Book Review: Until I Find You

“Professor Rachel Nolan, Assistant Professor of International History and author of Until I Find You, recently sat down with Carlos Dada of El Faro’s Malas Compañías podcast to discuss her landmark investigation into Guatemala’s international adoption industry; a system that, at its peak, represented 1% of the country’s GDP and generated $200 million in a single year. Nolan’s research spans three decades of adoption practices, from state-run orphanages in the 1960s to a privatized legal framework that allowed foreign families to commission children with striking specificity, such as requesting particular ages, skin tones, and ethnicities, from a network of lawyers and intermediaries operating largely outside judicial oversight.

Central to the conversation is the Hogar Elisa Martínez, Guatemala City’s main public orphanage and the hub through which thousands of children passed before being adopted abroad. Nolan details how, during the military campaigns of the early 1980s, later prosecuted as genocide, army officers and social workers transported indigenous children from conflict zones directly to the orphanage, erasing their origins in official documents before placing them with foreign families.

Under the 1948 international definition of genocide, the forced transfer of children from one ethnic group to another constitutes a genocidal act. “Forced adoptions of indigenous children formed part of the genocide in Guatemala,” Nolan states plainly in the interview, adding that the orphanage “served as a reception center for these children before sending them abroad.”

The interview takes on particular urgency given recent investigative reporting linking Guatemala’s current Attorney General, Consuelo Porras, to the falsification of documents during her tenure as director of the Hogar Elisa Martínez in 1982 — at the height of the military’s campaign. UN rapporteurs have flagged her potential involvement in irregularities affecting up to 80 children.

When asked whether it was possible that Porras was unaware of what was happening under her watch, Nolan was direct: “She was the legal guardian of the children, and in many cases where the children came from was written in the adoption files themselves. I don’t see how it’s possible not to have known.” Notably, Porras, now seeking a third term as Attorney General, has removed her role at the orphanage from her official résumé.

Nolan connects these revelations to a broader pattern of impunity, noting that several figures from the adoption era remain prominent in Guatemalan public life, including lawyers who processed hundreds of adoptions and are now lobbying for the practice to be reopened.

Her book, whose Spanish translation is forthcoming, aims to bring this history to both Guatemalan and, notably, American readers who, Nolan argues, bear significant responsibility both through Cold War foreign policy and through the demand that drove the adoption market in the first place. “I wanted people in the United States to know what Guatemalans already know well,” she said, “which is that Guatemalan children were being profited from.” Her ultimate hope is straightforward: accountability, a national conversation, and an assurance that it never happens again.”

Nolan on Child Trafficking, Genocide, and Impunity in Guatemala’s Adoption Industry
[Boston University 4/6/26 by Rachel Nolan]

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