Guatemala mother searched 5 years for stolen daughter, trafficked to US for adoption
Loyda Rodriguez Morales felt someone tug at her daughter as she tried to enter her simple home with three young children in tow. She turned to see a woman whisk the 2-year-old away in a waiting taxi. After nearly five years of searching, posting fliers, being turned away at orphanages and even staging a hunger strike, Rodriguez now holds what’s believed to be an unprecedented Guatemalan court order declaring the child stolen and ordering the U.S. couple who eventually adopted her to give her back.
The foundation doesn’t allege the U.S. couple knew the girl they adopted had been kidnapped, only that the girl was snatched by a child trafficking ring and put up for adoption with a new name.
Guatemala’s quick adoptions once made this Central American nation of 13 million people a top source of children for the U.S., leading or ranking second only to China with about 4,000 adoptions a year. But the Guatemalan government suspended adoptions in late 2007 after widespread cases of fraud, including falsified paperwork, fake birth certificates and charges of baby theft - though they still allowed many already in process.
This is devastating. I wish Ms. Rodriguez much luck in getting her daughter back, though it will be intensely painful for everyone involved. I once read a really interesting and heartbreaking article (that I can’t find) by an American woman who adopted a girl from Guatemala, but was wracked with guilt by this nagging feeling that perhaps the girl was not given up voluntarily. So she hired a private detective to find the birth mother and flew to Guatemala to meet her. This isn’t it, but it’s a good (and somewhat similar) read.
