America Centrale, Guatemala, società
Nyt 061105
Sotto inchiesta il sistema di adozione del Guatemala
MARC LACEY
Il sistema di adozione del Guatemala è gestito da privati, da
circa 500 avvocati legali e notai che costituiscono una potente lobby di
benestanti) ha trasformato un paese di 12 milioni di abitati in una specie di
fattoria di bimbi da fornire come merce, con gli USA primo paese destinatario.
I documenti necessari vengono rilasciati in genere in una
sola visita, basta una settimana di soggiorno in Guatemala alle famiglie per
ottenere l’adozione che desiderano.
Circa un bambino su 100 in Guatemala viene adottato da una
famiglia americana; il Guatemala è terzo dopo Cina e Russia come fornitore di
bambini alle coppie americane.
Nel 1995-2005 le famiglie americane hanno adottato
18 298 bambini guatemaltechi, con cifre in crescita ogni anno.
I bambini vengono consegnati dalle loro madri ai mediatori (jaladoras) che pagano da poche centinaia
a $2000 per bambino; la maggior parte proviene dalle campagne, dove domina la povertà
con una mortalità del 36‰ nel 2002, tra le più alte del mondo. Metà dei bambini
che sopravvivono soffrono cronicamente di manultrizione.
Le famiglie adottive in genere danno del denaro alle madri
naturali, oltre ai $25-30 000 alle agenzie americane di adozione, agli
avvocati del Guatelmala etc.
I membri del Council
of Central American Human Rights Attorneys (Consiglio dei procuratori per i
diritti umani del Centro-America) hanno pubblicato una dichiarazione in cui si
chiede se il sistema di adozione del Guatemala non «trasformi il bambino in oggetto,
in una merce».
Esiste la Convenzione sulle adozioni internazionali dell’Aja,
firmata nel 2002 dal Guatemala, finora non rispettata e che ora la Corte
costituzionale del paese obbliga a rispettare.
Diversi
tra i paesi firmatari hanno limitato le adozioni dal Guatemala per le sue
violazioni.
Nyt 061105
Guatemalan
Adoption System Under Scrutiny
By MARC LACEY
GUATEMALA
CITY — There are business
hotels and tourist hotels, and then there is the Guatemala City Marriott. Catering
to American couples seeking to adopt, it is a baby hotel of sorts, as the crush
of strollers, the cry of infants and the emotional scenes that play out
regularly in the lobby testify.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” shouted a woman from Kansas the other day as
she scooped a little girl she hoped to adopt from the arms of her foster mother
and held her up toward the chandelier. “You’re just the cutest little thing.”
Not far away, a woman from Texas
was beaming at another soon-to-be adopted girl near the reception desk and
comparing notes with an Illinois
couple, who had just picked up their new chubby-cheeked, black-haired son.
– Guatemala, where nearly one in every
100 children is adopted by an American family, ranks third behind much larger
nations, China and Russia,
when it comes to providing babies to American couples.
The pace of adoptions and the fact that mothers here, unlike in other
places, are sometimes paid for their babies have brought increasing
concern and the prospect of new regulation that may significantly reduce the
number of Guatemalan babies bound for the United States next year, or end it
altogether.
– Critics of the adoption
system here — privately run and uniquely streamlined — say it has turned this
country of 12 million people into a virtual baby farm that supplies infants as
if they were a commodity. The United
States is the No. 1 destination.
While the overall demand for international adoptions has increased
over the last decade, adoption from Guatemala has outpaced many other nations.
– From 1995 to 2005,
American families adopted 18,298 Guatemalan babies, with the figure rising
nearly every year. Though most families are undoubtedly
unaware of the practices here, foreign governments and international watchdogs,
like Unicef, have long been scrutinizing Guatemala’s adoption system.
– In other countries, adoptive parents are sought out for abandoned
children. In Guatemala, children are frequently
sought out for foreign parents seeking to adopt and given up by their birth
mothers to baby brokers who may pay from a few hundred dollars to $2,000 for a
baby, according to interviews with mothers and experts.
– Most babies that find
their way to America
are conceived in the countryside.
– Some of the birth mothers have brought shame on the family by becoming
pregnant out of wedlock. Others
are married but had affairs after their husbands emigrated to the United States.
Inevitably, the pregnancies were not planned.
– Poverty is a way of life
in these villages, and infant mortality, at 36 per 1,000 births in 2002, is
among the highest in the hemisphere.
Those children who survive have a rough start,
with almost half of them chronically
malnourished.
– Guatemala’s adoption
system is run not by judges, courts and bureaucrats —
as in most other nations — but by
some 500 private lawyers and notaries, who hire baby brokers and maintain networks
of pediatricians and foster mothers to tend children awaiting adoption. They form a powerful and well-heeled lobby.
“We’re rescuing these children from death,”
said Susana Luarca Saracho, one of the country’s busiest adoption lawyers, who
has fought for years to keep the current system in place.
“Here, we don’t live — we survive,” she said.
“Which would a child prefer, to grow up in misery or to go to the United States,
where there is everything?”
To adopt any foreign child, Americans must
clear numerous bureaucratic hurdles in the United States, including approval
by the Department of Homeland Security. Often, in the baby’s home country, the
adoptive parents must make several court appearances.
– In Guatemala, the required paperwork can often be
handled in one visit, with newly constituted families sometimes spending less
than a week in a Guatemala City hotel before
leaving for the United
States. So many adoptive
parents pass through the Marriott — hundreds per year, employees say — that
diapers, wet wipes and formula are available in the gift shop, next to the
postcards and Guatemalan curios.
