Documenting the Dark Side of International Adoptions
FEBRUARY 15, 2024
The Reporter’s Notebook is our monthly interview series with Dial contributors. To receive these conversations directly in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.
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A conversation with Rachel Nolan, whose reporting on illegal adoptions in Guatemala — and the decades-long fight for justice — was published in our Sex issue.
For decades, lawyers and brokers manipulated Guatemala’s international adoption system for profit at the expense of impoverished and indigenous families. In 2008, Guatemala banned international adoption entirely to put a stop to corrupt practices and illegal proceedings. Rachel Nolan wrote her book Until I Find You on these events, from which an excerpt was published in our Sex issue. Dial intern Eythana Miller spoke with Nolan about her investigation into adoption practices in Guatemala. This interview has been edited for clarity.
THE DIAL: How did you first become interested in writing about the coercive adoptions that were taking place in Guatemala?
RACHEL NOLAN: Through a circuitous route. I started out as a journalist and I was working full time for a number of years before I did my Ph.D. My book, Until I Find You, actually began as a Ph.D. project, a historical work. At first, I thought I was just going to go consult some archives in Guatemala, do some reading, and not really do interviews. I thought, I'll leave journalism to journalists, I'll keep my journalistic work and my historical work separate. But the two began to bleed together after I realized the extent of ongoing family separations as part of coercive adoptions. This history ended in 2008, when adoptions were closed in Guatemala to foreigners, but of course, all of the adoptees and their families are still dealing with the consequences.
THE DIAL: Can you describe the research process for the book? How did you gain the trust of individuals involved and what were challenges in gathering information?
RN: In Guatemala there were these two phenomena. On the one hand, there were forced disappearances of children during the civil war, which lasted for 36 years, from 1960 to 1996, and some of those children were put up for adoption without the consent of their parents. There were an estimated 500 to 800 such cases. I was able to consult the adoption files because of the Guatemalan equivalent of a Freedom of Information request. The second phenomenon was a pattern of privatized adoption, where about 40,000 Guatemalan children were sent to families all over the world — Europe, the U.S. and Canada. The wartime adoptions are really important, painful, and necessary to talk about, but the majority of adoptions were privatized adoptions orchestrated by adoption lawyers in Guatemala City.
Originally, I planned to only write about the wartime adoptions. But when I realized the proportions of the problem, I thought: I'm a journalist by training, I'm here in Guatemala City, let me get in touch with some of the adoption lawyers who matched families to children and who processed the paperwork with very little oversight in the 80s and 90s. These were controversial adoptions within Guatemala, so I thought they had every reason not to want to talk to me, but to my surprise, nearly every lawyer I contacted agreed to speak. They had different reasons. Some of them wanted to say there had been abuses or kidnapped children who were given up for adoption, but those were the minority, and they wanted to exculpate themselves and say that they were the good lawyers who had done only aboveboard adoptions. In some cases that was true. There were other lawyers who clearly wanted to make the case for reopening international adoption. They would say, “Yes, there were a few bad apples, but most of us were not coercive.” That's certainly a matter for debate, but they were right in saying the number of cases that involved kidnappings were not the majority. I asked all of them if I could read their private adoption files, knowing that the answer would probably be “No.” But one of them, Fernando Linares Beltranena, said yes. He felt that he had nothing to hide, so he allowed me to interview him several times. I sat in his law office for the better part of two weeks reading his adoption files. That was a real lucky break because it allowed me to try to reconstruct what happened with private adoptions, not just through what the lawyers were telling me, which was self-serving. Nor through what some of the Guatemalan newspapers were reporting, which was sensationalist — there were a lot of false rumors and panic around adoptions — but through the actual paperwork of the adoptions themselves.
THE DIAL: Were you ever worried about safety while you were investigating those stories? There had clearly been a lot of effort put into covering up what was happening.
RN: I will say, as a North American who does research in Latin America, I'm just not the primary target. I was always concerned about the safety of the people that I was interviewing. That is especially the case for the couple who were featured in the piece for The Dial, “Searching for Anyéli”. That couple had been threatened after speaking publicly about what had happened to their daughter. They wanted to meet with me and tell their story, but they really didn't want to meet with me in Guatemala City, and they didn't want to meet with me in the place where they live. I met with them at a kind of neutral nearby space. Certainly my main safety concern had nothing to do with myself and everything to do with the couple whose child had been kidnapped.
THE DIAL: Guatemala officially stopped allowing national adoptions in 2008. What does the fallout from that situation look like now in the country?
RN: It’s a really tricky question, because people will also sometimes ask me, “Well, do you condemn international adoption generally?” I tell them, no, that doesn't make any sense. These are very complex issues. When you cut off international adoption completely in Guatemala, what you’re left with is a country that does not have a widespread domestic culture of formal adoption. There are a lot of informal adoption practices, especially in Indigenous communities, so it’s really important to highlight that. But for the kids who are currently in orphanages, there's not a lot of opportunity to be adopted out to a Guatemalan family, which is the thing that critics of closing international adoption always point out. My counter argument is that privatized adoptions, which were the majority of adoptions internationally from Guatemala, did not involve kids from orphanages, but rather kids who had been found by private lawyers for adoptions through baby brokers. So the argument that there are more children in orphanages now that private adoptions are illegal doesn’t make sense. International adoption wasn't a remedy, and neither is closing it.
THE DIAL: Where are you focusing your attention now that the book has come out?
RN: I'm slowly, slowly starting research on a new book about deportations, specifically what happens to people, communities, and countries when there's large-scale deportation back to the country of origin. So I'm doing some research in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. The idea is basically that once people are off a deportation plane, they sort of disappear from the narrative in the U.S. Large numbers of people being returned are often stigmatized and criminalized in the public discussion in their home country, and it has really serious impacts within Latin America. I'm interested in the Latin American side of that story, if I can get at it through interviews and archives.
✺ Interview conducted by The Dial in conjunction with “Issue 12: Sex”
RACHEL NOLAN is Contributing Editor at Harper’s Magazine and has written for the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Salvadoran investigative news outlet El Faro. She is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University.
EYTHANA MILLER is a writer and editor from Montana. She was a California Humanities Emerging Journalist fellow and her work appears in CalMatters, The Berkeley Political Review, and Edible Shasta-Butte. A California transplant, she studies political economy at UC Berkeley.