ADA News (English)

More abuses are being reported to ADA by lawyers who took birth mothers to the CNA/PGN interviews. The offers of money, housing, health plans, etc. have moved some of the mothers to take back their children, but instead of giving the children back to their mothers, the children are being taken away to who knows where and when the deceived mothers expressed their intention to continue with the adoptions, since they were not getting the children back and the offers made did not materialize, the interviewers told them that it was too late to change their minds.

Siglo Veintiuno reported yesterday what Nineth Guevara, the director of the Section of Childhood and Adolescence of the PG, calls anomalies the mistakes found in several adoption files. Guevara says that the PGN will file criminal charges against 80 notaries. She is the same woman who took by force a baby girl against the will of her mother and grandparents last October. What the PGN is doing is not only reviewing the cases already approved by Barrios, which is totally illegal, but labeling the mistakes in the files that can be amended and that are cause of rejection for amendment (previos), as anomalies, and the notaries who preside those files, as delinquents. Since there are not legal grounds to prosecute the notaries, there is little chance that the PGN will actually file charges. The so called anomalies are actually typos, human errors and PGN requirements without legal grounds, results of an overzealous analysis of the files done by underpaid and jealous lawyers of the PGN, who are trying to justify their work by creating unnecessary obstacles. The least they have in mind is the best interest of the children. An example of that are the adoptions that were legally approved by the Family judges a year ago, and that were tangled in the appeal process filed by the PGN. After succeeding in getting back the files for its approval, after the court of appeals revoked the lower court approval, the PGN has had no other choice but to approve every one of them, stealing a whole year of the lives of those children, who were deprived during all that time of the love of their waiting families.

Associated Press, eager to attack adoptions as usual, is spreading the news that the Attorney General annulled fifteen adoptions for illegalities in the files. The truth is that those adoptions were actually approved by Barrios and there is no law that gives the new authorities the power to modify such approval. That is another display of shameful abuse of power of the PGN and of irresponsible journalism of Associated Press, who also collaborated in the closing of adoptions in Vietnam to US families.

The CNA should be setting up shelters for children who are being left abandoned in public places, instead of trying to take away the children already in process of adoption, Thus far, thirty two children have been found in garbage dumps, in the street and in vacant lots. Recently, a baby was found in a cardboard box just a few yards away from the PGN building. According to Nineth Guevara, of the PGN, those abandonments were done by the baby snatchers who dumped the children, afraid of being discovered. She has no explanation for the lack of complaints by the mothers of those children, who will have to be summoned during two months, according to her, through publication in two different newspapers of the pictures of the babies found, and if nobody claims them, the children will be ruled adoptable by the courts.

The announced suspension of adoptions during a month, may last for as long as the attorney general wants. The sign posted at the window of the PGN says that no adoption files will be released until further notice, not necessarily a month. In 2003, the PGN, acting as central authority and directed by Elizabeth Hernandez de Larios, the same lawyer who now directs the CNA, did not release any file during six months and it could have been more, because what they were planning then was to exhaust the financial reserves of the attorneys by tying up the cases for a long time, until they had to give up and surrender the children to the Central Authority, so Larios and her PGN accomplices could renegotiate the second half of the fee with those foreign parents who could afford them. Larios had no qualms in expressing her plans and to travel then to the US, expenses paid by adoptions agencies, to establish contacts with them in order to set up her monopoly of adoptions, just as she is doing it now.

ADA has been asked constantly if the children in process will go home. The answer is yes, but since the current government is showing as much respect for the rights of the birthmothers and adoptive parents and for the laws of the country, as the Nazis in Germany, we believe that the US government will have to intervene to restore the order in a situation that was created by them, when forced on Guatemala the passing of a law without the necessary preparation to implement it properly and by allowing the abuses that have been committed by the current authorities, while the US embassy claims that they cannot do anything, because it is an local matter, when they well know that an intercountry adoption is not a local matter and that they have to step up to the plate and fix the problems they created.