6/12 Update from Asociacion Defensores de la Adopcion

I apologize for not formatting the text yet....I wanted to post this information ASAP. We have learned the DOS (and Ms. Gaw in particular) is denying that DOS recommended the suspension of Guatemalan adoptions (which is still hanging in the balance). More to come......

Thursday June 12th 2003 Update (RE-posted with permission from Susana Luarca, Attorney at Law). We appreciate Susana's permission to temporarily repost this information as we feel it is important for as many people to read what is going on.

Dear Friends,

Here is this week's The Thursday Update containing
up-to-date information including:

Part One

a. Proposed UNICEF/Valladares Adoption Law
b. The June 9 Meeting with Guatemala's Attorney
General *IMPORTANT
c. The Hague Conference of Private International Law,
UNICEF and US DOS.
d. Legal Campaign
e. Letter Campaign
f. Publicity Campaign

a. PROPOSED UNICEF ADOPTION LAW
I finally finished my careful review of the proposed
(and promoted) UNICEF/Vallardes Adoption Law. It is
obvious that it was drafted by someone without any
lawmaking skills, by someone who is not in favor of
adoptions and, to impose requirements impossible to
fulfill.

Candidly speaking, if that particular law is ever
approved it will be
very difficult to do an adoption.

As it is now proposed, the birthmother is required to
live with the babyfor the first ninety days after
delivery, before she can place her child
for adoption. This presents a wide range of terrible
child- and bmother- possibilities.

After that ninety day period, the child must then go
through a process to be declared abandoned by a
Family Court, which is no small problem, because
abandonments fall under the jurisdiction of the Court
of Minors, and it takes approximately eight months to
obtain an abandonment decree.

However, the worst part is that after the of the birth
mother decides to place the baby for adoption, the
child the next priority is that the child, the child
should be given (not adopted)to one of the relatives
or, get this, to a non-relative living in the birth
mother's community.

Only then, if no relative and nobody in the community
wants the child, can s/he can be placed for adoption.
Adoption priority is to then be first with nationals
and when those possibilities are exhausted, only
then will children be available for adoption by a
foreigner. But the foreigner must be from a country
that offers children the same legal rights that
Guatemala offers them by being parties to the same
international treaties regarding children, such as the
'Convention for the Rights of the Child' and the Hague
Convention.

The plot thickens because the USA is not now a party
to these International Treaties. Therefore the logical
conclusion is that, according to this proposed law, US
citizens would not be eligible to adopt children from
Guatemala.

Why this convoluted reasoning and provisions? I just
don't know - you and I need to ask UNICEF why.

To show you just how anti-adoption these proposed laws
are, the Valladares proposal actually contains
language that says that the adoptive
parents must agree and promise that they will not
remove the child's organs.This of course, is a
subliminal way to convince the reader that there is
something inherently evil about intercountry
adoptions. And, what if in the future there would be
a medical reason to do so? And they have the
unmitigated gall to call this an 'adoption' law.

False Pretenses
What is actually happening is that under the pretense
of respecting the rights of the child, they want to
create a monopolistic system of adoption under the
power of the State. In Guatemala that is a recipe for
disaster in the incapable hands of the bureaucrats.

The PGN, appointed as the Central Authority a year ago
has in essence suspended adoptions since it started
working as the Central Authority on March 3, 2003. The
PGN is now saying that there will be a 'temporary
suspension' of adoptions; but in reality, that is
exactly what they have been doing since March 3. This
should be a clear and obvious glimpse of what will
happen if we allow the government, via a Central
Authority handle all adoptions.

This bureaucratic inefficiency will simply worsen the
total incapacity of the Guatemala to provide for child
care, and we will face a much bigger and longer-term
problem. Who will care for the children? Who will
pay for the care of the children? Who will build more
children's homes/orphanages/hogars.

