Renee Reilly and Yulisa Suhaira Sem Castillo live in two vastly different worlds, but international adoption has brought heartbreak to them both.
Reilly, a pediatric speech therapist from Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, has been waiting since the spring to adopt a Guatemalan child, a baby boy whose “sweet little face” she and her husband, Kevin, have seen only in photographs.
But six months later, the Reillys’ adoption of the boy they have named Adrian is bogged down in a legal, moral and bureaucratic morass as Guatemala struggles to impose a new government-regulated adoption system.
It is a system intended to ensure that no other mother suffers what happened to Sem.
One morning last month, a man with a knife kidnapped Sem’s cherubic, curly-haired 2-year-old daughter, Jenifer, as she was returning from the corner store with her 6-year-old brother. After eight days of frantic searching, police found Jenifer in a house with two other stolen children.
They had been swept up in what child advocates say is a black market in babies and toddlers in Guatemala that involves networks of thieves, corrupt doctors, nurses, lawyers, civil registrars and foster-home mothers enticed by the millions of dollars pumped into the country by international adoptions.
“The money tempts everyone,” said Sandra Zayas, Guatemala’s prosecutor for crimes against women and children. Her office is investigating 110 cases of irregularities in international adoptions.
The adoption predicament in Guatemala is a struggle to figure out how to protect the Sems and the Reillys, among thousands of U.S. couples eager to begin or expand their families who start looking abroad with no intention of getting entwined with anything that would harm children.
It is the story of two worlds at opposite ends of the international adoption process, and what happens when lofty ideas slam up against the hard reality of an impoverished nation with limited capacity to care properly for its children.
Guatemala is the latest nation trying to navigate the complexities of international adoptions, a world in which supply and demand constantly ebb and flow according to changing political and economic conditions. A decade ago, after the collapse of communism, adoption scandals erupted in Russia and Romania. Before that, the focus was on Paraguay, where investigators discovered a baby-selling ring.
Guatemala is the third-largest source of foreign children being adopted by U.S. families, behind only Russia and China, and with that growth has come increased peril.
Last March, Guatemala began implementing the 1993 Hague Convention, which regulates international adoptions. That included eliminating private adoptions and centralizing the process in the attorney general’s office, which UNICEF and other proponents say will make adoptions more transparent and decrease the temptation to exploit children for profit.
Lawyers challenge rules
But critics say more than 1,000 legitimate adoptions have been held up since then, jeopardizing the welfare of the children awaiting new homes, and they contend that the delay proves Guatemala is incapable of implementing an effective state-run system. Private adoption lawyers have challenged the new rules in Guatemala’s Constitutional Court.
They say the old system was sufficiently regulated and call the campaign a “money grab” by bureaucrats that could shut down the adoption process, increasing the ranks of street children and leaving others in badly run orphanages.
“We’re just in limbo,” said Renee Reilly, who adopted a Guatemalan girl, Elena, now 4, with few problems in 1999. “It’s a good idea to get the money out of [Guatemala’s adoption process], . . . but the government hasn’t shown it can make it work on any timely basis.”
The Reillys have joined with 12 other Illinois couples, from Chicago to Troy, to form an “action group” to lobby against Guatemala’s adoption reforms. Earlier this month, they met with a staffer from the office of Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.), asking that he push for the resumption of the processing of adoption cases.
The increase in Guatemalan adoptions in recent years is mostly due to what has been a relatively swift, quasi-private process in which an attorney handles most of the paperwork under the nominal supervision of the attorney general’s office. A family court judge signs off in the end.
The average cost is from $15,000 to $20,000 per child, excluding travel expenses, with the local Guatemalan attorney taking as much as $5,000 in fees for each case, although adoption agencies in Illinois point out that the fees go toward baby formula, diapers, vaccinations and other supplies that directly benefit the child.
The numbers
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Last year, 2,219 Guatemalan children were adopted by couples in the U.S. That was 85 percent of the adopted children leaving Guatemala, and up sharply from 418 children in 1992 and 788 in 1997.
This year, despite the bureaucratic holdups, the U.S. Embassy already had approved 2,103 immigrant visas for adoptions from Guatemala through July, with two months left to go in the fiscal year.
By some estimates, adoptions now bring $45 million into Guatemala, the only Central American nation that allows large numbers of private placements.
The majority of the Guatemala cases are legal, but abuses of the system date back years in a country that suffers from endemic corruption, maintains a per capita income of less than $4,000 per year and still has not completely emerged from the chaos of a bloody, three-decade civil war that ended in 1996.
Prosecutors describe schemes that include “baby factories” of pregnant young women, doctors telling new mothers that their healthy babies have died, employers forcing their domestic servants to surrender newborns and even villagers kidnapping their neighbors’ children from the local playground.
They warn about poor, illiterate mothers being threatened or drugged or tricked into putting thumbprints on blank adoption papers. Or about jaladoras, or “pullers”–women who seek out vulnerable pregnant women and subtly offer to buy their children, or who buy from thieves like the one who grabbed Jenifer Sem off the street in August.
“Those eight days weren’t days; they were years. All I did was cry,” said her mother, Yulisa Sem, holding Jenifer in the prosecutor’s office two weeks ago. She said the child will not leave her side now.
Alone, pregnant and desperate, Sonya Elizabeth Alvarado, 21, said she answered an ad in the newspaper last year that read: “Don’t have an abortion. We will help you.” When she responded, she said she was placed in a house with three other pregnant young women–two of them minors–and two babies without parents.
