Civil War-Era Adoptions in Guatemala: From Humanitarianism to Commerce

In 1971, Guatemala’s main state orphanage initiated the country’s first international adoption proceedings after a Swedish couple wrote to the director that they wished to share their home with a less fortunate child. As a formal institution, international adoption only dated back to “babylifts” of German and Japanese orphans at the end of World War II. It had become widespread during the Korean War, thanks to evangelical church drives in the U.S. While families, churches, and agencies positioned these adoptions as humanitarian acts, facts on the ground in the sender countries often came to look quite different. In Guatemala, foreign demand for adoptable children bore the unintended consequence of creating a lucrative private market.

This paper will explore the evolution of international adoption from Guatemala from the 1970s to the early 80s. This tiny Central American country later overtook China and South Korea as the world’s largest source of children adopted abroad. By 2008—when the Guatemalan government decided to discontinue such adoptions after reports of adoption fraud and baby-stealing—one in a hundred children born in Guatemala was adopted abroad. Drawing on adoption files, police records, court cases and oral histories, I will argue that the shift from humanitarianism to market dynamics occurred much earlier than previously thought. In 1976, during the height of the Civil War, the Guatemalan Congress passed a law allowing notaries to enact adoptions without the oversight of a judge— essentially privatizing adoptions. Several well-connected notaries and lawyers realized that they could charge foreign families up to US$10,000 per adoption, andmembers of the military began to supply child survivors to these lawyers, resulting in the acquisition of “adoptable” children through dubious and often illegal means.  The emergence of this market, which promoted international adoption as a humanitarian means to rescue a Guatemalan child, was actually a lucrative industry. The trajectory of adoptions in Guatemalan suggests that transnational humanitarian efforts may shift local economic incentives, producing unexpected and sometimes dire consequences.