LYNN HORRIDGE

On Thursday, July 24, 2003, masked protestors took to the streets of Guatemala City in reaction to a Supreme Court of Justice ruling to bar former dictator General Efra’n R’os Montt from running in the upcoming presidential elections. This ruling countered a previous Constitutional Court decision to allow R’os Montt’s candidacy.

The protests worked. People feared R’os Montt, and remembered his role in the army’s scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign of the 1980s, which was responsible for the deaths of many thousands of indigenous Mayans during the eighteen-month military junta. Faced with escalating violence and the possibility of a repeat coup attempt, the Supreme Court of Justice overturned its own ruling and allowed the candidacy.

The protest, dubbed Black Thursday, was not peaceful. Busloads of campesinos from disparate rural parts of Guatemala spilled into the city streets smashing storefront windows with clubs, setting fire to cars and buses, and provoking a temporary national lock-down. A journalist from a national newspaper was reportedly chased down and died of a heart attack. His death took on symbolic meaning for Guatemalans who have been struggling with a steady increase in violent incidents and human rights abuses since the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords. Police officials did very little to squelch the riots and the army appeared indifferent.

Well-armed and organized, many observers accused R’os Montt’s party, the ruling FRG (Guatemalan Republican Front), of paying campesinos to participate a tactic similar to those used during the previous three decades of civil conflict. If there was any doubt before, Guatemalans could now be sure what to expect if R’os Montt were elected president. As of this writing, two days after a national election with a nearly 70% voter turnout, Guatemalans have made it clear that this is not the kind of state they want. Though results were so close that frontrunners Oscar Berger and Alvaro Colom will have to face a run-off election in late December, with just 17% of the vote, R’os Montt will not be among the candidates. However, there is no way to tell what kind of government either of the two leading candidates will run considering the extensive corruption throughout the political infrastructure of the country. While some might suppose that the effects of this corruption are limited to Central America or to Guatemala itself, Guatemala’s major role in the international adoption trade means that American adoptive parents are included in the ranks of those affected by it.

For adoptive parents in the US whose in-process adoptions were already stalled by these negotiations, Black Thursday represented yet another setback. Many turned to support networks facilitated by Internet listservs and bulletin boards where new and experienced adoptive parents share their hopes, concerns, fears, and concrete questions about what happens next. This summer, the political content of such exchanges rose as parents adopting from Guatemala struggled to understand exactly what was going on there and how the political climate would effect pending adoptions.

Many adoptive parents say that the waiting period between a child’s referral to the adoptive parent and the actual placement of the child in the new parent’s home can feel like a pregnancy. In fact, a nine-month waiting period for an international adoption is not out of the question. And when an adoption is put on hold, it can feel like a pregnancy interrupted it is an extremely scary, nerve-wracking, and emotional experience. Most of all, it is difficult to relate to others. The bonds that form between adoptive parents and adopted children are often facilitated by photos, toys, and written communications, exchanged months before the two sides ever meet, and depending on how old the child is before arriving at his or her new home, glimpses of a future together may already exist. When a plan is made to introduce new members of an adoptive family to each other for the first time, and the plan is abruptly altered, it can be devastating to everyone involved. Having to cope with the possibility that one’s adopted child may not have been freely abandoned by his or her birth mother in the first place is no less devastating.

Even before last summer’s violence, adoptive parents in the US knew there would be delays in their adoptions from Guatemala. Under pressure from human rights groups and facing accusations of corruption, the Guatemalan Congress voted to ratify the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption in August 2002. Implementation of the Convention would require the creation of a Central Authority, an oversight agency within the government charged with handling all adoption procedures. The Guatemalan government’s proposed Central Authority would assign this responsibility to a branch of the Attorney General’s office, the Guatemalan Solicitor General (Procuraduria General de la Nacion, or PGN). Many human rights observers see this move as an attempt to maintain the status quo while fending off negative international attention. The PGN has already been serving as the main facilitator of adoptions in Guatemala and has been criticized for its lack of legislative authority and therefore inability to enact meaningful changes. Furthermore, the PGN’s cozy relationship with adoption lawyers and weak judicial enforcement seems incongruent with the goals of an agency charged with adoption oversight.

As of now, adoptions are being processed again and Hague Convention discussions have come to a halt. However, the issue is sure to be revisited. Many of the concerns raised by those involved in the Hague Convention discussions are legitimate and vital to the future of adoption policy in Guatemala. There is no doubt that some level of corruption exists in Guatemalan adoption practices. Press reports concerning the illegal trafficking of children from Guatemala to Costa Rica for the purposes of international adoption, and lawsuits brought against Guatemalan attorneys by birth families who claim their children were stolen from them are just two recent examples. While child advocate groups such as Casa Alianza and UNICEF welcome the ratification of the Hague Treaty in Guatemala, many are wary of institutionalizing a potentially corrupt system. Meanwhile, Guatemalan adoption attorneys and orphanage directors are rallying against the ratification on constitutional grounds and have organized the Association in Defense of Adoption around these issues. For birth families and adoptive families, this stalemate in negotiations has left them with little recourse in terms of dealing with corrupt practices. Moreover, the concept most central to adoption practices, the best interests of the child, seems to have given way to the best interests of those facilitating adoptions.

As it stands, the debate around international adoption between Guatemala and the US, as well as many other sending and receiving countries, is highly polarized between local attorneys and orphanage directors on the one hand, and human rights organizers on the other. Adoptive parents tend to defend their Guatemalan adoptions by siding with attorneys and orphanage directors while dismissing the allegations of human rights organizers. However, as more stories of trafficking and exploitation make it to the international press, and more US adoption agencies begin to distance themselves from their Guatemalan counterparts, adoptive parents might start taking a closer look. After all, Guatemala is a country with complex political and economic hardships, and the desire to adopt a child from a country less privileged than one’s own is undoubtedly an act driven by good intentions. While the potential for corruption does not necessarily lie with the adopters themselves, the potential for the implementation of stronger regulatory oversight does. US adopters can have a strong voice in this debate. Without political allegiance to the traditional groups that support or oppose international adoption, they may contribute important insights based on first-hand experience.