Guatemala Mother Searched 5 Years For Adopted Girl

GUATEMALA CITY -- Loyda Rodriguez Morales felt someone tug at her daughter as she tried to enter her simple home with three young children in tow. She turned to see a woman whisk the 2-year-old away in a waiting taxi.

After nearly five years of searching, posting fliers, being turned away at orphanages and even staging a hunger strike, Rodriguez now holds what's believed to be an unprecedented Guatemalan court order declaring the child stolen and ordering the U.S. couple who eventually adopted her to give her back.

If U.S. authorities intervene to return the child, now 6, as the Guatemalan court has asked, it would be a first for any international adoption case, experts say.

A construction-paper sign taped Friday to the door of the girl's U.S. address, a two-story suburban Kansas City home, read: "Please respect our families (sic) privacy during this difficult and confusing time. We ask that you not trespass on our property for the sake of our children. Thank you."

The U.S. State Department referred all questions about the court ruling to the Justice Department, which would not comment on the case.

Rodriguez, 26, cried when she saw the July 29 court order made public this past week. She's already planning how to fix up her daughter's bedroom.

"I want it with a lot of decorations. I'm going to buy dolls and clothes so she's not lacking anything," she told The Associated Press. "If she wants to sleep alone, she'll have her room. If not, she can be with her brothers."

U.S. officials might simply try to ignore the order, said David Smolin, a law professor at the Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama, and an expert in international adoption.

Chuck Johnson, president and CEO of the Virginia-based National Council For Adoption, said he has never heard of the U.S. carrying out a foreign court order to return adopted children to their home country.

But the leading advocate in the Guatemala case said the U.S. government is obligated under international treaties to return victims of human trafficking or irregular adoptions that have occurred within five years.

The girl left the country on Dec. 9, 2008, according to court records.

"We're within the margin of time," said Norma Cruz, director of the Survivors Foundation, a human rights group that filed the court case for Rodriguez. "We don't have to contact the (adoption) family. The judge's order says authorities have to find the child, wherever she is."

The foundation doesn't allege the U.S. couple knew the girl they adopted had been kidnapped, only that the girl was snatched by a child trafficking ring and put up for adoption with a new name. The couple was identified in the court ruling as Timothy James Monahan and Jennifer Lyn Vanhorn Monahan of Liberty, Missouri.

Guatemala's quick adoptions once made this Central American nation of 13 million people a top source of children for the U.S., leading or ranking second only to China with about 4,000 adoptions a year. But the Guatemalan government suspended adoptions in late 2007 after widespread cases of fraud, including falsified paperwork, fake birth certificates and charges of baby theft – though they still allowed many already in process.

The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, a U.N.-created agency prosecuting organized crime cases in Guatemala, has reviewed more than 3,000 adoptions completed or in process and found nearly 100 grave irregularities.

The U.S. still does not allow adoptions from Guatemala, though the State Department is currently assisting with 397 children whose adoptions were in process at the time of the ban.

The court ruling signed by Judge Angelica Noemi Tellez Hernandez canceled the girl's passport and ordered her returned in two months, asking the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala for help in locating the child. The court says it will file an order with the international police agency, Interpol, if she is not returned.

Smolin said this is the first case he knows of a foreign judge ordering an American family to return an adopted child to her native country. He adopted two children from India who he later discovered were stolen, a situation he resolved by allowing the birth parents regular visits.

"This is the scenario that has made everybody afraid for years, the knock on the door from the reporter or whoever," Smolin said.

Anyeli Liseth Hernandez Rodriguez was born Oct. 1, 2004, the second child of Rodriguez, a housewife, and her bricklayer husband, Dayner Orlando Hernandez, who came as teenagers to Guatemala City looking for work. The girl disappeared Nov. 3, 2006, as Rodriguez was distracted while opening the door to their house in a working class suburb, San Miguel Petapa.

They reported their daughter missing to various local and federal law enforcement, including authorities in charge of human rights violations and missing children, according to documents of the U.N.-backed corruption commission.

