Guatemala: A Look Back at a Past "Orphan" Disaster
One does not have to reach far back into adoption history to see the effects of such emphases on adoption and orphan rescue. Guatemala entered into an intercountry adoption moratorium at the end of 2007 after sending at least 30,000 children abroad as adoptees from 2000 to 2007; most children joined families in the USA.
Fundamentally, there was a pervasive belief among those adopting that impoverished orphans were in desperate need of homes and that intercountry adoption was a noble and just means of child rescue, no matter how much it cost. As such, the term disaster is not an overstatement; the loss of such a great number of children who were not true orphans would be called such if the children were to be swept from their families and communities in any other manner. The system closure only came after years of criticism from a variety of sources; internally, human rights defenders documented a baby market including child sales and documented cases of child abduction (Casa Alianza et al. 2007). The international community made similar observations, ranging from the UN special investigations and resulting reports to media scrutiny documenting personal stories of force, fraud, and coercion including falsified DNA tests and children lost or abducted into international adoption (Bunkers and Groza 2012).Compelling but lesser-known stories included accounts of those living and working in Guatemala who tried to bring attention to child sales and abduction; Shyrel and Steve Osborne (US citizens) who run a faith mission and children’s home called Amor de Nino (Love the Child) were outspoken, for example. They openly identified the corruption, often calling out those posing as evangelical missions or noble organizations while really being a profit-driven entity set up simply to entrap children and families in the orphan machine (Rotabi et al.
2010). Shyrel Osborn repeatedly went to the US Embassy to report force, fraud, and coercion in adoption and to advocate for Guatemalan women and birth families (Personal communication, August, 2009). In time, when she realized that the US government was not going to cease adoption from Guatemala - largely as a result of pressure from powerful adoption proponents such as Senator Landrieu - Osborne joined women who lodged hunger protests as a result of their children being abducted into adoption (Rotabi 2012a). The last starvation protest, in July 2009, eventually led to important legal movement; the most notable result was a Guatemalan court order for a young girl to be returned to Guatemala as a victim of child abduction rather than a child sent to the USA as a bona fide adoptee (Rotabi 2012a).Embedded in many of these stories, either explicitly or implicitly, was the assertion that most of the children adopted from Guatemala did not truly meet the definition of orphan, as they had one or two living parents, an extended family, or others in their local community who were willing and able to care for them (Roby et al. 2014). However, the international adoption system was so powerful that children were swept from their communities and institutionalized (some were spared the grief of institutions and lived in foster care) and awaited new families in the USA (Bunkers and Groza 2012). The wait time for the child to join their new family was relatively brief in most cases, and the cost to secure such a child was approximately USD$25,000 and upward - relatively inexpensive compared to other sending countries like China and Russia at the time (Casa Alianza et al. 2007). While this is an obvious distortion, in a country that is one of the most impoverished in the Western Hemisphere, those hoping to adopt turned a blind eye and wired large sums of money to secure their adoptions. As a result, adoptions from Guatemala remained at a record high with an estimated 17 children leaving the country daily as adoptees during the peak years (Selman 2012).
The avalanche of mounting evidence that Guatemalan adoptees were “manufactured” through adoption intermediaries who were profiting from trafficking children into adoption forced Guatemala to sign the Hague Convention, and in 2007, they suspended their adoption programs to bring the child adoption system into compliance (Rotabi 2012b). As Guatemala closed to intercountry adoptions, other countries became the new cause for concern. Most notably, there was a clear shift to Ethiopia, which began to rise as the next orphan destination (Bunkers et al. 2012). Other African countries have also gained a high profile in the “orphan rescue” market and the rush to “help” orphans ostensibly due to war and the AIDS epidemic. Troubling practices continue to spill over from one international adoption destination to another; as countries like The Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya close to adoption due to irregularities, agencies seek new footholds in other countries with less regulation (Cheney 2014). Often, adoption agencies promote the narrative of rescue to justify opening a new country program in order to remain financially viable (O'Connor and Rotabi 2012).
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