Guatemalan Government Apologizes to Victims of Illegal Adoptions

 👇As the theft of children from their families and the subsequent illegal adoption became a tactic of war, it also became a political market.

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ANOTHER COUNTRY? Government Apologizes to Victims of Illegal Adoptions

By Jeff Abbott 7/22/2024

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Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo has taken an important step in seeking justice for tens of thousands of children illegally adopted from the Central American country. 

On July 12, the president made a public apology to the parents of two children illegally adopted by a family in the United States in 1997. This is the first time that the Guatemalan government has made a public apology for illegal adoptions carried out in the country between 1977 and 2008.

The public apology was in response to the case of Osmín Tobar Ramírez, who was seven years old in 1997 when he and his younger brother, Jeffrey Arias Ramírez, who was nearly two years old, were taken from their family by the Guatemalan state and housed in the Asociación Los Niños de Guatemala orphanage. They were put up for adoption, an act that would later be revealed to be illegal. 

“It was something sensational,” Gustavo Tobar, their biological father, tells The Progressive. “I never thought I would be in front of the highest authorities of the country, in an act especially dedicated to us. You feel a positive energy, you feel nervous, you feel everything, but it is something wonderful, it is something very wonderful.”

In 2018, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Osmín and Jeffrey’s parents after years of searching for the children and struggling to find justice in Guatemala, where their complaints were met with disinterest from authorities. The court ruled that the Guatemalan state had violated the rights of the family and that a criminal network had financially benefited from the trafficking of the brothers through adoption, ordering that the Guatemalan government apologize to them and set up a commission to find the children that were sold as part of the illegal adoption scheme. 

“We sought justice here in Guatemala,” Tobar says. “We went to courts [in Guatemala], but they did not want to touch the issues. So we had to find an international court so that they could be heard. Everything seemed very long.” 

He adds, “But thanks to God, after twenty-seven years we had that glimmer of hope, that the government of Guatemala would apologize for all the atrocities that were committed against us.”

Osmín and his brother were taken by the state and adopted out during the darkest days of Guatemala’s internal armed conflict, when criminal networks would steal children and put them up for adoption. Arévalo’s public apology comes as a welcome shift for those who have been seeking justice for decades. 

“It was a historic step after a long struggle,” Mariela SR Coline Fanon, the President of the Lost Roots Foundation and who herself was illegally adopted from Guatemala in the 1980s, tells The Progressive. 

“The Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued this sentence before the state because really the apologies were one with an international sentence that the state of Guatemala should comply with the order,” she explains. “It opens the door for everyone. It is a first step.” 

Between 1977 and 2008, Guatemala became one of the primary countries in the world for illegal adoptions, just ahead of Russia and China.  During those years there were an estimated 30,000 cases of children being illegally adopted from the Central American country before international adoptions were made illegal in 2008. Each adoption cost between $12,000 and $80,000. 

Many of the people involved with the illegal adoption scheme were directly connected to Guatemalan political and business leaders, meaning these crimes have largely gone unpunished and families have remained separated. 

“Impunity cannot be the only response to what happened,” Fanon says. After discovering her story at age thirty, she wrote a book entitled Mamá, No Estoy Muerta (Mom, I Am Not Dead) that documents her own kidnapping, adoption, quest for justice, and meeting her biological mother. 

BOOK: Until I Find You

 

Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala

The poignant saga of Guatemala’s adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession.

In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption—but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora—a baby broker.

Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation.

Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.

“Important, compelling reading. Nolan has interviewed countless people, obtained access to adoption files, read the human rights reports, and sorted through the legal history. This will become a key, authoritative account of the deeply corrupt state of Guatemalan adoption from the 1970s to the 2000s.”—Laura Briggs, author of Taking Children: A History of American Terror