The Guatemalans find that the looting of the State's
resources by the people in government is worsening
every day. The latest scandal is the embezzlement of
the more than US$60 million from the funds of the
Guatemalan Institute of Social Security, which runs
the main hospital system for all formal employees in
Guatemala. Those funds are provided by the employers
and by the workers through a percentage of the payroll
and of their salaries.

After a succession of dishonest general managers, the
last one helped to arrange an elaborate scheme, along
with seven others in and outside the IGSS system, to
steal this incredible amount of money. The national
auditor said they didn't notice anything amiss,
despite many warnings by the press and a few members
of congress over the last year.

That leaves the Social Security with no money to
provide for the pensions of the retired, the disabled
and the widows. No money to pay for medicines or
medical equipment, or salaries for the workers of the
hospitals. It has also been revealed that the
government, which is also
an employer and pays into the IGSS, has not paid in
over $55 million
dollars in back payments. The State takes social
security payment off
the salaries of its workers, but does not give its
part nor has it paid
in the workers' money to the Social Security.

The irony is that when discussion is about passing
laws that would stop adoptions, the people in
government say with a straight face that they
have tremendous pressure from the international
community to pass those (anti) adoption laws. But
when it comes to pure corruption and the
wholesale looting of the people's money, they could
not care less about the opinion of the international
community. The Ambassadors and international
representatives are pictured in the newspapers looking
very angry, saying that the international aid and help
will cease unless there is a stop to corruption. This
aid is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year,
yet this does not seem to worry the people in
government.

B. THE MEETING WITH THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF
GUATEMALA

Last Monday, I and three other adoption lawyers had a
high-level meeting
with the Guatemala Attorney General, Luis Rosales.

We expressed to him, and discussed with him, the
following:

a) The Hague Convention is nothing more than an
international treaty,
binding only between contracting states, without the
power to change the
existing legislation of the country or to obligate
third-party states.
The
Central Authority has no legal right to hold the
post-March 5 cases,
because the laws that rule adoptions have not changed.
We explained that
only Congress can pass implementing legislation to the
convention.

b) The PGN director has been delaying without reason
the signing of
all the cases, and many times the cases are rejected
for silly reasons.
We have complied and responded to every tiny objection
that the PGN
lawyers have raised, but they then come back with new
and other tiny
objections not previously mentioned; there is no way
to please them. I
said that the time has come when we are forced to file
legal actions
against them for their negligence and failure to
comply with the law and
discharge their duties as public officers.

c) The children who are adopted have their life
problems solved, because
they will have love, family, home and education. If
they are not
adopted, they will be abandoned without homes, many
will die and if they
manage to survive, they will become children of the
street first, and
then delinquents and criminals. Street crimes and
child prostitution
will increase and more children than ever will suffer.

d) The communication with the director of the PGN is
broken, and we
think that our voices must be heard so that we can
help draft and
implement legislation that will actually benefit the
children. After
all, we have more experience and knowledge of the
potential problems
and, of the adoption process and needs and concerns of
all the parties
involved in an adoption.

Rosales told us:

i) That the PGN has a tremendous amount of work
overseeing adoptions
because of the large number of them and, because it is
their duty to be
thorough.

ii) His opinion about adoptions and about the amounts
that lawyers
charge for them is neutral. However, he does not share
our opinion that
the best that can happen to a child without a family
is to be adopted by
foreigners.
Actually, he used the words 'exported through
adoptions by foreigners'.

