GUATEMALA CITY – Every 100th baby born in Guatemala grows up as an adopted American, making the Central American country the richest source of adoptees in the Western Hemisphere. But U.S. ratification of an international adoption treaty is likely to choke off the supply next summer.
Critics say Guatemala has become a baby farm where adoptions are too easy and prone to corruption.
For now, willing parents can get Guatemalan babies by paying thousands of dollars to notaries who act as baby brokers, recruiting birth mothers, handling all the paperwork and completing the job in less than half the time it takes elsewhere. Guatemala outpaces all other countries in the percentage of its children put up for adoption in the United States.
All this will likely end once the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions takes effect in the United States. The U.S. will then require all foreign adoptions to meet tougher international standards, which Guatemala ratified in 2003 but has not implemented.
“We don’t want adoptions to stop, but we believe the current system does not provide enough protection to the child’s needs,” said John Lowell, the U.S. consul in Guatemala.
The treaty, also ratified by China, Russia and at least 39 other countries, aims to protect children, birth parents and adoptive parents from abuse, in part by requiring a government agency to regulate adoptions.
Guatemala still allows adoptions to be managed privately, without judicial approval. In many other countries, adoptions take more than a year. Guatemala can deliver children in as little as five months.
Berta Morales, 35, has given the last five of her 10 children to Americans.
“It would have been more of a sin to abort them,” said Morales, who lives in Coatepeque. “I’m poor … but maybe one of them will become a professional.”
Morales said she was only paid bus fare to Guatemala City to sign the papers.
But Josefina Arellano, who directs the government office that approves each adoption, says women who give up multiple children in a row are probably getting paid.
Susana Luarca, a notaries’ association lawyer, denied mothers are doing it for money: “What more help could they get,” she asks, “than relieving them of the problem of their child’s situation?”
Every profession has unscrupulous people, “but that does not mean everything is rotten,” said Luarca, who is currently handling 40 adoptions. “Some people have tried to make the case that, just because a business is lucrative, it’s bad.”
It is lucrative: Notaries charge up to $19,000. With U.S. paperwork and plane trips, the typical Guatemalan adoption costs as much as $30,000, adoption agencies say.
But in the last six months, the government has brought 30 criminal cases against notaries for falsifying paperwork and creating false identities to avoid having to involve the birth father or the parents of underage birth mothers.
Applications are surging as parents rush to take advantage of the current process, which will apply to any request filed before the treaty takes effect in mid-2007. Of the 4,100 cases pending in Arellano’s office, more than 3,000 were filed this year.
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