GUATEMALA

After a tip-off from neighbours, police raided an adoption home (Casa Quivira in Antigua) run by a US man and his Guatemalan wife, taking 46 children (believed to be possibly abducted) into care. The children are aged from only a few days to three years.

Neighbours alerted police after seeing foreigners picking up children from the home. The children are temporarily being taken care of by the attorney-general’s office during the investigation. It is being determined whether the children were kidnapped or taken from their mothers under coercion. Most of the children lacked the documentation making it lawful for them to be in the custody of someone other than their parents.

Whilst two lawyers who are believed to have handled the paperwork for the adoptions, the US State Department have recommended that US couples no longer adopt children from Guatemala. Women there are frequently pressured into selling their babies and adoptive parents were often targeted by extortionists.

More than 4 000 babies were adopted from Guatemala by US couples last year.

Guatemala is second only to China as a source of children for adoption.

(Reported in the Times – August 14, 2007)