Honorable Guatemalan Judge Angelica Noemi Tellez Hernandez's ruling in late July that 26-year-old mother Loyda Rodríguez Morales' stolen daughter must be returned to her arms was a groundbreaking decision.
On its own merits, it was perhaps an obvious one. The decision sought to right an awful wrong by re-linking the maternal bond that was broken on Nov. 3, 2006, when Anyelí Rodríguez (then two years old) was stolen from Morales' arms in Guatemala City.
It sought to reassert order in a land where disorder, mayhem and bloodshed have prevailed for decades. And the decision presupposed that, in a just world, the child could simply be handed back to its natural mother, in a sequel to wise King Solomon's biblical judgement.
But there's nothing simple about the practical implication of Judge Hernandez's historic ruling. Anyelí Rodríguez, who turns seven on Oct. 1, now lives in a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., with her American adoptive parents, Timothy James Monahan and Jennifer Lyn Monahan. The Monahans have given her the name Karen Abigail, and likely had no idea that their daughter was stolen from her birth mother's arms when they returned to the United States with her on Dec. 9, 2008.
The culprits behind this crime appear to be the nine Guatemalans who have been criminally charged, including Judge Mario Peralta Castaneda, who signed off on the adoption -- and not the American couple. The Monahans won't talk to the media and have instead hired a Washington D.C.-based spokesman, Peter Mirijanian, to represent them.
Through Mirjanian's public relations agency, they issued the following statement: "The Monahan family will continue to advocate for the safety and best interests of their legally adopted child. They remain committed to protecting their daughter from additional trauma as they pursue the truth of her past through appropriate legal channels."
"Their legally adopted child." Those are powerful words.
Judge Hernandez has given the Monahans 60 days to hand over the girl, and threatened to call the international police agency Interpol if they do not. And that's where the linear story ends. The Monahans' intentions are unknown, but if you honestly think that a judge in small and powerless Guatemala can successfully order a family in the mighty United States to relinquish their child, then you haven't studied the grotesquely one-sided history of U.S.-Guatemala relations.
It was we yanquis who executed a coup d'etat in 1954 to remove democratically-elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz; used the beautiful countryside as our own banana republic during the Cold War; armed and trained its right-wing military during the brutal, 36-year civil war to further our own foreign policy goals; and forced the CAFTA free trade deal down the throats of Guatemala City's powers-that-be last decade.
The most recent chapter in the unequal relationship between the United States and Guatemala is about international adoption. Last decade, Guatemala became the largest "sending country" in the world for adopted children. Nearly 20,000 Guatemalan children were adopted by American families between 2004 and 2008, and a full 1 percent of all babies born in 2007 in "the land of eternal spring" were relinquished by their birth mothers and adopted abroad.
Guatemala's "notary" adoption system was the only privatized system in the world at the time. That is, "notary" judges and attorneys controlled the flow of children out of her borders, and not the government itself. The financial incentive for Guatemalans working in international adoption led to allegations, and actual cases of theft, birth mother coercion, even rumors of "fattening houses" where sex workers were encouraged to become pregnant and then sell their babies to adoption lawyers. The Guatemalan government effectively shut down international adoption in 2008.
I explore this morass in Between Light and Shadow: A Guatemalan Girl's Journey Through Adoption (University of Nebraska Press, April 2011). During my time in Guatemala, I met corrupt and unsavory lawyers, honorable women who had given up children out of the goodness of their hearts, rural Guatemalans who believed that Americans adopt children to use their organs... and everyone in between.
In the book, I retraced the steps of a girl who was coercively relinquished by her biological mother at the late age of 7 and then adopted by a loving and unsuspecting Michigan family. At the adoptive mother's urging, I facilitated and chronicled a dramatic reunion with the girl's birth family in 2006, during which we learned that the biological mother had repeatedly given up children -- for money. The realization was bitter, and yet, around no turn did this story appear black and white. Had Antonia not given up five of her 10 children for adoption, today they would probably be as desperate and poor as she is -- perhaps resorting to sex work, perhaps joining violent street gangs.
My book leads to an unexpected showdown in the jungle where the adoptee suddenly must choose between her Guatemalan family and her American family. Reading this month's upsetting news about the Missouri girl Karen Abigail, and the inevitable fight to come over her custody, I thought of how a similar battle played out in Between Light and Shadow:
Of course the girl will return to the United States with Judy on Thursday... The match today here in this jungle in Central America was not going to be fair. In fact, it was fixed to begin with. Two poor Guatemalan boys with no money, no resources, and no valuable passports never really stood a chance against a middle-class white woman from the United States when it came to fighting over the 14-year-old girl they all love and need so badly. At the end of this week Guatemala's most valuable natural resources, its children, will still be leaving the country on airplanes for El Norte, and this particular case will be no different. At the end of the month, Guatemala's role will still be one of subservience to the United States of America.
