Searching for Anyelí
In Guatemala, mothers fight for their trafficked and illegally adopted children.
JANUARY 18, 2024
On November 3, 2006 Loyda Rodríguez left her three young children playing downstairs in a fenced-off patio at their home in San Miguel Petapa, a working-class area south of Guatemala City. Rodríguez went up to the roof to hang some freshly washed laundry, then looked around in the bedroom for her children’s jackets. It was afternoon, not yet dark. She still had time to take them out to the playground.
But when she returned to the patio, one child was missing. Her two-year-old toddler, Anyelí, had slipped through the cracks of the fence out to the street. The daughter of the neighbor who sold tortillas across the way saw a woman lift Anyelí into a white car and drive away.
After searching the neighborhood, Rodríguez and her husband filed a missing persons report with the police, then drove straight to the international airport downtown to hang up flyers with Anyelí’s photo. “I thought that they might take my daughter out of the country,” recalled Rodríguez, who had heard rumors that kidnappers were stealing babies and selling their parts to organ traffickers. Rodríguez and Hernández continued to visit the police station and courthouse every three days, hoping for news of their toddler.
Eventually, a judge advised them to get in touch with Norma Cruz, a well-known human rights activist who had founded an organization called Fundación Sobrevivientes (Foundation for Survivors) to combat violence against women. The couple joined the Foundation for Survivors’ campaign “No More Empty Cribs,” which included protests, and later a hunger strike. But they could not find Anyelí.
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By the early 2000s, Guatemala was frequently cited as the “worst case” scenario for international adoptions. The adoption program began, along with so many in the world, during the Cold War. At first, Guatemalan children were placed mostly from orphanages to countries in Europe including Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. Then, in 1977, the Guatemalan Congress passed a new law privatizing international adoptions. It became the only country in the world that allowed lawyers to match children to adoptive families without any judicial oversight. Privatized adoptions were speedier than adoptions through orphanages, which did have to be approved by courts. Despite a price tag in tens of thousands of dollars, they quickly overtook state-run adoptions. Agencies in Europe and the U.S. worked directly with lawyers, who hired baby brokers to find them children for a fee, and the brokers took to coercing often destitute women, many of them indigenous and poor, into relinquishing babies to wealthy women in the Global North.
At the height of the adoption boom in Guatemala in the 2000s, one in 100 children born in Guatemala was placed for adoption with a family abroad. Guatemala’s population was only 14 million people in 2006, yet that year it provided the second-highest number of children to what had become a world adoption market.
By the time Anyelí disappeared in 2006, adoptions in Guatemala had become a focal point of the nation’s political debate. Two years later, a newly formed governmental oversight body called the National Adoptions Council agreed to allow the families that Cruz, the human rights activist, was working with into their office to review adoption files, to see if they could find their own children among the stacks of paper. Each adoption file had a passport-sized photo of the child attached to the front. On the eighth day of searching, Rodríguez’s brother found three files with photographs of girls whom he thought could be Anyelí.
This discovery launched the first criminal investigation of an adoption ring in Guatemala that landed a whole adoption fraud network in jail. An extensive investigation showed that Anyelí had been lured from the patio, kidnapped, then sold to a baby broker, who in turn sold her to Susana Luarca, an outspoken proponent of privatized adoptions who arranged hundreds of cases. Working on commission for a Florida-based adoption agency, Luarca, with the help of a corrupt judge and notary, falsified documents in order to make the girl eligible for adoption. Anyelí became “Karen Abigail.” An associate of Luarca’s posed as the girl’s mother in order to consent to her adoption. (Luarca denied all of this in court and during our interviews.)
Authorities approved the adoption despite the fact that obligatory tests comparing the DNA of Anyelí and her supposed birth mother came back negative. On December 9, 2008, “Karen Abigail” flew from Guatemala to Missouri with a set of adoptive parents — just three months before Rodríguez’s brother found her photograph in the National Adoptions Council’s office.
Rodríguez is shy, and she was nervous about taking the stand when Luarca and ten of her associates went to trial in Guatemala City in 2012. Rodríguez told me that the adoption ring had been found to have ties to organized crime funding itself mainly through extortion. Organized crime was on the rise after the end of the Guatemalan civil war, which had lasted from 1960 to 1996 and during which 200,000 had died. After strangers started showing up in San Miguel Petapa asking where Rodríguez and Hernández lived, they moved to a rural area, where I visited them in 2016. Despite threats and intimidation, the couple persisted with the case. Luarca’s defense lawyer tried to argue that “Karen Abigail” was not really Anyelí, but independent labs in Spain and the United States returned a 99.98 percent positive DNA match between Rodríguez and the girl. In 2015, the Guatemalan court convicted eight people involved in Anyelí’s adoption, including Susana Luarca and the woman who posed as “Karen Abigail’s” birth mother. Luarca was sentenced to eighteen years in prison, which she is still serving.
