During the darkest period of state terror, in the early 1980s, children fled or were left behind at the scenes of horrific massacres; soldiers sometimes adopted them as “pets” to run errands or shine shoes on military bases, while others were dropped at orphanages or were likely handed over for private adoptions. In a case uncovered by ProPublica in 2012, a boy was kidnapped and brought to the U.S. by one of the Army lieutenants who participated in a massacre of 250 people in his village. The army sometimes sent workers from the Ministry of Social Welfare to pick up children after military operations in remote areas, in what were called “humanitarian” missions. “Disappearing children was a war crime that hid in plain sight, in the sense that some military officials openly bragged about ‘saving’ children,” Nolan writes. It is estimated that 500 forcibly disappeared children were put up for adoption. This is likely an undercount, because many people, especially many Indigenous people, never testified to the country’s two truth commissions, which were carried out soon after the peace accords. Shame and guilt may have also made families reluctant to report a lost or stolen child, or terror—one can imagine that the survivor of an army attack might be afraid to approach a state-run orphanage to search for their child.
As in “orphan-rescue missions” from Germany and Japan after World War II and “Operation Babylift” after Vietnam, adoptions were seen from abroad as a humanitarian effort, “private, and somehow apolitical,” though, Nolan notes, they were always “very much part of great power politics.” The U.S., through its support of successive Guatemalan regimes, helped create the conditions that led to the children being given up for adoption. More specifically, the U.S. Embassy, which awarded exit visas for adoptees, was aware of crime in the adoption system as early as 1988. Yet officials were more concerned with the complaints they got from American adoptive parents, who badgered the Embassy and congressmen when their cases slowed. The “urgency of parenting instincts of the relative wealthy Americans,” in the words of a 1989 Embassy cable, was a pressing factor. Ironically, American families sometimes expressed on their adoption forms “humanitarian concern for the war-torn nation of Guatemala as one reason for their wish to adopt.”
Nolan obtained access to previously untapped archives of the Guatemalan Ministry of Social Welfare, which held files on children adopted through the central state orphanage, and, for a window into private adoptions, the files of a Trump-supporting Guatemala City lawyer who professes to be undertaking his own investigation into how foreign adoptions were banned, at the “alternative cost,” he believed, of “kids out on the street as burglars and prostitutes.” (This is an academic book, but Nolan’s journalistic flair comes out in her encounters with the lawyers, one of whom she meets in a jail cell filled with cats.) Out of respect for privacy, she does not reveal real names, nor did she contact any of the people in the files she read. This was obviously the ethical choice, but it’s agonizing to wonder what happened to those children flown around the world. I also wanted to learn more about the foreign side of the adoption industry. We get just a bit of it: mentions of a corrupt lawyer “working on commission for a Florida-based adoption agency”; an American couple who flatly refuse to return a child even after eight people were convicted for being involved in her kidnapping; and Christian organizations that had connections with evangelical relief agencies and missionaries. Nolan finds “adoption files were thick with expressions of faith.”