We explained to him that three years ago, a group of
lawyers formed an
association to do pro-bono adoptions to Guatemalans,
as an effort to
promote national adoption. After a year of paying for
office space, a
secretary and newspaper ads, we closed without having
done one single
adoption, due to the lack of interested prospective
adoptive parents. We
said our offer to process adoptions for in-country
Guatemalans was still
open and asked him to help us to create in the
Guatemalans the desire to
adopt, without stopping with bureaucratic roadblocks.
In reality, we
said, international adoption is currently the only
practical options for
children without a family who wants them.

c) Rosales told us that a Ms. Monica Gaw, delegate
of the US
Department of State expressed to him that the DOS
wants the PGN to
suspend adoptions, while they implement legislation
according to the HC.
Rosales told her that the PGN could not do that
however the PGN did
effectively suspended them later, but not of their own
accord, but
because the Hague Conventions "caught them by
surprise". (Yeah, right.)

d) He confirmed what Mérida of the PGN told the
lawyers - before
going to The Hague meeting in May - that the General
Secretary of The
Hague Conference of International Private Law came to
Guatemala to
dictate the guidelines they expect Guatemalan
adoptions to follow,
according to the convention. Rosales confirmed that
The Hague secretary
told them that "the lawyers should be banned from
involvement in
adoptions, and no more baby farms should be allowed."
His words.

e) One of the lawyers in our meeting, Mr. Carrillo,
asked Rosales to at
least hold off on the application of the Hague
Convention for all cases
for an additional sixty days, to give us time to
finish already-started
adoptions. I personally was not in agreement to offer
this compromise
and reiterated that it would be a better and
legally-defensible option
to accept the position of the United States as a Third
State and not
apply the convention to the US cases. He could
possibly set a sixty day
delay of the Hague Convention to cases to other
countries who are
parties to the HC. In that sixty day period, we could
all work together
to implement reasonable changes in the legislation
that would allow
adoptions to continue to be processed according to the
law.

f) We gave a copy of the Vienna Convention to
Rosales, and a copy of a
brief regarding the non-application of the Hague
Convention to the US.
He promised to study the documents, to talk to his
advisors and to come
up with a solution 'right away'. However, we are still
waiting to hear
from him.

C. THE HAGUE CONFERENCE OF INTERNATIONAL PRIVATE LAW,
THE US DEPARTMENT OF STATE AND UNICEF
These three organizations have something sinister in
common: they have
tried in one way or another, to stop adoptions from
Guatemala. Their
stated reasons and internal motivations may be
different, but the
objective is the same. Let me count the ways

1. The Hague Conference:
The Hague Convention for Inter-country Adoption is the
most
'popular'(i.e., more country members) convention of
all its
international agreements to unify international
private law in general.
The countries that are members of this convention are
qualified as
'sending' or 'receiving', which equals to 'poor' or
'rich' countries.
For the rich countries, it only serves to add another
layer of
bureaucracy. For the poor countries it is the end of
international
adoptions. Proof of this are the decreasing numbers of
visas issued by
the US to adopted children from countries that
embraced the Hague
Convention. The saddest of part of all is that after
sabotaging
adoptions in poor countries, the Hague Convention does
not promote or
help fund any alternative to the children, or
bmothers, left without the
option of inter-country adoption.

2. UNICEF It has had a long and extensive labor of
maligning
adoptions form Guatemala, hand in hand with Casa
Alianza, the European
Union and the group calling itself International
Social Service. And now
it is trying to stop adoptions from Guatemala.
Although the UNICEF
delegate who presented the ILPEC report, Elizabeth
Gibbons, adopted a
Guatemalan child while she was working in Guatemala,
she requested the
government to suspend adoptions in 2000 and to
implement the Hague
Convention, accusing Guatemalan adoptions of being 98%
illegal.

Christian Munduate previously presided over the
Guatemalan 'Secretaría
de Bienestar Social', a very inefficient office of
social welfare whose
main purpose is to make the wife of the President look
good. He was so
helpful to UNICEF at that time, that he was
subsequently rewarded with a
post as UNICEF delegate to Costa Rica, considered to
be the Switzerland
of Central America.

Another UNICEF delegate, current Peruvian delegate
Gladys Acosta, claims
total ignorance of the catastrophic consequences of
the implementation
of the Hague Convention in Peru. I spoke with her in
persona and she
said she believes that the proposed Valladares
adoption law "is a
serious effort of the Guatemalan Government to fulfill
its promises to
the international community."

