The Politics of the Welfare State and Adoptions in Civil War Era Guatemala

This paper examines the pre-history of an adoption boom in Guatemala in the 1980s through the early 2000s, exploring how families were politicized in Guatemala well before a moral panic over adoptions. Adoptions were privatized in Guatemala in 1977, but for the decade prior to that all international adoptions were arranged through a state orphanage called Hogar Elisa Martínez, founded as part of an expansion of the Guatemalan welfare state during the early years of the Civil War (1960-1996). At this orphanage, state-employed social workers had nearly total latitude over which children should be adopted and which parents (foreign and national) were suitable as adoptive parents. The orphanage was run by a government branch overseen by the Guatemalan First Lady and was explicitly positioned as "apolitical." The social workers saw their job as purely "humanitarian," which they seemed to regard as definitionally apolitical. However, the relationships forged between social workers and would-be adoptive parents abroad represented a form of foreign relations that only surfaced as a recognized form of politics and a hot political issue (both in the U.S. and in Guatemala) as the numbers of adoptions ratcheted up in later years. This paper draws on adoption files from the Hogar Elisa Martínez as well as interviews with former social workers and psychologists involved in the adoption process. I will argue that the politics of social worker/adoptive parent relations in the early state-run years of adoption were highly political, as was the entire adoption program--despite its public positioning as gendered female through association with the Guatemalan First Lady, and thus apolitical. During the early years an expansion of the welfare state was intended to wick away potential support from Communist subversives during the Guatemalan Civil War. The adoption program formed part of a state initiative to remake the Guatemalan family.