Follow Jacob Wheeler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jacobrwheeler
International Adoption - Adopting a Child Internationally. Foreign ...
The Monahans knew: they knew early on in the adoption that it was a shady business and that the child, Anyeli, they wanted so badly was not put up for adoption by her mother. And for more than two years they have ignored the pleas of Anyeli's mother for her return home. Now they are ignoring a court order.
Two of the lawyers the Monahans hired are behind bars charged with conspiracy and child trafficking. Everyday the Monahans continue to keep a child from her mother and family is an act of cruelty. Perhaps being an orthopedic surgeon and living in a big house in a wealthy neighborhood protects people from being prosecuted for crimes, even the worst of the worse crimes.
This case is also about thousands of children illicitly placed into child trafficking through adoption. It is necessary to stop this trade in children and prosecute the wrongdoers. The Monahan's congressman Sam Graves and Senator Mary Landrieu are involved along with our government. Guatemala has taken steps to stop child trafficking through adoption and prosecute those who participated. Will the US do the same?
For Anyeli, and so many children sold to adoption, the Monahans deserve their day in court to tell their truth, show their true grief. First send the child home.
Riben, who lost her first child to adoption, is former Director of the American Adoption Congress and Past Vice President of Communications of Origins-USA, a national non-profit that advocates for mothers' rights and keeping natural families together.
In 1980 Riben co-founded the original Origins, a New Jersey-based national organization for women who lost children to adoption (unaffiliated with any other similarly named organization).
Riben has been researching, writing and speaking about the need to reform, humanize, and de-commercialize American adoption practices since 1979. She has appeared on several national television programs, and was keynote speaker and many conferences. She blogs at http://FamilyPreservation.blogspot.com
See more at: http://works.bepress.com/mirah_riben/
Might cannot be allowed to make right. This child needs to be returned because it is morally right and we need to show the world that America is not just a big meany who takes - or buys - whatever it wants, right or wrong, and disregards morals, ethics, decency and international law when it suits one of our citizens, but want the obeyed if it suits others among us.
Mirah Riben, author, THE STORK MARKET: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry
If it right when it is the child of American who is taken overseas and held illegally, it is right when the shoe is on the other foot.
The Monahan' adoption may have appeared to be legal, but it was NOT! It's that simple. Ignorance of the facts is no excuse. If it is discovered that a car you purchased, for example, had been stolen without your knowledge, you do NOT get to keep the car and are lucky if you are not charged with being accessory after the fact. In this case, no one is pointing a finger of wrong-doing at the Monahan's or even the adoption agency...but the innocent mother and child victims of a felony crime should not suffer because the crime was LAUNDERED through many hands and not known at the time to adoption decree was issued.
I have written TWO books about adoption base don 30+ years of researching the subject. And, like Mr. Wheeler, I too have been to Guatemala and met with mothers who had their children taken form them at gunpoint or after being drugged. Loyda Rodríguez Morales' is a loving, caring mother living in middle class standards in Guatemala. So too is Ana Escobar who's daughter was headed to America for adoption after being kidnapped, and Raquel Par and Olga Lopez just to name a few of the heartbroken victims of child trafficking to fill a demand for babies in America!
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The Monahan's grief at the loss of a child they thought of and cared for as legally their own for two years would indeed be monumentally painful. No one would downplay their grief over such a devastating separation.
But we must separate out wealth, privilege and ethnocentricity here from the simple fact that the child was feloniously kidnapped from the arms of her loving mothers. This is in no way comparable to an impoverished mother allegedly taking money to let five of her children go to America.
The facts here require us to compare this to any other kidnapping case, such as that of CARLINA WHITE snatched from a hospital at 9 days old in 1987. She was abducted by a nurse who raised her as her child.
Even children adopted by a non-custodial parent are also always ordered returned! Take for example the highly publicized international custodial kidnapping case of DAVID GOLDMAN where all sympathy and compassion in this country was with the natural father, not the Brazilian maternal family.
U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith (R-4th Dist.)and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Intervened on Goldman's behalf to get his son rightfully returned to his natural, biological father.
Goldman's son was nine years old when he was returned to his father to a cheering America.
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Still not all the culprits involved in this sickly disgusting crime are in jail. How much further trauma does this child need to suffer before she is allowed to go home to the arms of the mother who loves her?
This is an incredibly sad story with no winners and many losers no matter what becomes the end result. Another example of how greed creates victims out of the innocent.
But it seems to me this child had something that mattered a heck of a lot more than the 'opportunities' that were supposed to replace her stolen identity and family. She had a mother and a family that never gave up on her.