Finding Fernanda Book Review UPDATED

Finding Fernanda by Erin Siegal goes on sale today, November 1, 2011, the first day of National Adoption Month. This book chronicles a true story of a Guatemalan mother, Mildred Alvarado, who against all odds risked her life in order to be reunited with two of her children who’d been kidnapped by mafia elements of the adoption industry. Mildred’s two-year-long ordeal from 2006 to 2008 puts a human face on the corruption of the international adoption industry.

This is a hugely important must-read for anyone involved in international adoption—prospective adoptive parents, adoptive parents, US government officials, lobbying organizations for the adoption business, adoption agencies, state licensing officials, the media, anyone who cares about human rights, and most of all the biological families and adoptees who have so egregiously been wronged. It is a long-overdue and savage indictment of the criminals who run international adoption operations; the unethical lengths that US adoption agencies go to in order to secure referrals; and the American adoptive parents who looked the other way as long as they got the babies they wanted.

Ms. Siegal traveled to Guatemala and interviewed Mildred; the NGO that helped her, Fundación Sobrevivientes (Survivors’ Foundation); birthmothers and foster mothers; and numerous Guatemalan officials. Also interviewed on the US side were: The prospective adoptive parent of Fernanda, Elizabeth Emanuel; other clients of the agency responsible for this situation, Celebrate Children International (CCI); the agency’s director Sue Hedberg’s husband; Hedberg’s current and former employees; and other adoption industry personnel. Hedberg herself would not be interviewed.

In addition, the author describes events that have been documented by a lengthy paper trail. This evidence is juxtaposed against the falsified Guatemalan adoption paperwork that was revealed in an in-depth review by CICIG, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala. The CICIG was established by the government of Guatemala and the United Nations on December 12, 2006 to investigate the Mafia’s activities, which unfortunately include international adoption.

While this story is mostly about the breathtaking ordeal of Mildred Alvarado, there are important sections at the end that discuss other Guatemalan children that have been kidnapped and believed to be living with US adoptive parents. CCI’s activities in Ethiopia are also mentioned.

This book highlights four important points:

Point #1:

In Guatemala, the Mafia Is Involved with International Adoption and All of the Depraved, Heinous Actions Described in This Book.

When Mildred attempted to recover her children, she, her children, and her sister Patricia were threatened. About her two kidnapped children: “Their bodies would be chopped up into pieces, which would be strewn around Zone 9 of Guatemala City. Mildred would be informed of where to pick up her children’s heads, legs, and arms. Sometimes the killings of her two remaining kids, Mario and Susana, were detailed. Sometimes the calls foretold Mildred’s own death, or worse, Patricia’s [her sister].”

This cannot be disconnected from the context of other crimes against women. Ms Siegal relates: “The Guatemalan organization La Unidad de Protección a Defensoras y Defensores de Derechos Humanos (The Unit of Protection Defenders of Human Rights, or UDESGUA), which monitored the safety of human rights groups, tallied 2028 attacks between 2000 and 2010. According to their 2010 report, Sobrevivientes was the most threatened human rights organization, with 96 registered threats of violence.”

The Guatemalan equivalent of the American AMBER Alert system is even named for victims believed to be part of the illegal adoption network. Ms Siegal states: “The Alba-Keneth Alert System was named after two little girls who had been found brutally murdered after disappearing. Both of their bodies showed signs of torture, and Alba had been beheaded and buried in a backyard. Sobrevivientes believed that both kidnappings were initially linked to illegal adoption networks.”

The traffickers were not choosing between sex trafficking and adoption trafficking, but adoption trafficking and dismemberment.

Also described are the “fattening homes” that were where poor pregnant women went for care and in order to pay the “debt,” they would have to give up their babies OR they were told their baby died. Many of the victimized women still think their babies died, which makes them disinclined to search for them. Mildred, while pregnant with Ana-Cristina, had her other three children and sister Patricia accompany her to live in this kind of “helping” home. The first “debt” that Mildred had to pay was allowing Fernanda to live with Condi Bran, one of several people facing prosecution in Guatemala.

