Guatemala’s Baby Brokers: How Thousands of Children Were Stolen for Adoption

This piece by Rachel Nolan—an edited excerpt from her book, Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala—is an eye-opening look at Guatemala’s privatized adoption industry.

During a wave of international private adoptions beginning in the ’60s, thousands of Guatemalan children were taken from their families. Jaladoras, or baby brokers hired by lawyers, often coerced or tricked Indigenous Mayan and poor women to give up their babies. In some cases, such as that of “adoptee” Dolores Preat, children were outright kidnapped.

It was illegal for baby brokers to offer birth mothers money, but it sometimes happened. More often, though, they used other methods of persuasion. Linares Beltranena’s paperwork, along with police records and Guatemalan news reports, showed that his jaladoras would approach poor, often Indigenous women who were visibly pregnant – at home, at bus stops, in hospitals, in marketplaces. Baby brokers sometimes also worked as midwives, maids, nurses, obstetricians or civil registrars, or they ran nurseries or daycares. They would ask if the mother-to-be had money to raise a child, or if the child would be better off with a foreign family in a country with more opportunities. Some jaladoras carried photo albums, which they flipped through in front of pregnant women, showing them Guatemalan boys and girls in the comfortable homes of middle-class families abroad. Many of the women they approached already had young children they were struggling to feed.

Linares Beltranena’s files contained photographs of the adoptive couple, often pictured in classic all-American scenes, like sitting together at a picnic table on a front deck with their barbecue grill visible behind them. One couple sent a photo of the whole family out jogging together. Interiors feature bourgeois comfort: pianos, wall-to-wall carpeting, fireplaces.