Sarah Foss. Review of Nolan, Rachel, Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala

BOOK REVIEW

Rachel Nolan. Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024. 309 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-27035-0.

Reviewed by Sarah Foss (Oklahoma State University)

Every so often, we hear a statistic that seems improbable at best, unfathomable, even, given the reality we think we know. Such a moment occurs in the opening pages of Rachel Nolan’s book, Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, when she shares that by the early 2000s, Guatemala—a country of 11.1 million people in 1999—was the second-largest sender of children to the international adoption market in the world, second only to China (p. 3). This number was not adjusted for population differences (China’s population was 113 times larger than Guatemala’s) but was based on actual numbers. As one continues reading, the story behind this startling fact becomes more concerning: according to existing state adoption files, only about 10 percent of these children were true orphans (p. 5). And, the height of this so-called adoption boom occurred during Guatemala’s state-sponsored genocide, when the military was slaughtering entire Maya villages, disappearing children, stealing and trafficking others, and rendering already tenuous living situations much more desperate for many poor Guatemalans. Though some children were certainly consensually surrendered by birth parents, others were coercively relinquished, still more outright stolen, and trafficked to families abroad who were often—and likely—unaware of this violent reality. Until I Find You examines this history of Guatemala’s international adoptions, explaining how this seemingly unbelievable statistic actually happened and how Guatemalans continue to reckon with this devastating history.

From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala experienced an armed internal conflict that pitted leftist revolutionaries against a counterinsurgent and authoritarian military state during which state-sponsored genocide occurred against some Maya populations. This context also includes ongoing counterinsurgency measures that affected all aspects of life through driving government programming from education to public health initiatives, to very limited land distribution initiatives and agricultural modernization schemes, all with an eye to curbing rural support for leftist politics and not actually addressing deeply rooted inequality. Importantly, this history also happened within a longer history of anti-Indigenous racism and pronounced and systemic socioeconomic inequality. And it occurred as powerful political brokers and business elites developed corruption networks that would co-opt state resources and eventually develop into what today is referred to as the pacto de los corruptos. To paraphrase Nolan, the history of international adoption in Guatemala must be understood as one of both corruption and mass terror (p. 15).

To unpack the tangle of coercion and consent that was at play in adoption cases and to understand how international adoptions from Guatemala became such a lucrative and common enterprise, Nolan utilized government sources, private files of adoption lawyers, interviews with lawyers and social workers, newspaper accounts, court proceedings, and police records across Guatemala and the United States. Her ability to treat sensitive subject material with clarity and compassion and to protect privacy and withhold judgment of birth mothers and adoptive families is testament to the infallible research ethics employed in this study. With this diverse source base, Nolan uncovered how two separate mechanisms—public adoptions through the state and private adoptions facilitated by lawyers without state oversight—worked together in a context laden with racism and violence to commodify Guatemalan children and establish the lucrative adoption industry. Taken together, these histories reveal the gut-wrenching yet important story that Until I Find You tells.

Organizing the book into nine chapters and an epilogue, Nolan moves chronologically to first explain the emergence of public (state) adoptions, the evolution of private adoptions in the aftermath of disaster, adoptions during the war, and the ways that Guatemalans are reckoning with this past. The first chapters situate Guatemala’s adoption program within the post-WWII international context of growing practices of so-called baby lifts, showing how Guatemala joined the trend of seeing this “international transfer of children from South to North†(p. 45). The first documented international adoption through the Ministry of Social Welfare’s adoption program occurred in 1968, though Nolan clarifies that earlier and continuing practices of informal adoptions existed outside of the state’s purview—or at least apart from the Ministry of Social Welfare. Despite the Guatemalan state’s codifying of adoption procedures and law, state adoption files demonstrate the unclear legal and often de facto meanings given to obtaining consent from birth mothers. Though careful to clarify that not all adoptions happened under dubious circumstances, Nolan demonstrates how cases of forged paperwork, falsified birth certificates, stereotypes and racialized assumptions in social workers’ documentation, and thumbprint signatures raise questions about coercion in the process. Similarly, her careful reading of adoption files points to the highly unequal power dynamic at play, as social workers could determine 1) if a child should be considered adoptable and 2) how and where a child would be placed. Nolan shows how racialized understandings of class shaped social workers’ understandings of a woman’s capacity to mother and an adoptee’s “attractiveness†for certain families.

The next chapters examine the advent of private adoptions, an important development in the history of international adoption as between 1977 and 2007, the large majority of the roughly forty thousand Guatemalan children adopted went through private channels (p. 91). Nolan argues that the devastating 1976 earthquake was a watershed moment in the history of adoption, as lawyers used the reports of numerous orphaned children after the earthquake to justify the privatization of adoptions, requiring only a notary to sign off on uncontested adoptions (in Guatemala, all lawyers are notaries). This process—which was entirely legal—not only expedited adoption proceedings but gave adopting families more control over child selection and allowed lawyers to theoretically represent the interests of both the birth and adoptive parents, as well as those of the child, a clear conflict of interest. This process presented an extremely lucrative opportunity for attorneys. Private adoptions cost between $7000 and $15,000, and lawyers developed connections with women known as jaladoras (baby brokers) to find adoptable children, often doing so through morally dubious or outright illegal means. Nolan explores some infamous examples of this, such as the 1983 Piñata case that involved the kidnapping of a three-year-old and the murder of his birth family, or the multiple arrests of Ofelia Rosal de Gamas, the sister-in-law of President General Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores (1983-86), for abduction of minors for trafficking purposes. And although declassified reports dated in the late 1980s from the US Embassy indicate awareness of corruption in international adoptions, and despite over fifteen proposed bills in the Guatemalan congress between 1977 and 1994 that would have revised private adoption procedures (all failed), this system remained in place until the closing of international adoptions from Guatemala in 2007.

Nolan then explores adoption in the context of genocide, arguing that though she found no evidence to suggest that the state directly mandated the use of adoption as a component of its genocidal strategy, adoption did factor as “part of a genocidal outcome†(p. 151). She demonstrates how military officials and social workers alike often assumed that Indigenous children from war-torn regions were orphans and how both political and economic motivations led to funneling these children into the private adoption network. Drawing parallels to other instances of wartime child disappearing, such as in Argentina, and to other examples of anti-Indigenous violence, such as the Indigenous boarding school histories of the United States and Canada, respectively, Nolan points to how children disappeared during the war often ended up as international adoptees in an effort to turn a profit for the perpetrators of this violence or to separate them from their Indigenous communities—or both.

This is a legacy that Guatemalans now grapple with, and the final chapter and epilogue discuss how increased awareness about the corruption often embedded within adoption and rumor-fueled moral panics in Guatemala led to the suspension of international adoptions in 2007. Birth families and adoptees themselves played a significant role in bringing about the closure of international adoptions, as they told their stories, searched for their family members, and helped to raise awareness about the issue. Tracing the impact of organizations such as H.I.J.O.S. and La liga guatemalteca de hygiene mental, Nolan shows how this history has become embedded in broader efforts to acknowledge that genocide occurred in Guatemala and to prosecute war criminals and how the emergence of an international community of Guatemalan adoptees today plays a critical role in pursuing justice.

In sum, Until I Find You is a devastatingly important account of overlooked historical actors—children—and their place in Guatemala’s Cold War history. Nolan requires readers to confront the moral dilemmas inherent in humanitarian programs and situates children and birth mothers at the heart of Guatemala’s political violence of the twentieth century. It is a book that will continue to leave its mark and generate important conversations for years to come.

[This work from H-Net is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License]