Rodriguez said she searched for more than a year on her own and was repeatedly refused court permission to search foster homes where kids awaited adoption.

She found Cruz and the Survivors Foundation through a court employee in January 2008, and the two women staged a short hunger strike when they were still denied access of government adoption records, Rodriguez said. Once they were given access, it still took nearly a year to find the child's photo at the National Adoptions Council, where Rodriguez sifted through records with her brother for four straight days in March 2009.

"I felt like my heart was going to leap out. I knew it was her," she said.

Rodriguez submitted to a DNA test that established her as the mother, the corruption commission says.

But the girl was already in the United States, according to court records.

Anyeli's identity had been changed in early 2007 by Felicita Antonia Lopez Garcia, a woman claiming to be her mother, who changed the child's name to Karen Abigail and offered her for adoption, according to the court order. Lopez left the girl with an adoption agency, the Spring Association, several months later after she failed a DNA test, according to the corruption commission. The adoption agency had the girl declared abandoned and put her up for adoption in 2008.

The office of Guatemala's solicitor general approved the adoption in July of that year, despite the fact that it had already received a missing person's report on the girl with photographs as early as February 2008, according to the corruption commission.

In December of that year, the girl left the country with the Monahans, named in her Guatemalan passport as Karen Abigail Monahan Vanhorn and listed as being born Jan. 14, 2005.

Prosecutors for the corruption commission used Rodriguez's case to bring charges against lawyers and brokers with the Spring Association for alleged human trafficking for illegal adoptions and for using false documents. They include the lawyer who notarized the Monahans' adoption, according to the court order.

Cruz said she has two other cases involving illegal international adoptions in the works.

The address given for the Monahans in the court order is a spacious house on a large, wooded lot with a carriage driveway and an orange soccer ball on the porch.

Earlier in the week, a woman came to the door and told an AP reporter she couldn't talk because she was on the phone. No one answered repeated calls for comment until the sign appeared Friday.

Rodriguez said she just wants her daughter back.

"They made a mistake taking my baby," Rodriguez said. "Perhaps they didn't know she was stolen."

___

Associated Press writer Larry Kaplow reported this story in Mexico City and Sonia Perez D. reported in Guatemala City. AP writers Maria Sudekum Fisher and Chris Clark in Kansas City, Missouri, contributed to this report.

Comments

[DEpley]

10:37 AM on 09/30/2011

As an adoptive mother of a child from another country, I can tell you that there is no good answer here. Returning the child to Guatemala is legally the right thing to do, but this child WILL suffer. My daughter was only 14 months old when we adopted her, but she had been with a foster family for most of that time. Now, almost 2 1/2 years later, while she doesn't have any concrete memories of that time of her life, the wounds of separation are still there. Less visible all the time, and fading, but still there.

At 2, this little girl was ripped away from everyone she knew and loved. Then at 3, she had to learn a new culture and new parents all over again. She must have had some attachment issues with her adoptive parents, which they have most likely worked hard to overcome and give her a real sense of stability and love. Ripping her away again at 6, to return to a life she doesn't know (new people, new language, new food, new culture) will not be easy and may do irreparable damage to her ability to trust and form loving relationships.

It's a nightmare for everyone involved, and there are no easy answers.

[mslottidi]

10:38 AM on 09/12/2011

The word is kidnapped, not adopted. This girl was never adopted. Adoption is a legal process by which the rights to a child are terminated by biological parents. The biological mother was not found unfit by any court system, nor did she voluntarily give up her rights to this child. Thereby, there are a set of people who were incredibly deceived into believing that an adoption had taken place, but who were actually and unknowingly aiding and abetting international criminals.
The needs of the child have to be foremost here. There should be no discussion about how "hard" this situation is for the "adoptive" parents. If their primary motivation for "adopting" had been to provide a child in need with a home, instead of to give themselves a child, then there would be no question that the child should be returned.
The "adoptive" parents must now turn their attentions to the state and federal governments, and vehemently petition to put laws in place which place huge restrictions on and regulate the archaic adoption industry in the U.S. Our leaders have failed to recognize that adoption laws are dangerous for all parties. Let's spend our time debating the fact that the State Department has no offical position on the buying and selling of children internationally. We'll send the clear message that we are more interested in children, instead of in committing human rights violations by providing upper middle class people with babies they are not even sort of entitled to raise.