“Everyone who goes to a hotel here sees the
scene: North Americans meeting with Guatemalan children,” said Manuel Manrique,
Unicef’s representative in Guatemala.
“Most people think, ‘How great that those children are going to have a better
life.’ But they don’t know how the system is working. This has become a
business instead of a social service.”
The
adoptive parents are often so emotionally involved in the process that they do
not adequately investigate the inner workings of this country’s system,
adoption advocates acknowledge. The American couples at
the Marriott were reluctant to talk or give their names.
“There is sometimes a great deal of naïveté on
the part of adoptive parents,” said Susan Soon-keum Cox, a vice president at
Holt International Children’s Services, an American nonprofit agency that works
in Guatemala and elsewhere, and who was herself adopted from Korea by Americans
in 1956. “It’s don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The
system is not without controversy in Guatemala.
Josefina Arellano Andrino is in charge of the government department that signs
off on all adoptions but, for now, is permitted to halt only those involving false paperwork or outright
fraud. She relishes the prospect of additional oversight.
“Babies
are being sold, and we have to stop it,” she said.
“What’s happening to our culture that we don’t take care of our children?”
Alarmed to see so many foreign adoptions in
Guatemala, members of the Council of
Central American Human Rights Attorneys, who were meeting at the Marriott in
August, issued a statement questioning whether the country’s system “converts
the child into an object, like a piece of merchandise.”
Key to that business are jaladoras, as the baby brokers are called locally. They ply the
Guatemalan countryside looking for pregnant women and girls in a fix. Adoption
is presented as the perfect answer, one that will leave the child with a
wealthy family and the mother
better off as well, by paying for her medical bills and providing some direct
money surreptitiously.
Although most countries forbid paying mothers
who put up their children for adoption, it occurs regularly here, an open
secret that mothers are told to deny if anyone asks.
“They gave me some money,” a 12-year-old
mother acknowledged on condition of anonymity in an interview in October at a
government office when asked if she had been compensated for giving up her baby.
“I don’t know how much. They gave my father some money, too.”
Her father, interviewed separately, denied he
had received anything. The payments strike many in the adoption world here as a
form of benevolence.
– Some American couples say that if they are going to pay
$25,000 to $30,000 for an adopted child — which they routinely do in the fees that go to American
adoption agencies, Guatemalan lawyers and others involved in the system
— shouldn’t the birth mother get something?
The Hague
Convention on Intercountry Adoptions has an answer. Guatemala’s president, Óscar Berger, signed
the treaty in 2002, and after years of legal challenges the nation’s Constitutional Court ruled definitively
this year that the country must abide by it.
The treaty states that international adoptions should come only after a
loving home, preferably with the child’s relatives, is sought in country. It
also aims “to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in children” and
limits payments to “only costs and expenses, including reasonable professional
fees.”
– Several signing
countries, including Canada,
Germany and Britain,
already restrict Guatemalan adoptions because of apparent breaches. The United States
has said it plans to join the convention next year. At that point, officials
say, Washington
intends to stop approving adoptions from countries that do not meet the
treaty’s standards.
“Guatemala is the principal concern
that we have,” said Catherine Barry, a deputy assistant secretary of state for
consular affairs.
Baby brokers tread carefully as they seek
pregnant women in the countryside, where many villagers believe what is apparently a rural myth that
there is an active market overseas for children as organ donors.
A few months back, in a village outside the
provincial town of Nahuala,
two women and a man went house to house selling baby slings, pieces of cloth
used to carry infants across the back. It was a ruse, neighbors recounted, to
find out who would give birth soon.
The traveling salespeople talked one young
woman in the hillside village
of Xolnahuola into giving
up her baby. She was single and despondent and they offered her about $750, the
villagers said.
When the three returned as the pregnant
woman’s term neared its end, her parents, who opposed giving up the child,
alerted neighbors, who gathered angrily at the scene. The two women’s hair was
forcibly cut off, a traditional form of Mayan justice meant to shame offenders.
The baby brokers were taken away by the authorities and later released.
In early October, villagers in Ixtahuacán
killed one person with machetes, captured another 12 and set fire to five cars
when fear spread that a gang of child snatchers was in the area. The police
said it remained unclear whether the outsiders had actually been looking for
children.
Ms. Luarca, the adoption lawyer, said such
episodes have nothing to do with the children she handles, who come from poor
mothers who cannot afford to raise them and who give them up willingly without
payment.
“We’re not a criminal organization,” she said
of Guatemala’s
adoption lawyers. “What we are doing is a good thing. At this moment in time it
is the only way out for these children. I look forward to the time when they
can grow up well here.”
In her opinion, though, that time has not
arrived. New regulations will “create a bureaucratic labyrinth,” she says, and
she continues to lobby lawmakers to preserve the current system.
Around the corner from her office, Ms. Luarca
runs an adoption home, clean, orderly and with attentive nannies roaming among
the rooms.
With the prospect of tighter rules, business
is surging. Seventy children are there, the older ones in miniature bunks and
the many babies wrapped in blankets in cribs.
They came from mothers not unlike a teenager
who was encountered at a government office, signing away her baby to a Pennsylvania couple, and
a bit melancholy to be doing so. She and her baby, like all birth mothers and
their children, must have their DNA tested for the American Embassy to approve
the adoption.
“I hope she has a nice family and lives a
happy life,” said the 17-year-old mother, who would not give her name.
Fidgeting as she spoke, she said she hoped that her daughter, Antonietta, would
return one day to visit her and that the adoptive parents would keep the
newborn’s name.
Both prospects,
those involved in the process say, are unlikely.
New York Times