It may be difficult for you to reconcile the idea of
UNICEF, the
venerable institution created to help the children, is
actually working
so hard to eliminate international adoptions and does
its subtle part to
spread rumors of body-parts selling, high incidence of
illegal adoptions
and the use of the phrases "exporting children" and
"baby farms".

If you want to learn more about their activities go to
www.google.com
and key in the search phrase: UNICEF + abortion . It
will give you more
information about how this organization deals with
that issue. Maybe
the
fact that abortion is a criminal offense in Guatemala,
is what makes
UNICEF to try to close adoptions as an option for
unwanted pregnancies
and unwanted children, or children who can not be
cared for. Yet another
disturbing question for UNICEF. But they don't share
*this* information
and their anti-adoption stance and work with the
international
fundraising community. They keep us all in the dark on
these things.

The Current Role of the US Department of State?
Instead of the USA asserting their position as a Third
State and
requesting Guatemala to treat them accordingly, the
Guatemala Attorney
General reports the insistence of the DOS delegate,
Monica Gaw, that
Guatemala suspends adoptions. Now we understand more
things. Ms. Gaw is
as confused on the issue as the others, or maybe
UNICEF got to her. We
were wondering why the adoption files were piling up
at the offices of
the Central Authority, and this seems to be a likely
explanation.

Suspending adoptions due to the absence of any HC
implementing
legislation does not make sense, and it is shocking to
hear that the US
DOS might be actually and aggressively promoting this
action. To simply
delay the processing the files when we continue to
have current and
still-valid legislation does not solve anything.

The situation at the present time is: Congress is in
recess, no
proposals of new laws to implement the Hague
Convention have been
presented, and the radical proposed Valladares
adoption law would
actually establish a different Central Authority. The
only conclusion I
can come to as of today, is that the US Department of
State does not
want to keep adoptions open. This is terrible, and sad
and there is no
legal basis for this drastic behavior.

D. POSSIBLE LEGAL ACTION and CAMPAIGN

If the Attorney General does not offer a credible and
acceptable
solution within the next three days, we are going to
take the position
that we have exhausted all possibilities of an
amicable solution. At
that point, we will have to file legal actions to try
and keep adoptions
open and protect the children. I can't tell you all of
our strategy
here, but one of the key points will be that the
illegal, unfounded and
arbitrary delay in processing an adoption file is
cause of action.

We will ask the court to order the PGN/Central
Authority to release the
files being held hostage and to fulfill PGN's sole
duty of giving an
opinion, which is only that. The law says that if the
PGN opinion is not
favorable to the adoption, it still may be approved by
a Family Court.
Although the judges are never faced with that
situation, because we do
everything the PGN says to get its favorable opinion,
it is a
possibility we could elect to pursue. If the judges
refuse to then
approve the adoption, that will prove what we have
been saying all this
time: that adoptions in the hands of the judges are
doomed, because they
are not willing
to take the time and effort to study and rule on an
adoption file.

E. LETTER WRITING CAMPAIGN
The position of the US is very important at this
moment, as a back-up
plan
if the constitutional challenges are not upheld. Keep
writing to your
congressmen and senate representatives. Ask your
relatives, neighbors,
friends, admirers and coworkers to help. The more
attention this gets,
the
more chances we have of keeping adoptions open.

In your letters you can say that the US has not yet
ratified the Hague
Convention Treaty on International Adoption and
therefore is not
formally a party to it. However, although it is not
being implemented in
the US, the specter of the Hague Convention is causing
interminable
delays in the processing of adoptions from Guatemala.
US adoptions from
Guatemala should not be affected, because the US is
not bound by the
terms of this Treaty. It is not a case of discretional
application. The
Vienna convention sets the rules for Guatemala as to
when and to whom it
can apply a treaty. All we are asking is that the
Vienna Convention be
followed and that the US not be treated as if they
were a full party to
the Convention; in essence, that Guatemala should
apply the law
correctly and that the US insist on this. The DOS
should *not* be
stepping in and suggesting (telling) Guatemala to
suspend adoptions.