[LauraLyn Liberty]

07:25 AM on 09/02/2011

Quite aside from any criminal activity Dr. Timothy and Jennifer Monahan may or may not have participated in in order to get this child into the US (for the past two years they have been under investigation in Guatemala for child trafficking), there is another question here regarding perhaps thousands of children trafficked through international adoptions. Many couples with children they adopted defend the Monahans knowingly keeping the child from its mother and family for more than two years. The views of adopted children are quite different.

Aside from any damage and trauma this child goes through daily to satisfy the Monahans' need to fill an empty room, the Monahans response of wealth, entitlement, and media manipulation through the DC lobby firm they hired, Peter Mirijanian Public Affairs, is certainly damaging to the thousands of children adopted, legally or illegally, from Guatemala by US couples in need of a child. When these children read this, they must be asking themselves too: "Was I too stolen from the mother who loved me?"

If the Monahans get away with this, more children will be at risk of being kidnapped for wealthy orthopedic surgeons living in quaint neighborhoods in places like Liberty, MO. And the risk will not only be for children in far away countries. We all want our children protected. One cannot imagine the kind of parent who would not want their kidnapped child returned.

[Set Free]

12:48 PM on 08/14/2011

Being stolen so young, she probably wouldn't remember her mother anyway, if raised in the USA. She'll just know what she is told anyway!

[Greg Hodgin]

09:24 AM on 08/13/2011

It does not matter how old the child is now, she was STOLEN, she belongs with her birth mother. Her birth mother carried this child for 9 months, raised her for two years...and then the little girl was snatched away. If the little girl didn't mean so much to her mother, she wouldn't have spent so much time trying to find her. Yes, the child would have wonderful opportunities in America living with an American family, but the birth mother's rights trump any other rights because, the child is too young to really understand the gravity of what has happened, and she was stolen, so the mother never really gave up her rights as the child's guardian. If anything, the child should be returned, and perhaps the adoptive family should be given visitation opportunities. The little girl belongs with her family.

[edvbyrne]

08:13 PM on 08/12/2011

Most Americans will remember the recent case of David Goldman, who fought for years to bring home his young son, Sean, from Brazil. Sean was taken from the U.S. by his mother in 2004 when he was four, ostensibly for a two week vacation with family members (she was Brazilian by birth). After arriving in that country Sean’s mother called David, told him their marriage was over and that she was filing for divorce, and that neither she nor Sean would be returning to the U.S. Thus began a five year saga by David Goldman to recover his own son, in a case characterized by several U.S. courts – and by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton – as one of international kidnapping. Sean did not return home until the day before Christmas 2009, after a five year "visit" to Buenos Aires.

If the Goldman case is one of kidnapping, how is this sad case fundamentally different? Claiming that the child is bonded with her adoptive parents and has few memories of her previous life, or that she doesn’t speak Spanish, are the same kind of arguments made by Sean’s Brazilian family members in that country. The natural mother claims, and a Guatemalan court determined, that this child was stolen off the street. A bitter and tragic result, true. But if your son or daughter was kidnapped from the front yard of your home, exactly when would you decide to give up and just “let it be”?

[F4U Corsair]

07:13 PM on 08/11/2011

This is rough for all involved but I commend the Mother for being a Mother.

I fear some take advantage of the emotions and good hearts of people wanting to adopt by stealing children, ect.

While so many are choosing abortions to end life, others are stealing and selling babies to supply the demand. It is all pretty sick.

