...OK, just ONE more thing: If any of you would like some insight into the complex mystery that is Guatemala -- child trafficking, politics, and all -- check out "The Long Night of White Chickens" by Francisco Goldman. It is fiction, but it is also autobiographical. An incredible read. Goldman is a Guatemalan-American who is (or was) an editor at Harpers.

Somebody take this keyboard away from me....

P.S.: Unless I get totally torn apart here (or my ego somehow gets the better of me), I will not add any more comments to this thread. This is an enormously important discussion, I think, but it has also been very time-consuming. I wish everyone well with the decisions they make in life!

I must say I feel a little self-conscious now that my personal story which I wrote in response to a related thread on Casa Quivira seems to have become a feature topic in its own right. Be that as it may, all I can say is the story is indeed true. I don’t mind the detractors and skeptics, as I suppose that simply comes with the territory in this medium. In other venues I am often a skeptic, too. To the skeptics, I truly wish I could offer you something in the way of verification or independent corroboration, but I cannot. All you have is my word.

I myself cannot fully explain certain details in my story, like the strange liquid squirted in my daughter’s direction. There is just so much in life we cannot fully explain.

Then again, let’s suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I AM a fabricator, a liar, a charlatan. You may conclude, then, that this incident never happened to this American. But alas, there is still an overwhelming body of evidence to show that this incident, or something like it, has happened to hundreds of Guatemalan families. If you can read Spanish, then take a look at this article from Guatemala’s most prestigious newspaper:

http://www.prensalibre.com/pl/2007/junio/23/175173.html

I am sorry I cannot quickly produce a comparable article in English, but the point is nonetheless clear: What almost happened to us in 1985 (whether you believe it or not) is still happening today to others. Indeed, would it have to happen to an American family in order to command your empathy??

Let’s face the facts and deal with them. Adoption is good; human trafficking is evil. Sometimes (not always, mind you, but SOMETIMES) human trafficking can be the source of adoptable babies. When that happens, then the adoption process itself is tainted.

About those highly touted “controls” in modern adoption processes: in the final analysis, I fear there are no “controls” so “strict” -- in Guatemala, in our Embassy there, or anywhere else in the world -- that cannot be circumvented by clever entrepreneurs.

Incidentally, I completely stand by my comment earlier that NO PRINCIPLED MORAL DISTINCTION can be made between kidnapping for adoption or selling a child for adoption. If that comment is to be disparaged as mere “moral subjectivism,” then God help us all!

I do not wish to enter the fray about the child’s picture in the CQ screengrab. While I do have my own views about ‘fair use’ and the Internet’s reinvention of privacy rules, I’ll leave that discussion for others.

But I did want to follow up on three posts which appear to be at least partly in response to my Post #15. To begin with, while I did not say, as Anonymous #20 appears to attribute to me, that "people shouldn't be bought and sold like animals", nevertheless in my P#15 conclusion I did express an idea to the same effect. I do not think I am retarded, but I do think a crucial distinction needs to be made here between “paying an adoption fee” and “buying a baby.”

Clearly adoption fees will always be with us, due to the substantial legal, medical, not to mention interim child care expenses that are incurred during the adoption process. This much is obvious, and obviously someone has to cover those costs. Hence the adoption fee.
But when any portion of those fees is used, with or without the knowledge of the prospective adopters, to persuade a birth mother to offer her child for cash or to purchase a child who was kidnapped, then the profundity of the moral question at stake here should be equally obvious. Both of these issues are at stake today in Guatemala, if not in the Casa Quivira case specifically then in others like it. And it is this question, the morality of BUYING A BABY, which I weighed in on in my Post #15 -- not the question of adoption fees per se. Let’s try to keep these issues clearly distinct.

Madre in Post #19 worries that the news articles and all this fuss we are making could simply cause international adoptions from Guatemala to cease altogether, and she opines that in that case “only the children without permanent families will suffer.” In the first place, I think that while Guatemalan adoptions should not necessarily cease, indeed there should perhaps be a moratorium on such adoptions while serious, thoughtful people earnestly try to work the moral and legal kinks out of the system. (And kinks there are, trust me.) Secondly, though, I really have trouble with this term of art, “permanent families.” I assume you mean the adoptive family, for most of these children already have “permanent families” in Guatemala. Those who do not are true orphans, and while it is true that everybody came from somebody, as far as I can see the desperately poor orphans wandering shiftlessly on the streets of Guatemala City without any identifiable mother or father are decidedly NOT the ones who end up in Casa Quivira, or any other adoption house. The rest HAVE families.

