Word: guatemalans
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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...
Earlier this month, dozens of Guatemalan police, soldiers and government officials raided Casa Quivira, a foster home in the colonial town of Antigua. They took custody of 46 babies and accused the home of failing to issue the proper paperwork for adoptions. Worse, says Carmen de Wennier, Guatemala's Secretary for Social Welfare, Casa Quivira is being investigated for illegally trafficking infants, an accusation that its owners vehemently deny: "If these children were bought in the womb," de Wennier says, "that is a crime...
...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...
...cartels, only to watch them atomize into smaller but more sinister gangs. The most vicious is the Zetas, a 2,000-member army led by ex-commandos hired by the border-based Gulf Cartel because of their military skills. The Zetas recently recruited ex-members of an infamous Guatemalan-army commando unit, the Kaibiles, which is believed to be responsible for the growing use of beheading as a terrorizing tactic. "That militarization of Mexican drug trafficking was a watershed," says Sergio Aguayo, a public-security expert at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. "It raised the violence far beyond...
Robert Kennedy's crusade against the lesser-known Marcello, whose Mob territory embraced Texas, was almost as intense. Born in Tunisia of Sicilian parents who moved to the U.S. in 1910, Marcello later used a phony Guatemalan birth registration to avoid deportation to Italy. Fully aware that Marcello was not a Guatemalan, Kennedy in 1961 nevertheless had Immigration agents hustle him aboard a 78-seat jet as its lone passenger and deposit him in Guatemala City. Marcello and his American lawyer were later flown to El Salvador, where soldiers dumped the two expensively dressed men in the mountains. Marcello claimed...