Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala

By the time that Guatemala put an end to international adoptions in 2008, the nation had become the planet's number-two “sender country” of children, second only to China. It was also the only nation on earth that had fully privatized the process of adoption. It took this step in 1977, on the eve of the scorched-earth counterinsurgency and village-to-village massacres that marked the most violent and genocidal years of an armed conflict that dated to 1960. “Disappeared children,” the first group earmarked in the subtitle of a brilliant new book by Rachel Nolan, loom large in the first part of this history, while “coercive adoptions” came to characterize the corrupt and lucrative adoption business through and after the end of the conflict in 1996. The biggest boom in international adoptions dates to the first decade of the 2000s, and by the end, Nolan writes, one out every hundred Guatemalan-born babies was an adoptee living abroad. How did this happen, why, and to what effect?Until I Find You is a meticulously researched and powerfully argued history of this painfully human story. Nolan refuses to engage in simplistic binaries; indeed, a main point of this book—the first thorough study of the topic—is to blur the line between “disappeared children” and those relinquished in “coerced adoptions.” Nationally grounded but transnationally informed, the work insists that forcible adoptions are a form of political violence and uses fine-grained readings of hard-to-access archives to show “how closely legality may resemble illegality, how closely coercion may sit to consent” (p. 17). Adding to literature on transnational adoptions by scholars such as Laura Briggs and Karen Dubinsky, to a body of new histories of contemporary Guatemala, and to scholarship on Cold War violence and child separation and human rights, Until I Find You will draw a wide readership in and beyond the classroom.After a brief review of the state's earlier adoption policies and practices, the book dives into the debates surrounding Guatemala's unique privatization of adoption after a deadly 1976 earthquake. Themes related to this sea change are unpacked throughout the text. A chapter called “Adoption Rings and Baby Brokers” profiles jaladoras—the ground-level brokers who served as liaisons between for-profit adoption lawyers and birth mothers, and who took the brunt of the punishment later, when falsified paperwork, the purchase or theft of babies, and crimes in nurseries called “fattening houses” came to light. Following chapters trace scandals, trials, moral panics over child stealing, and, ultimately, the role of international conventions—the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption chief among them—in the end of the baby business, covered in the final chapter. Before this, Nolan offers a reading of private adoption files shared with her by a prominent Guatemalan lawyer. These records show no illegalities. Woven together, however, with the author's interviews and analysis of public discourse—think “good mothers versus bad mothers,” children called “abandoned,” and families painted as “disintegrated”—they shine a light on the dubious nature of a mother's ability to consent meaningfully to relinquishing her child when under extreme economic duress.In Guatemala's for-profit adoption industry, “orphan” remained more a status on paper than a verified social state, just as it had been at the height of counterinsurgent state terror. The trenchant chapters covering the stolen, disappeared, displaced, and truly or fictively orphaned children of the 1980s—most but not all of whom were Indigenous—are at the heart of the author's analysis. Guatemalan children and babies disappeared or separated from their parents by violence in the 1980s were kidnapped during massacres or found wandering and caring for one another in the mountains, among many other circumstances that Nolan presents in moving case studies. Viewed as “bad seed” by counterinsurgent forces who saw families as the smallest unit of subversion, their silenced histories remain at the center of personal and nongovernmental organization–supported family searches. Their plight provides legal evidence of genocidal actions even in the absence of a master plan to kidnap children.In 1980s Guatemala, “colonial and Cold War violence marched in lockstep,” Nolan writes (p. 155). That is, the wresting of children from their families had the hallmarks of child separation as seen on the one hand in the assimilationist boarding schools and fostering/adoption programs of Canada, the United States, and Australia, and on the other in the political and racialized “cleansing” campaigns seen in fascist Europe and dictatorship-era Argentina, among other places (p. 284n60). These dual valences of violence carried over into the commercialized private adoptions of the postpeace era, making well-intentioned families in the global North “unknowingly complicit in anti-Indigenous violence in Guatemala that echoed . . . earlier patterns of political violence and colonial child separations around the globe” (p. 168). Heart-wrenching, heartfelt, and built through masterful and exceptionally difficult archival research and skillful fieldwork, Until I Find You situates Guatemalan adoptions in global history, explicates their inner workings, and traces the haunting human stories they entail. It is essential reading.

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