At first, Hernández and Rodríguez felt vindicated by the trial, they said. Neighbors had been quick to criticize them for being bad parents for “losing” their child. Police had even gone so far as to accuse them of selling Anyelí to an adoption ring and then having second thoughts. In 2011, a Guatemalan judge ruled to cancel the passport and birth certificate that had allowed Anyelí to leave the country and ordered her immediate return — a court order supposedly enforceable by Interpol. It soon became clear that the family had won their case, but only within Guatemalan borders. Karen Abigail’s adoptive family, who live in Liberty, Missouri, responded with an appearance on the CBS Early Show. The adoptive mother said they would not send the girl back.
“We actually believe that DNA testing is a very important part of the process, but unfortunately in Guatemala, it's the only part of the process that holds preeminence. And because they use property rights arguments to declare Karen, as we understand it, like DNA is sort of viewed as a title, and we strongly feel that Karen isn't property ... it's very important that we know the whole truth, and not just DNA, and that that be done in a safe context.”
The couple retained Jared Genser, a well-known Washington-based lawyer, who argued that the Guatemalan judge’s jurisdiction didn’t reach the United States. The only contact between the two families has been a letter Genser sent to Norma Cruz with a series of questions. When an article about this case was published in 2015, Genser strenuously disputed the illegal circumstances of the adoption, that Anyelí and Karen are even the same girl, in short, everything about this account. (Genser did not reply to The Dial’s request for comment.)
Rodríguez and Hernández told me they understood that the family in Missouri adopted their daughter without knowing she was stolen, and that the girl had “another life” now. While they are worried about the distress learning her full story will cause Anyelí, they wanted to speak to the adoptive family and come to some kind of agreement that would allow them to spend time with their daughter. Rodríguez told me, “The most difficult thing is that we know where she is, and they don’t let us see her.” When I visited her at the couple’s new home, she showed me Anyelí’s toddler clothing, which she keeps neatly folded and stored away.
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The fight to address problems with international adoptions in Guatemala took decades. Before the 1990s, international adoptions were poorly regulated. But after problems with international adoptions arose in Guatemala and elsewhere, the U.S. Embassy had put in place some limited safeguards. In Romania, for example, communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu decreed in 1984 that abortion was punishable by incarceration of both women and their doctors and mandated that Romanian families produce at least five children or be penalized with drastic tax increases. Contraception was already banned. Combined with poverty, these policies meant that at least an estimated 100,000 children ended up in Romanian orphanages when Ceausescu was overthrown in 1989, many malnourished and ill-cared for. When images of the orphans were televised internationally, foreigners rushed in to adopt the children—often through brokers. An absence of paperwork meant that there was little information about kinship or medical issues, like fetal alcohol syndrome.
Women could be coerced into giving authorization for adoption in ways that looked perfectly legal on paper…“It was all—in air quotes—legal.”
This development changed the US State Department’s approach to adoptions. After Romania, the State Department requested that Latin American embassies check on adoption fraud throughout the region. The United States took two measures intended to address fraud without stopping adoptions altogether: mandatory embassy interviews with birth mothers and DNA tests. After DNA testing became mandatory, there were allegations of adoption workers switching samples in order to make false matches. Internal U.S. Embassy communications acknowledged that “the whole thing that makes DNA allowable in court is that the chain of custody,” meaning who has the sample at any given time, “can be verified and we can’t do that here because we rely solely on the labs .” By 1993, the Canadian, French, and Swedish embassies also required interviews with birth mothers.
These turned out to be less effective than hoped. Duke Lokka, chief of American Citizen Services and Immigration Sections at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala from 1993 to 1998, acknowledged in a 1996 interview that lawyers routinely falsified paperwork. The thirty-minute interviews with birth mothers were intended to minimize fraud, but power imbalances and language gaps meant that the interviews were not always reliable — not least because the embassy relied on freelance interpreters for conversations with Indigenous birth mothers. Susana Luarca told me that she brought her own translators to embassy interviews — not exactly a guarantee of impartial interpretation.
Women could be coerced into giving authorization for adoption in ways that looked perfectly legal on paper. “There are many intermediaries and many people who manipulated and co- erced the poor mothers,” said Carmela Curup, a Guatemalan public prosecutor who worked on child trafficking cases in the 1990s. “These are women who come from marginalized areas. They are indigenous and poor. It is easy to trick them or play off their fears. Some are even told that after the child turns eighteen they can get the child back.” Curup told Mexican journalist Karen Avilés that coercion and trafficking were common, but that the procedures were made to look above- board. “It was all—in air quotes—legal.”