She said a couple–the man Peruvian, the woman Honduran–would come and go at the house, speaking on cell phones about arranging paperwork, sometimes in English.
For two months, Alvarado said she feared that the couple would pressure her into giving up her baby. She was able to escape only because, a month before her due date, the house was raided by the police, who arrested everyone.
“They said we were accomplices. They said we were machines, making babies for others, but it wasn’t true,” said Alvarado, who is now living with her 10-month-old son, Yahir, at a shelter for young mothers.
“If my son had been born in that house, I wouldn’t have him right now,” she said.
Tales of baby rings
Zayas, the prosecutor, can reel off other chilling tales of how the baby rings work.
She said on Jan. 31, a woman gave birth at Roosevelt National Hospital in Guatemala City. But the newborn then disappeared, allegedly taken by a lawyer who wanted the baby for an adoption. He was helped by nurses and workers at the civil registrar’s office in the hospital, who helped him arrange false papers, Zayas said.
Concerned about such stories, officials at the U.S. Embassy implemented a new system of safeguards, requiring their own DNA test and a tough face-to-face interview to prove motherhood. But even that is not foolproof, prosecutors say.
In a case last December, a couple from Kentucky successfully adopted a baby with embassy approval only to have the birth mother come forward afterward saying a lawyer had forced her to give up the child. A subsequent review of the paperwork showed that two of her supposed signatures were different.
The birth mother later assented to the couple’s taking the baby to the U.S., but Zayas said prosecutors are insisting that the couple return to testify against the lawyer before the adoption is finalized.
In 2000, a report by the United Nations special rapporteur on children said international adoptions in Guatemala had turned some kids into “an object of trade and commerce.” The report said Guatemala had the “weakest” adoption laws in Central America.
“About six or seven years ago, they [adoption bands] discovered this gold mine,” said Hector Dionisio, legal director in Guatemala for Casa Alianza, a child advocacy group. “We agree that it’s better to have international adoptions than street kids, but what they’ve done is opened a market for humans that is very lucrative.”
The illegal trade has provoked rumors and paranoia about “baby stealing” in Guatemalan villages, where foreigners have been beaten after trying to take photos of children. In 2000, a Japanese tourist was stoned to death after speaking to a child who later briefly disappeared before being found.
Making it public
Under the new rules, adoptions are overseen by the attorney general’s office, where all DNA testing is supposed to be done. Birth mothers must relinquish a child before a judge, rather than just with a signature or thumbprint, officials said.
All waiting children are supposed to be assigned to state orphanages, rather than private foster homes arranged by private attorneys, and a child can be sent abroad only after an exhaustive search for a home in Guatemala.
But sensing that their livelihoods are at risk under the new arrangements, the country’s 400 powerful adoption attorneys declared war and began a multifaceted campaign to overturn the new rules, including rallying the adopting families through the Internet.
The attorneys say Guatemala is about to experience what happened to other Latin American nations when they implemented the more restrictive Hague Convention rules, causing a sharp drop in foreign adoptions. They insist that corruption would be worse under a state-run system.
“If some people don’t respect the law, they should be punished, but don’t punish everyone,” said Jorge Amando Carrillo, a Guatemalan lawyer whose practice is based on doing about 15 adoptions a year. “I call these [new] adoption laws . . . more anti-lawyer than pro-child.”
The adoption attorneys filed a lawsuit charging that Guatemala had not followed the correct constitutional procedures in subscribing to the Hague Convention. The Constitutional Court is expected to uphold the challenge, thus restoring the attorney-led process.
In the meantime, a new law is being debated in Guatemala’s Congress that would enact the same Hague-type rules. Child advocates say perhaps two dozen such legislative attempts have failed already, but they are more hopeful that the Congress is serious this time.
One drawback, however, is that lawmakers envision funding the law with only $600,000, which critics say is far too little to build quality orphanages, construct a DNA lab and add enough family courtrooms to keep the process from bogging down permanently. At least $2.5 million is needed, advocates of the new law say.
The state has only four orphanages, whereas the private adoption money had been enough to fund some 300 foster homes.
Only a few adoptions have been approved since the new rules were enacted in March, and the U.S. Embassy suspended its DNA testing and the issuing of visas until the matter is resolved. That leaves the Reillys and about 1,000 other families frustrated and heartsick.
On a quiet street in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, the Reillys can only wait, although they are planning a trip to Guatemala to see Adrian soon. They keep tabs on the process mainly through the Cradle, their adoption agency in Evanston, and through e-mail updates from a Guatemalan attorney.
When they got the referral for their son on April 1, the Reillys were told it would be just a few months before he would be settled in their nursery, where stuffed animals stand guard in the crib and T-shirts remain neatly folded on a dresser.
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Still, the very thought of baby-trafficking is deeply troubling to the Reillys and the other Illinois families awaiting Guatemalan children.
“No one here wants a family at the expense of another family,” Kevin Reilly said.
Uniting families
Advocates of international adoptions worry that the disturbing stories out of Guatemala are obscuring the far more common reality: that the process successfully unites children in need with families who will love them.
“I believe that [fraud] happens, but I don’t believe the majority are done that way,” said Anne Schmidt, director of international adoption for the Cradle, which has been involved with Guatemala since the early 1990s.
In the meantime, Elena Reilly keeps asking when her new brother will be coming home.
“The problem is that he [Adrian] is 6 months old now, and he hasn’t even gotten into the [attorney general’s office] yet,” Renee Reilly said. “The main concern is that there is just no end in sight.”
She added: “Family members ask, `When is he coming home?’ Right now I can’t give you a month. I can’t even give you a year.”