BOOK: Until I Find You

 

Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala

The poignant saga of Guatemala’s adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession.

In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption—but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora—a baby broker.

Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation.

Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.

“Important, compelling reading. Nolan has interviewed countless people, obtained access to adoption files, read the human rights reports, and sorted through the legal history. This will become a key, authoritative account of the deeply corrupt state of Guatemalan adoption from the 1970s to the 2000s.”—Laura Briggs, author of Taking Children: A History of American Terror

 

Indicted Paul Petersen involved in ICWA case(s)

Here.

Indian Child Welfare Act experts agreed that the Bright Star contract potentially misled the adoptive parents by saying the law “does not apply” in their situation.

“That is just wrong,” said Professor Fort, who also serves as director of the Indian Law Clinic at Michigan State University and authored a case law book titled American Indian Children and the Law.

She pointed to a section in the Indian Child Welfare Act that states the law does apply in adoptions of Native children. And she invoked a federal regulation published in 2016, which states that the Indian Child Welfare Act applies in any “voluntary proceeding that could prohibit the parent or Indian custodian from regaining custody of the child upon demand.”

In other words, the Indian Child Welfare Act applies in voluntary adoption cases when a Native birth mother gives up her parental rights. It’s unclear from the September Bright Star contract whether the birth mother agreed to give up her parental rights after the birth of her child.

Mormon Paul Petersen’s adoption work was the focus of an Arizona Republic article in 1998. Petersen started facilitating adoptions as a college student. At left is Matt Long, who is now Petersen’s attorney.

This is the gentleman who is also now indicted for trafficking Marshallese women and selling their babies. 

ilpc | October 22, 2019 at 12:10 pm | Tags: adoptions, Arizona, baby selling, Bright Star, ICWA, marshall islands, Paul Petersen, trafficking, Utah | Categories: Author: Kate E. Fort, ICWA, Research | URL: https://wp.me/p7zky-kGl

➢	Paul Petersen Involved in at Least One ICWA Case by ilpc MORE: Marshallese Adoptions Fuel A Lucrative Practice For Some Lawyers

➢Arizona Native American leaders want adoption fraud probe expanded

Petersen, 44, was arrested Oct. 8 and indicted on 32 counts — including human smuggling, sale of a child, conspiracy and fraud — in three states. He’s been accused of recruiting, transporting and offering to pay more than 40 pregnant women from the Marshall Islands to adopt out their babies in the United States between November 2015 and May 2019. Petersen’s attorney has said prosecutors have miscast his client as a human smuggler. He could face a $5 million fine and up to 315 years in prison.
Rep. Myron Tsosie wants the investigation to be widened.
“Rather than protecting Native American children and keeping them with families from their tribes, his firm apparently is skirting the federal Indian Child Welfare Act to facilitate adoptions of native kids,” Tsosie said in the release.

Source: Arizona Native American leaders want adoption fraud probe expanded