Finally, Anonymous in Post #22 asserts that Guatemala “is rife with rumors and stories of kidnappings and events that may have happened in limited scope or in the past that have ballooned in to larger than life legends.” Rumors? Stories? Limited scope? Larger than life legends? If you can read Spanish, take a look at this article from Guatemala’s most prestigious newspaper:

http://www.prensalibre.com/pl/2007/junio/23/175173.html

I am sorry I cannot quickly find a similar article in English, but the point is nonetheless clear: What almost happened to us in 1985 (which I related in Post #15) is still happening today. Let’s face the facts and deal with them. Adoption is good; human trafficking is evil.

For those of you (and I count a couple among the posters here) who appear willing to condone or turn a blind eye to human trafficking in the name of some “higher good,” allow me to share a story which, in a sense, may put the proverbial shoe on the other foot. For this could have happened to you.

It is a story that my wife and I have told practically no one. At first, in the wake of the incident, because it was too horrible and unsettling to talk about, and, much later, because the horror had thankfully receded into the distant past. But it definitely happened, and it definitely colors my views today on Guatemalan adoptions.

I am an American. Back in the 1980s I worked for several years in Guatemala as a development worker with a well-known NGO with projects all over the country, though I was based in the capital city. In 1984 my Guatemalan wife and I were blessed with a beautiful baby girl (biological offspring).

Like many people in my line of work we had a paid housekeeper. One day when our little girl was maybe seven months old our housekeeper had to walk down the street about five short blocks to get some small sundry, like milk or something, at a little store there. She asked my wife for permission to take the baby with her, and my wife said of course. (You must understand that we trusted our wonderful indigenous housekeeper implicitly, and besides, Zone 10 of the city was far more tranquil back then, notwithstanding the war in the countryside.) As for me, I was at work 15 blocks away in the office.

Scarcely a block from the little store, the housekeeper carrying our daughter swaddled in a colorful peraje was accosted by a microbus which sped up to her from behind and cut her off. Inside (I am told) was a male driver and 4-5 “well-dressed women.” (Bear in mind, this is our housekeeper’s account.) Through an open window of the microbus a woman deftly squirted the contents of what looked like a large syringe into our baby daughter’s face. Not injected, but squirted through the air. And indeed, it appeared this would have been an abduction, had not something miraculous and ironic happened in that instant. An army jeep with 3-4 soldiers came around another nearby corner and stopped in front of the tienda! They did nothing, really, except that one or two of them went into the tienda to buy something -- but the mere sight of them on this very tranquil street must have spooked the people in the microbus, for they suddenly sped off as quickly as they had approached.

Our housekeeper came back home in a panic with our baby. Police were called, and about three of them showed up very quickly in a patrol car, including one female officer who took down our report. I had just arrived home from work, and was quickly apprised of the situation. Our baby, swaddled and deeply asleep in the same peraje, smelled vaguely of rotten eggs, and both the housekeeper and the police officer said that was from the liquid they had squirted in her face – evidently some sort of chemical with a tranquilizing effect. The police had evidently seen or heard of this before; in fact, they seemed unsurprised by any of the details recounted to them.

Well, the moment passed, and we eventually all returned to normalcy. We’ve been back in the States for many years now (except for the housekeeper, of course). Our little girl is fully grown, graduated from college, and on her own now working at a wonderful job in DC. But we might well have lost her forever, and there is not a shadow of doubt that our daughter might have become one more statistic in the horrible saga of human trafficking and illegal adoptions.

Folks, there is NO PRINCIPLED MORAL DISTINCTION that can be made between kidnapping for adoption or selling a child for adoption. It is human trafficking, and it is wrong. If a child is sold, it doesn't matter if you are the seller or the buyer, and if the latter, it matters not a whit whether you paid the cash yourself or paid someone else to pay the cash.

Moreover, I agree wholeheartedly with the poster here who noted that those who adopt because they want to “save” a child should really consider how many more children they could save by devoting the same resources to vitally needed community development efforts in the country where the children live.