ends of the international adoption process, and what happens when lofty ideas slam up against the hard reality of an impoverished nation with limited capacity to care properly for its children.
Guatemala is the latest nation trying to navigate the complexities of international adoptions, a world in which supply and demand constantly ebb and flow according to changing political and economic conditions. A decade ago, after the collapse of communism, adoption scandals erupted in Russia and Romania. Before that, the focus was on Paraguay, where investigators discovered a baby-selling ring.
Guatemala is the third-largest source of foreign children being adopted by U.S. families, behind only Russia and China, and with that growth has come increased peril.
MORE THAN 1,000 ADOPTIONS ON HOLD IN GUATEMALA
Last March, Guatemala began implementing the 1993 Hague Convention, which regulates international adoptions. That included eliminating private adoptions and centralizing the process in the attorney general's office, which UNICEF and other proponents say will make adoptions more transparent and decrease the temptation to exploit children for profit.
But critics say more than 1,000 legitimate adoptions have been held up since then, jeopardizing the welfare of the children awaiting new homes. The critics contend the delay proves Guatemala is incapable of implementing an effective state-run system. Private adoption lawyers have challenged the new rules in Guatemala's Constitutional Court.
They say the old system was sufficiently regulated and call the campaign a "money grab" by bureaucrats that could shut down the adoption process, increasing the ranks of street children and leaving others in badly run orphanages.
"We're just in limbo," said Renee Reilly, who adopted a Guatemalan girl, Elena, now four, with few problems in 1999. "It's a good idea to get the money out of (Guatemala's adoption process), but the government hasn't shown it can make it work on any timely basis."
The increase in Guatemalan adoptions in recent years is mostly due to what has been a relatively swift, quasi-private process in which an attorney handles most of the paperwork under the nominal supervision of the attorney general's office. A family court judge signs off in the end.
The average cost is from $15,000 to $20,000 US per child, excluding travel expenses, with the local Guatemalan attorney taking up to $5,000 in fees for each case, although U.S. adoption agencies point out the fees go toward baby formula, diapers, vaccinations and other supplies that benefit the child.
Last year, 2,219 Guatemalan children were adopted by U.S. couples, up sharply from 788 children in 1997.
By some estimates, adoptions bring $45 million into Guatemala, the only Central American nation that allows large numbers of private placements.
The majority of the Guatemala cases are legal, but abuses of the system date back years in a country that suffers from endemic corruption, has a per capita income of less than $4,000 per year and still has not completely emerged from the chaos of a three-decade civil war that ended in 1996.
Prosecutors describe schemes that include "baby factories" of pregnant young women, doctors telling new mothers that their healthy babies have died, employers forcing their domestic servants to surrender newborns and even villagers kidnapping their neighbours' children from the local playground.
They warn about poor, illiterate mothers being threatened or drugged or tricked into putting thumbprints on blank adoption papers. Or about jaladoras, or "pullers" -- women who seek out vulnerable pregnant women and subtly offer to buy their children, or who buy from thieves like the one who grabbed Jenifer Sem off the street in August.
"Those eight days weren't days; they were years. All I did was cry," said her mother, Yulisa Sem, holding Jenifer in the prosecutor's office recently. She said the child will not leave her side now.
Alone, pregnant and desperate, Sonya Elizabeth Alvarado, 21, said she answered an ad in the newspaper last year that read: "Don't have an abortion. We will help you." When she responded, she said she was placed in a house with three other pregnant young women -- two of them minors -- and two babies without parents.
She said a couple -- the man Peruvian, the woman Honduran -- would come and go at the house, speaking on cellphones about arranging paperwork, sometimes in English.
For two months, Alvarado said she feared that the couple would pressure her into giving up her baby. She was able to escape because, a month before her due date, police raided the house.
"If my son had been born in that house, I wouldn't have him right now," said Alvarado, now living with her 10-month-old son, Yahir, at a shelter for young mothers.
Concerned about such stories, officials at the U.S. Embassy implemented a new system of safeguards, requiring their own DNA test and a tough face-to-face interview to prove motherhood. But even that is not foolproof, prosecutors say.
In a case last December, a couple from Kentucky successfully adopted a baby with embassy approval only to have the birth mother come forward afterward saying a lawyer had forced her to give up the child. A subsequent review of the paperwork showed that two of her supposed signatures were different.
In 2000, a report by the United Nations special rapporteur on children said international adoptions in Guatemala had turned some kids into "an object of trade and commerce."
"About six or seven years ago, they (adoption bands) discovered this gold mine," said Hector Dionisio, legal director in Guatemala for Casa Alianza, a child advocacy group. "We agree that it's better to have international adoptions than street kids, but what they've done is opened a market for humans that is very lucrative."
The illegal trade has provoked rumours and paranoia about "baby stealing" in Guatemalan villages, where foreigners have been beaten after trying to take photos of children. In 2000, a Japanese tourist was stoned to death after speaking to a child who later briefly disappeared before being found.
Under the new rules, adoptions are overseen by the attorney general's office, where all DNA testing is supposed to be done. Birth mothers must relinquish a child before a judge, rather than just with a signature or thumbprint, officials said.
All waiting children are supposed to be assigned to state orphanages, rather than private foster homes arranged by private attorneys, and a child can be sent abroad only after an exhaustive search for a home in Guatemala.
But sensing their livelihoods are at risk under the new arrangements, the country's 400 powerful adoption attorneys began a multifaceted campaign to overturn the new rules, including rallying adopting families like the Reillys through the Internet.
The attorneys say Guatemala is about to experience what happened to other Latin American nations when they implemented the more restrictive Hague Convention rules, causing a sharp drop in foreign adoptions.
They insist that corruption would be worse under a state-run system.
ADOPTION ATTORNEYS CHALLENGE EFFORTS TO BEEF UP RULES
The adoption attorneys filed a lawsuit charging that Guatemala had not followed the correct constitutional procedures in subscribing to the Hague Convention. The Constitutional Court is expected to uphold the challenge, thus restoring the attorney-led process.
In the meantime, a new law is being debated in Guatemala's Congress that would enact the same Hague-type rules. Child advocates say perhaps two dozen such legislative attempts have failed already, but they're hopeful the Congress is serious this time.
One drawback, however, is that lawmakers envision funding the law with only $600,000, which critics say is far too little to build quality orphanages and a DNA lab and to add enough family courtrooms to keep the process from bogging down. At least $2.5 million is needed, advocates of the new law say.
Only a few adoptions have been approved since the new rules were enacted in March, and the U.S. Embassy suspended its DNA testing and the issuing of visas until the matter is resolved. That leaves the Reillys and about 1,000 other families frustrated and heartsick.
The Reillys can only wait, although they're planning a trip to Guatemala to see Adrian soon.
The very thought of baby trafficking deeply troubles the Reillys and the other families awaiting Guatemalan children. "No one here wants a family at the expense of another family," Kevin Reilly said.
Advocates of international adoptions worry that the disturbing stories out of Guatemala are obscuring the far more common reality: that the process successfully unites children in need with families who will love them.
In the meantime, Elena Reilly keeps asking when her new brother will be coming home.
"(Adrian) is six months old now, and he hasn't even gotten into the (attorney general's office) yet," Renee Reilly said.
"The main concern is that there is just no end in sight."
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