Word: guatemalans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...News of the raid, a story that rivaled Guatemala's upcoming presidential election for headlines, was especially alarming for women like Ana Escobar, a Guatemalan, and Ann Roth, an American. Last spring, armed gunmen held up Escobar in the storage room of her Guatemala City shoe store while two female accomplices stole her 6-month-old daughter Esther. Escobar, 26, is convinced the baby was put up for illegal adoption, and she came to Antigua to see if Esther was one of the infants found at Casa Quivira. "We are not animals to be bought and sold," she says, clutching...
...That feeling, which more and more Guatemalan mothers and adoptive mothers in the U.S. are experiencing these days, reflects the growing awareness that adoption in Guatemala is all too often a multimillion-dollar underworld trade. The nation's ill-regulated adoption business, run by private lawyers and notaries, is rife with corruption, including forged paperwork, payoffs to women who agree to hand over their children and, in some cases, newborns stolen from hospitals or mothers' arms, according to the government human rights ombudsman's office. One U.S. couple spent almost two years and $50,000 to adopt their Guatemalan daughter...
...Guatemala has become an increasingly popular adoption source for U.S couples. Almost 5,000 babies were adopted last year from the nation of 13 million - the world's highest per capita adoption rate - and 95% of them went to the U.S. Since 1990, in fact, more than 25,000 Guatemalan children have been placed in American homes...
...cases in Guatemala in which babies were switched in the middle of adoption processes, for example, the U.S. recently announced that it would require two DNA tests on babies to ensure that a child issued an exit visa is the same one originally given up for adoption. More important, Guatemalan lawmakers earlier this year ratified the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which will tighten controls - by closely tracking the use of adoption fees and by creating a centralized adoption authority that can be easily regulated - in both Guatemala and the U.S when it takes effect January 1. As stories appear...
...Florida resident Clifford Phillips, who runs Casa Quivira with his Guatemalan wife, insists they're victims of the spreading anti-adoption hysteria and persecution. "This is an injustice that needs to be stopped now," says Phillips, arguing that Guatemala is treating him as if he were "guilty until proven innocent." The adoptions of two of the Casa Quivira children, in fact, were found to be legal, and those infants have since left for the U.S. But the rest have been removed to other private facilities, and nine were hospitalized with lung problems and other sicknesses...