[onetruth]

05:35 PM on 08/11/2011

This is a sad case but the child should go back to her mother. Hopefully the adopted parents will be allowed to remain in contact but that is up to the birth mother. This injustice can not stand as it will impede the rights of America to ask others to abide by their parent/ child treaties. Horrific situation, especially for this poor child who knows the adopted parents as her only parents.

[francny]

05:34 PM on 08/11/2011

This child has been with it's adoptive parents for quite some time. She has been integrated into an american life and at this age has begun school. She probably doesn't even speak spanish either. She most likely sees her adoptive parents as her mom and dad and sending her back would be extremely traumatic for the child. She does not even know her birth mother. I am more concerned about the wellbeing of this child. The adoptive parents are innocent in this. No one knows what REALLY occurred between the birth mother and the woman who brought her to that foster home where she was eventually adopted. You have only the birth mother's word. I also don't see a judge's order in another country being a controlling force on the courts here in the US. The adoption was finalized in the US and as such US courts have the prevailing decision. I don't think these parents can be forced to give up their adopted daughter. They did not kidnap this child. I feel sorry for the birth mother but she should think about what is best for the child at this time. She is thinking about her own feelings (which I do understand) but not about the feelings of the child who does not know her. This is all so confusing. This child is probably already a US citizen and therefore can't be forced to leave the country, can she? Which country's laws prevail on something like this?

[Emmanuel Carrillo]

08:28 PM on 08/11/2011

I see what you are saying, but I have to say it does come off as a bit harsh. The birth mother is as innocent as the adoptive parents. In the US don't we also give birth parents more say than adoptive parents? It seems to me that the only problem the birth mother is encountering with this is that she isn't an American. It is incredibly shameful to think that the US could deny a mother access to her kidnapped child because of a preference for the adoptive parents' nationality--that may not be the case, but that is what it sounds like.

[Georgerz]

02:08 AM on 08/13/2011

Your post is wrong in all counts. the child was kidnapped, not given up for adoption. The parents have never given up their parental rights.

[Natti]

02:24 PM on 08/11/2011

This little girl belongs with her mother. Period. If someone stole my child and sold him/her, I would fight tooth and nail until he/she was returned.

[eaenkiufo]

08:58 PM on 08/08/2011

well one more thing Give the mother the child, I believe a King once said that, ah yes his name was KING SOLOMON

[eaenkiufo]

08:55 PM on 08/08/2011

This womans child was stolen & sold for profit & that is all i have left to say

[eaenkiufo]

08:37 PM on 08/08/2011

correction: The Affordable Care Act raises the maximum adoption credit to $13,170 per child, up from $12,150 in 2009. It also makes the credit refundable, meaning that eligible taxpayers can get it even if they owe no tax for that year.

[eaenkiufo]

08:35 PM on 08/08/2011

Yes adoptive families are great sometimes but most of them do it for reasons like the 16 thousand dollar cash tax refund they get per child. It's easy to be so big hearted when this child that you have is paying the bills

[Kendall Hawley]

09:07 PM on 08/08/2011

While I know some foster parents do it for the cash (I learned this from a longtime foster parent), I have the sneaking suspicion that adopting and raising a child costs a little bit more than $13,000. I don't know what the legal costs are for someone to adopt a child but they are probably high enough to be prohibitive for the average American family and I bet that credit helps. I just don't see how anyone could possible think $13,000 comes anywhere close to raising a child.

[eaenkiufo]

10:54 PM on 08/08/2011

Yes we all know that a extra 13k a year wouldnt be anything right? And where i found out about those tax breaks was a story about a man & woman with 3 adoptive kids & how they were getting that amout back for each child. Then you add food stamps & free medical care & of course any child who is abused has mental problems so they get a disability check around 1k a month & they also have the free clothing voucher from DFS. It starts to look like there is a lot of money in it to me maybe even enough to drive some people to steal kids

[Sighthound lover]

10:24 AM on 08/08/2011

This is truly a heartbreaking story. I really hope that both families can find a compromise that will be in little Karen/Anyeli's best interests. My sympathies to both parties.