Guatemala's Forgotten Voices

Children who were fraudulently adopted share their stories
by Isabella Rolz and Jorge Rodriguez
March 27, 2023

It’s difficult to gauge the magnitude of the impact that something as heinous as war can have on the lives of the people who experience it, especially when they were too young at the time to understand the conflict.

From the mid-1960s to the late 1990s, Guatemala was embroiled in a civil war that led to the forced disappearance of more than 250,000 people. Conflicts usually result in casualties of people who have nothing to do with it. In Guatemala, a country marked by state corruption, insecurity, extreme poverty, and a lack of socioeconomic opportunities for indigenous populations, the impact of the war extended to infants, whose only “crimes” were being born in a rural, impoverished area.

Thousands of children were sent abroad in unregulated adoption processes. Approximately five thousand children were stolen. Thirty-five thousand minors were given for fraudulent adoption and delivered without verifying that they had a family. In the worst cases, some were bought from their parents, exploiting their situation of extreme poverty.

Such is the story of Ignacio Alvarado, whose mother abandoned him on the banks of a river because socioeconomic problems made it impossible for her to raise him. A group of villagers soon found him and immediately took him to the nearest hospital, where an orphanage run by the Guatemalan State took him and placed him for adoption to a family from Quebec, Canada. “The orphanage belonged to the government, and many of us who went through this institution were sent to Canada or the United States, illegally, because there was an agreement between the Guatemalan government and the orphanage,” Alvarado says.

More:
https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/guatemalas-forgotten-voices