Another Look at Guatemala and Child Protection System Subversion
By the time Guatemala entered into an intercountry adoption moratorium due to corruption allegations, extreme international pressure, and a 2007 domestic law related to the country's ratification of the Hague Convention, the intercountry adoption system boasted a variety of actors who were all invested in preserving their well-paid jobs (Bunkers and Groza 2012); many attorneys processing international adoptions had become millionaires, while birth mother recruiters and some institution directors had also earned sizeable incomes.
A UN impunity commission investigation found that the orchestration of intercountry adoption fraud also necessitated some family court judges to engage in graft and corruption (Comision Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala 2010).In the social service sector, social workers and foster parents' jobs became entirely anchored to children being streamlined into intercountry adoption. Social work wages ranged from modest to very good: a 2007 investigation by the Hague Permanent Bureau documented that family court/government social workers earned approximately USD$550 monthly (Hague Conference on International Private Law
2007). However, it is known that social workers involved in private children's homes and the management of foster care as agents of adoption agencies and attorneys earned three to four times that amount. While this assertion is not well documented, the lack of transparency in salaries and fees in general during this era is indicative of a highly corrupt system.
In this impoverished country, the effect on the social service sector included a flood of untrained individuals calling themselves “social workers” so that they might be employed by private attorneys and adoption agencies in the service of expediting cases. Among their tasks were biological family social history reports, and today it is known that many of these reports were poorly written with errors, in the best cases, and were even falsified in cases related to child sales and abduction (Siegal 2011).
In a few cases, adoptive parents halted their adoptions midway through the process because they realized that the child to whom they had been matched was not truly an orphan (cf. Siegal 2011). Unfortunately, these cases had all of the prerequisite paperwork - including a social worker's signed social history report verifying orphanhood, as was necessary for a child to leave Guatemala free and clear through adoption (Hague Conference on International Private Law 2007).Now, as Guatemalan adoptees and their US families are going back to trace their roots, some are identifying inconsistencies in their personal documentation. For example, some have learned that their biological family's street address never even existed or that there were other “errors” in their files that suggest fabrication of information. This has led some adoptive families to question whether their children were kidnapped (Larsen 2007). To child protection specialists in Uganda, Guatemala's experience suggests that if they do not get the current proliferation of the orphan industrial complex under control, they too will be found wanting when adoptees return to ask hard questions about the circumstances of their adoptions.
9