While I cannot imagine how a potential kidnapping could affect a parent, you did say that this occurred many years ago.

Things are different now. There are multiple DNA tests and the US Embassy monitors and regulates the adoption process. In fact, if biological parents were required to go through all that adoptive parents go through, there'd be fewer unwanted kids on this earth.

From my experience, it would be virtually impossible to get a child a visa to exit the country without a legitimate adoption. There are way too many checks in place...with both the Guatemala and US gov't.

You speak of adoption as if is not a good thing. Yet you claim to have lived there for quite a while...were you blind to the children who live in the garbage dumps or are put out on the streets to fend for themselves? Is your wife not Guatemalan? She must still have contact with others there and know of the way that women are repressed, left without jobs and unable to afford for the care of their children.

Do you think it an easy decision for a woman to place her child into adopttion? These birthmothers do so because they know that they have so little to offer their child. In many cases, they simply lack the means to feed yet another child. Just becasue these birthmothers lack proper legal identification does not make them criminals for placing their children up for adoption. Nor does it make the folks whose job it is to process the paperwork for adoptions, or even the Director of a orphanage, a criminal or guilty of child traffiking.