2005: A VERY POSITIVE YEAR FOR GUATEMALAN ADOPTIONS

{Posted on Behalf of Susana Luarca, ADA, Guatemala}
When a year comes towards its end, it is a good time to count the blessings that we have received throughout the year. For some of us, the greatest blessing that we can be grateful for in this year of 2005, is that adoptions are still possible in Guatemala, with a legal system that allows children to be placed with families just a few months after their biological families decided to relinquish them.

The people in Guatemala are constantly misinformed about the "atrocities" and "abuses" that are done by the adoption professionals in order to place a child with a foreign family. At the same time, they are told that the foreign families are unable to love those children as their own, because they are of a different color and therefore, the children are adopted for all sort of illegal purposes. Unable to understand the concept of adoption, because the majority of Guatemalans would not adopt a child, they easily believe that adoptions should be stopped, until a "legal system that protects the rights of the child is in place". That is what UNICEF has been telling them all these years, and until very recently, nobody argued that. But not anymore. The most important leaders of the public opinion in Guatemala are raising their voices in defense of adoption. For them it is very clear that adoption is good for the child who needs a family, because the country that does not provide the most basic social services, should not prevent the needy children to find them abroad.

For the last fifteen years, there always has been a proposal of adoption law pending approval before the Guatemalan Congress. Those proposals are very similar, because all of them have been conceived by the same mother: UNICEF. This institution that used to be known as the biggest effort of mankind to help the situation of the children in the underdeveloped countries, has shifted its course thus becoming an instrument of control of the population growth. While there are one hundred million orphans in the world, UNICEF spends millions of dollars to convince the Guatemalan authorities to pass laws that would make adoptions impossible, just to prevent three thousand children to leave Guatemala every year, in the arms of loving adoptive parents.

The approval of the Hague Convention in Guatemala in 2003 brought enormous grief to the waiting parents of the children whose adoptions were no longer possible during the six months that such convention was arbitrarily applied by a despotic State Attorney's Office (Procuraduria General de la Nacion, also known as PGN). The success of the constitutional challenges filed by lawyers who were not willing to let the children be deprived of permanent and loving families, restored the order and brought together children and parents. At the same time, it taught all of us some lessons: that we were not as powerless as we thought, that adoption is a constitutional right to every child and to every parent who wants to place a child for adoption or who wants to adopt, and that the war is far from being over.

Two organizations were created as a result of the Hague Convention fiasco: Focus on Adoption, (FOA) and Association for Defense of Adoption (ADA). Both have been working together to keep adoptions open in Guatemala . Even the most acerbic critics of the adoption system, must admit that shutting down the system is not the solution to improve it. With that in mind, FOA and ADA have been instrumental in advocating to keep in place the very efficient system of placement that works so well in Guatemala and that allows private institutions to keep thousands of children off the streets, without any funds from the government. There is no way to express to Hannah Wallace, president of the board of directors of FOA and to all its members, our heartfelt gratitude for their hard work and unfailing support of Guatemalan adoptions.

The funding of this joint work of FOA and ADA has been provided by many people whose lives have been touched by adoption. Although we will never be able to thank each and all of them individually, we want to express our gratitude to Traci Orr, of "For This Child", who worked very hard to raise THIRTY THOUSAND DOLLARS to fund the activities of ADA. Those funds have been used in an education campaign to change the way Guatemalan adoptions are perceived by the public in general and by the Guatemalan authorities in particular. Part of that campaign was the grant that allowed five Guatemalan congressmen to attend to the Second World Conference of Children Without Parental Care, that took place in Worcester, MA, in November.(co-sponsored by International Advocates for Children, Focus On Adoption, and Center for Adoption Research.) The Congressmen were able to attend the conference and to listen to people of many countries express their support of adoptions, even though many of them were public officers or delegates of the central authorities of their countries. For the Congressmen, it was a very enlightening experience. It was reinforced the next day when they attended a gathering of adoptive families sponsored by Wide Horizons, where hundreds of families and their children got together to celebrate adoption. Later in the day, they were invited to the home of the adoptive family of three Guatemalan boy, where they were joined by other families of children of our country. More than a thousand words, the love that they could see there, convinced the congressmen that adoption is a wonderful option that must remain open. Thank you Traci, and all of you who made this possible. God bless you.

We wish you a peaceful and joyous Christmas and a wonderful New Year.
Susana Luarca, Attorney at Law,
Asociacion Defensores de la Adopcion ADA