F. PUBLICITY CAMPAIGN - YOUR HELP IS NEEDED
We need help. Of all kinds. In Guatemala, ask your
agency/lawyer if they
are meeting with us, and if they are doing their part
to help us and
support us in all ways. Have them contact us. In your
countries, it
would be wonderful if you would form working groups to
come up with
ideas to help to keep Guatemalan adoptions open. I
understand that some
of you are bored and frustrated with all these delays
and threats of a
'Congress-attack'; and so are we. But if you and we
want to keep
adoptions open, then we must not allow ourselves to
get tired and
defeated. And it is going to take resources to fight
not only the
Guatemalan government, but world organizations such as
UNICEF, as well.

But the way we see it now, it is as an opportunity to
set the record
straight once and for all. Now is the time to educate
and inform
everybody
about the adoption legal system of Guatemala. We must
let it be known
that the current adoption process helps about three
thousand needy and
unwanted children a year and provides a good home and
quality care for
many other children that cannot be adopted due to a
lack of an
abandonment decree. Stress the fact that the
Guatemalan Government,
besides being corrupt and inefficient, does not
provide any funds to
support the unfortunate children and the parents from
making their
children work since they are very little.

We do not support the idea that a reform in the
existing laws is
necessary and we do not believe it should be done. We
earlier thought
and we now know for certain, that we are not dealing
with people who
have the best interest of the children at heart. They
say they do, but
they are really anti-adoption. We are dealing with the
Lords of Poverty,
the international organizations who profit with the
misery of the Third
World Countries. And they are ruthless, so there is no
middle ground.
Once you accept their sinister premise that each
country must embrace
the HC and that doing so will protect the rights of
the child, you begin
to fall down a slippery slope from which there is
little or no chance of
keeping adoptions open. Unless you pull out all stops,
and fight in
every conceivable way. But this requires resources and
a willpower that
has been lacking in most poor countries.

But it should known that aside from the legal system,
we are
implementing changes that will increase the
transparency of the process
and document everything, in order to have updated
information at hand,
to rebut their groundless accusations.

When I read the many of posts in the online Lists, I
see all that energy
spent in venting against a situation over which you
have no control. If
you would like things to happen, then join us in an
effort to make them
happen. Let's brainstorm and come up with ideas and
put them to work.
We have influence over certain number of people, who
can influence other
people. We must spread the message that adoptions are
A Good Thing for
the children and for their mothers, that Guatemalan
adoptions are
reliable and thoroughly reviewed by government
agencies, and that even
the US Embassy interviews many of the birth mothers.
This is one way we
can help to combat and possibly erase the bad, unfair
and untrue image
of adoptions that UNICEF and the others have viciously
given painted and
promoted, knowing that this image is untrue.

You already know how the general public reacts to
campaigns, how to
appeal to their support, how to make this happen.
Choose the media
carefully; I would not give interviews to
UNICEF-aligned news media,
such as BBC or CNN. Talk shows such and similar to
'Oprah' could be an
option, since she is very sensitive to this kind of
plea. Let the world
know that we are fighting for the lives of Guatemalan
children, who will
suffer if international adoption is no longer an
option for them as a
way to have a family.

There is a good probability that we can win this one.
And once we have
won, I will leave you alone, to discuss among
yourselves how much an
adoption should cost.

Best regards,

Susana Luarca, Attorney at Law
Asociación Defensores de la Adopción
Guatemala City

Copyright 2003 by Susana Luarca. '"The Thursday
Update" on Guatemalan
Adoptions' may be distributed, reproduced and quoted
from, provided any
portion so used is quoted verbatim and credit is give
to the source
along with Susana Luarca's address of
SusanaLuarca@hotmail.com

Posted by Kelly at June 12, 2003 02:57 PM