ADA News (English)

After the US DOS and UNICEF (and of course, the then president Oscar Berger and his wife Wendy) twisted the arm of Congress to get the Adoptions Law passed, we found that three and a half months later, the Central Authority has not started to work. Only the enormous pressure of the State Department, who was duly pressured by the adopting families, made them work to register the in process adoptions and - in record time - , stamp a seal and handwrite a date, a number and a signature on the forms that the notaries who presided the adoption processes started before the end of 2007, were forced to present in order to be able to finalize them.

ADA and other lawyers have filed constitutional challenges against the elimination of the notarial process of adoptions and we all expect that the seven lawyers and notaries who are temporarily magistrates of the Constitutional Court, do not bend the rules and decide against the clear wording of the Constitutional provisions that protect the work of the university graduates, such as the notaries. They refused to suspend during the time that it takes to process the challenges, the detrimental effects of the unconstitutional elimination of the notarial process, stating that they did not deem it necessary. It is obvious that to prevent someone form doing his/her work is evidently harmful, and it is even more obvious that it is far more harmful to deprive orphans and abandoned children of their right to a family.

The Hague Conference for International Private Law is an international entity that Guatemala has nothing to do with. Not being a member of such entity and never attending its meetings, our country remained immune to its negative effects on adoptions. Far from setting golden standards for adoptions, what the treaty created by UNICEF and marketed by The Hague Convention for Inter Country Adoptions does, is to close them down. We witnessed that effect in 2003, fought against it and won at the Constitutional Court. During the six months that adoptions were closed in 2003, even though the United States was not a party to such convention, when adoptions were paralyzed and harmed the interests of its citizens, the US DOS simply stopped accepting initial documents of new adoptions and did nothing to claim their Third Party Status according to the Vienna Convention, also known as The Treaty of Treaties, that both Guatemala and the US are parties to, in order to remove from the scope of the convention, the adoptions done by the citizens of the United States. Seeing the issues more clearly than the US DOS, a Guatemalan Court of Amparo, granted the relief requested through an Amparo resource by nearly three hundred notaries (who are also lawyers) and ordered the PGN to proceed to process the adoptions to the United States. The Attorney General disregarded the order and was not prosecuted just because the Constitutional Court restored the order by ruling unconstitutional the approval by Congress of the Hague Convention.

Laura Martínez-Mora and Ignacio Goicoechea, the liaison for Latin America of the Hague Conference, are right now in Guatemala and according to the ever biased Prensa Libre, they stated their satisfaction because the situation of adoptions in Guatemala has improved very much. It does not take a lot to figure out what the real purpose of The Hague Convention is, if they think that no adoptions at all and a central authority that does not work amount as a great improvement. The same newspaper states that Holt International determined that in Guatemala there are 127 private orphanages (a year ago there were 500, according to the mission report of The Hague Conference) that shelter 5000 children (half of the amount of children who were in private orphanages a year ago). Elizabeth de Larios, who was the director of the Central Authority in 2003, and who is now one of the three directors of the CNA, says that they are very sure that they will work without anomalies and there will not be any more traffic of children. And by the way it looks now, not any more adoptions, either.

The Hague Convention can be implemented without closing down adoptions. The problem is that no country has done it yet. The United States will continue doing adoptions with non-Hague countries and trying to close them down at the same time. We only want a law that keeps the many good features of the former notarial system and at the same time implements The Hague Convention in a way consistent with our Constitution and with our laws. But we cannot accept that no adoptions at all, one fourth of the orphanages that were running a year ago and half the children who used to be in orphanages, is a step in the right direction. We believe that simple rules, easy to follow and easy to supervise, are the solution to the system. When the entity that has the right to approve the adoptions has all the power and no supervision, as it happens with the PGN, corruption blooms with total impunity. The same can be said of the Mixco Civil Registry, where it is vox populi that final deeds of adoptions are rejected for insignificant reasons unless a bribe is paid, and the Santa Catarina Pinula Civil Registry, where a birth certificate of a child is issued for fifteen quetzals (two US dollars) and the same certificate of an adopted child costs two thousand quetzales each, and since it takes three of them to finish an adoption (one for the passport, one for the visa and one for the parents), the Civil Registry of such town has no qualms in over charging six thousand quetzales (almost as much as what each of the reviewers of the PGN make a month) to issue them, despite a Constitutional Court ruling that stated that all children are equal and that no distinctions can be made between adoptive and birth children.

Our country has many problems, but adoptions are not one of them. The reason why Guatemalan adoptions are being so maligned is to finish something that was successfully done. The bad publicity turned adoptions into something shameful, when it was something that not only is protected by the Constitution but was duly regulated and that gave work to all the people who helped to make them possible, and changed positively the lives of the children being adopted. We refuse to give up and let Guatemala become the next Romania. With half of the children suffering malnourishment, a million children working to support themselves and their families and one of the highest rates of infant death in the Western Hemisphere, the children of Guatemala need that all of us speak up for them and work to make it possible that adoptions, that used to be the only way out for many children, opens again.