Kudos: Child Trafficking in Adoption Connection
From time to time, REFORM Talk will offer our kudos to particularly insightful blog posts or articles.
Insight Organized Crime in the Americas article “Mexico Adoption Case Points to Child Trafficking Industry” by Elyssa Pachico on January 19, 2012 succinctly and successfully ties together various adoption fraud cases in the Americas.
“The arrest of six women in Mexico over an alleged child trafficking ring is a reminder of the potential for organized criminal groups to get involved in the adoption business across the region.
Corruption within the adoption industry is not a new problem in Mexico or Central America.
Smugglers take advantage of the demand in countries like the US, where 11,000 international adoptions were processed in 2010 and 9,320 in 2011. Central America is a particularly attractive region for US adoptions as it is geographically close and because cases tend to be processed faster than infants adopted from China or Russia, other countries with large adoption industries. Growing demand in Europe also helped the industry grow on a global scale, with about 40,000 children from developing countries adopted by foreigners in 2006, up from 22,200 in 2005, according to a report by Brandeis University.
The industry is most deeply entrenched in Guatemala. At one point, one in every 100 Guatemalan children were adopted by US families. But there were so many cases of fraud that the two countries halted the practice in 2007. Since then, the US has eased regulations regarding pending cases.
According to journalist Eric Siegel, who has covered the issue extensively, there are some 300 adoption cases from Guatemala that are still in limbo.
Other countries in the region, including Brazil, Peru and Honduras, have at one time halted US adoptions due to concerns over child smuggling. But this tightening of has created something like a “bubble” effect: as adoption regulations become stricter in one region, the industry shifts to another country with more lax laws.
As the incident in Mexico illustrates, law firms are frequently involved in engineering these fraudulent adoptions. As Siegel points out, in the case of Guatemala, lawyers and other wealthy, upper class individuals are typically involved in adoption fraud, which has given significant political clout to adoption lobbying groups. In turn, this has made it difficult to pass stricter regulations for adoption procedures in the country.”
Organized crime does involve itself in intercountry adoption.
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