Ongoing scandals in Guatemala and elsewhere pushed the biggest change in the international adoption market since it first emerged in the 1950s. A new international agreement called the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption came into force 1 May 1995. The Hague Convention explicitly banned baby brokers and payments of any kind for birth mothers, and in general mandated more stringent oversight for international adoptions. Like many international laws, it only applied where countries both ratified and enforced it. And as with many other international agreements, the United States didn’t enforce the Hague Convention right away. In fact, the United States waited fourteen years after signing to enforce the convention.
In 2000, the United Nations published a damning report highlighting the abusive behavior of lawyers in Guatemala toward birth mothers. It observed that too often children were “commercial objects to be offered to the highest bidders.” None of this was new information. But the imprimatur of recognized international organizations had an effect. Both Spain and the Netherlands stopped authorizing adoptions from Guatemala. The U.S. ambassador to Guatemala wrote in February 2002, “If we do not take action now, we run the real possibility of a scandal that could result in the USG [U.S. government] being accused in abetting child trafficking.” That year, the United States suspended adoptions from Cambodia, which were much smaller in scale, over similar concerns: baby brokers, fraud, falsified birth documents. Guatemala remained open, and Newsweek estimated in 2002 that “at an average fee of $20,000 per adoption, the Guatemalan adoption industry now brings in more than $50 million a year—or only slightly less than the country’s growing textile-export industry.”
While everyone agreed on the high volume, the ethics were in the eye of the beholder. One adoptive mother wrote a magazine story called “Did I Steal My Daughter?”
Under pressure to close private adoptions altogether, Guatemala signed the Hague Convention, on 26 November 2002. Several countries that had already signed—among them Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom—viewed Guatemala’s participation as making a mockery of the Hague Convention and filed official objections to its accession to the Convention. There was a six-month slowdown in adoptions as the Guatemalan government made minor revisions to adoption laws to appear to come into compliance. Two years after Guatemala signed, after a sustained round of lobbying by the same set of adoption lawyers that had sunk earlier efforts at reform, the Constitutional Court found that the Hague Convention violated Guatemala’s constitution. Adoption numbers soared again. By this time, in 2004, the United States was one of the few countries that still allowed adoptions from Guatemala, since it had signed but not enforced the Hague Convention.
By 2006, stories that had been familiar sights in Guatemalan newspapers since the 1980s began to appear in the international press. The New York Times wrote, “Critics of the adoption system here—privately run and uniquely streamlined—say it has turned this country of 12 million people into a virtual baby farm that supplies infants as if they were a commodity.” It cited payments to birth mothers “from a few hundred dollars to $2,000 for a baby, according to interviews with mothers and experts.” Many news reports mentioned “baby hotels,” where families lived for as little as a week to complete adoption paperwork and receive a child. Hundreds of families passed through the Marriott alone, and it sold diapers, wet wipes, and formula next to postcards in the gift shop. The Camino Real, another hotel in the upscale Zone 10 of Guatemala City, outfitted its rooms with cribs. Journalist Jacob Wheeler wrote:
Until recently, almost every flight leaving Guatemala City for the United States had one: a tiny brown baby held in the arms of her white parents, many of whom were not able to have their own biological children . . . This beautiful yet strange scene of the foster mother and the Guatemalan attorney passing a baby to its new adoptive parents in the sterile lobby of the Marriott or the Radisson or the Camino Real near the American Embassy became an everyday occurrence here.
While everyone agreed on the high volume, the ethics were in the eye of the beholder. One adoptive mother wrote a magazine story called “Did I Steal My Daughter?” She included excerpts from her journal recording the trip to pick up the baby in Guatemala: “‘I feel so sad for the pain your birth mother must be in since she is not able to raise you,’ I wrote. ‘But I believe now that I am your “real” mommy.’ Reading those words now sparks a flash of shame.” In her book Finding Fernanda, Erin Siegal McIntyre documented in scrupulous detail another case of a kidnapped girl put up for adoption through a Florida-based agency, Celebrate Children International. The adoptive mother heeded signs that something was amiss with the paperwork, found out the truth, and dropped the adoption proceedings. Norma Cruz, head of Foundation for Survivors, repeatedly brought birth mothers to meetings with U.S. officials. “We cannot act as accomplices to this,” she told officials, adding that “Americans would not support children being stolen from their mothers.”
Still, some adoptive parents and those who wished to adopt pushed to keep Guatemala open. On 4 September 2006, an adoptive father and author of the popular blog Guatadopt, Kevin Kreutner, a blog about adoptions from Guatemala, wrote a post titled “What the **** Is Going On?” He described calls for the closure of adoption as “emotional terrorism” against Guatemalan children and adoptive families and called on the United States to ensure that adoptions would continue. Laura Briggs analyzed discussion board posts and found that people in the United States, unlike their European counterparts, tended to minimize or deny allegations of kidnapping or fraud. These message boards were frequently cited as cause for concern in U.S. Embassy cables. On 21 February 2006, an embassy cable referenced “a message board where at least some adoptive parents very clearly understand that biological moms are selling their children. I would say it is getting harder for us to ignore this side of Guatemalan adoptions.”
Adoption lawyers tried to hold out. During the debate over the closure of adoption, the lawyer Linares Beltranena gave an infamous interview to the newspaper Siglo Veintiuno comparing children to the avocados sold in La Terminal, Guatemala’s largest street market:
It’s good for lawyers to make money promoting adoptions. The more procedures there are, the lower the costs. It’s the same as in La Terminal: those who sell avocados encourage people to eat avocados, and that way more people are going to plant avocados and they will be cheaper by the law of supply and demand. But if the production of avocados is restricted, the whole market suffers. If we restrict the adoption of children, those who are going to suffer are the children.
By this logic, demand for Guatemalan children meant the market should expand to supply more of them internationally, which in Linares Beltranena’s view would benefit more children. If Guatemalan children could pass from a poor family to a richer one, he thought, they should do so for their own good.
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When change came, it came abruptly. A combination of pressure within the country, U.S. concern over bad publicity, and belated enforcement of international legal frameworks regulating adoption finally led to the closure of all international adoptions from Guatemala. In 2007, the United States began enforcing the Hague Convention fourteen years after signing. That same year, after decades of scandal and blocked reforms, Guatemala declared that it would also come into compliance with the Hague Convention. Guatemala definitively closed all international adoptions in 2008. This included adoptions that were already in process, leading families in the United States to protest that they were locked out before finalization. On May 7, 2008 Consul General John Lowell cabled Washington: “the Department (and Embassy) have been warning PAP’s [prospective adoptive parents] since December 2006 of potential problems with Guatemalan adoptions, and since May 2007 basically warning folks not to start new cases at all.” One would-be adoptive father told the New York Times that his case, one of more than a hundred still stalled in 2012, had been “a torture.” (All but a handful were resolved by 2023). A 2010 report by CICIG found that of the 3,342 adoption cases underway at the time of closure, 60 percent had “serious irregularities.” These ranged from different names listed in abandonment documents and adoption files, to unmatched DNA tests, to uncorroborated accounts of children’s birth families and pasts.
Still, many families have not been able to find the children that were taken from them. Over the course of reporting my book, I met Julio Prado, a charming former public prosecutor who specialized in adoption cases, at a coffee shop in Guatemala City. He told me that he worked on kidnappings that still haunted him, including cases where newborns were stolen from public hospitals. In his view, the majority of private adoptions were what he called “gray,” involving some form of fraud or coercion. In addition to his legal work, Prado was already a published poet. He later wrote a thinly fictionalized novel about adoptions called The Night Comes Without You. In our conversation, he recalled one case that had particularly obsessed him, of a baby girl who was kidnapped from Zone 6. They managed to find her through the review process that Norma Cruz had demanded for Rodríguez and Hernández and the other parents, in part because the girl had a recognizable characteristic: deviated fingers.
Prado told me that there are few recourses for parents whose children were taken. Child trafficking for adoption wasn’t even a crime defined in the legal code until recently. The general state of impunity in Guatemala, where three percent of all crimes are ever prosecuted, does not inspire confidence. Add to this the fact that the number of victims is unknown. How many children were kidnapped? How many were what Prado called “gray cases” in which the birth mother was coerced into signing relinquishment papers by a baby broker, a lawyer, or a family member? It is impossible to know. What the mothers of the kidnapped and those too poor to raise their own children or coerced into relinquishing them share is social status: many are Indigenous, and all are impoverished.
Rodríguez and Hernández have lost hope that Guatemala will be able to pressure the United States to return their daughter and are waiting for her to be old enough that she might come looking for them. Some couples who heard or read about their story decided to stop pursuing adoptions and wrote letters to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala in protest. An author and activist named Mirah Riben posted online in support of Rodríguez and Hernández: “Imagine if the girls stolen were American (and white),” she wrote. “Imagine the difference in response.” When I spoke with Norma Cruz about the couple’s stalled attempts to get Anyelí back, she told me, “I know that one day will come when she will come to look for her roots in Guatemala and then she will learn the truth, that her parents did not stop fighting for her for a single minute.”
This is an edited excerpt of Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala by Rachel Nolan, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2024 by Rachel Nolan. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
IMAGE: via Freepik
✺ Published in “Issue 12: Sex” of The Dial