Doctors were also involved in the trafficking. When Mildred was ready to give birth to Ana-Cristina, the second child kidnapped from her, she was taken to an underground clinic, drugged, the baby was taken out by c-section and sent with the trafficking network.

Point #2

Lack of Proper Checks or Sanctions by the US Embassy.

According to Ms. Siegel, a memo “outlined the U.S. government’s plan for handling the minority of adoption cases that showed obvious signs of fraud. As the Embassy didn’t have the resources to scrutinize each document in an adoption file, they decided to focus on one particular element: the consent, or relinquishment, form. That way they could avoid [as the US Embassy described it] ‘overloading ourselves and causing long delays for adoptive parents anxious to return to the United States with their children.’” [Emphasis Rally]

The focus was speed, not ethics or legality. This directly applies to what the Congressional Coalition for Adoption Institute via Senator Mary Landrieu and the Guatemala 900 group that awaits adoption finalization is asking Guatemala to do right now.

After irregularities were uncovered in 1999, a UN Special rapporteur was dispatched. After meeting with the US Embassy visa unit it was revealed that “a single Guatemalan woman had successfully given up thirty-three children for adoption over the course of three years. They were all supposed to have been her own biological children. No one caught the error because the woman had relinquished two children per month, the legal limit.” The irregularities continued. A scathing report released in 2000 revealed that “Out of the ninety cases, eighty-two birth mothers gave the same reason for relinquishing children: Each cited a “precarious economic situation.” At that time child finders known as jaladoras were paying pregnant women $640 for their child to be adopted internationally.

The abductions cannot be disconnected from international adoptions in recent times either. Ms. Siegal states: “Forty-five complaints of abducted children were made to PGN [Guatemalan adoption authority] in 2007.” In the same year, “The Ministerio Público received 1,921 additional complaints of a similar nature.”

Furthermore, “According to a memo from the U.S. Embassy, 60 percent of the cases handled by the new Ministerio Público Trafficking Unit between April 2007 and March 2008 dealt with illegal adoptions. The Embassy noted that a lack of resources limited the unit’s ability to prosecute and convict offenders, saying ‘leaks of information about impending raids and investigations’ to criminal targets was a ‘serious impediment’ to Guatemalan law enforcement.”

As if that weren’t devastating enough, she shares: “Between 2008 and 2010, CICIG found that just ten percent of all children who left Guatemala in adoption were legal orphans. More than 60 percent of the transition adoptions contained abnormalities, including ‘theft and the illegal purchase or sale of children, threats and deception to biological mothers, and forgery of documents to carry out “adoption processes…”’”

And more: “In some cases, CICIG found, the photograph of a single child appeared in more than one adoption file. They unearthed cases where children whose adoptions had never gained approval from Guatemala’s PGN had been given passports anyway. In other cases, a single child’s identity was used in the adoption documents prepared for “two or three sets of adoptive parents.” Other children, the Adoptions Report said, left Guatemala on private flights, leaving behind no information about where they were going or who had taken them.

Point #3

Lack of Real Consequences for Adoption Agencies that Place Internationally.

Though CCI was denied Hague accreditation, they still are in business. In 2006, before Hague regulations went into effect, they were placing 15 to 25 Guatemalan children per month. After Guatemala closed, they went on to place from Ethiopia, becoming the fifth-highest placing agency at 250 kids per year. Ms Siegal enumerates: “Since 2005, nineteen complaints have been made about the adoption agency. The Department of Children and Families has not substantiated any of them.”

Guatemala’s hands are tied when it comes to prosecuting foreign agencies. Ms Siegal interviewed Mynor Pinto, a prosecutor in the Ministerio Público’s Trafficking Unit. He said, “With Sue, we would have charged her with child trafficking and money laundering.”

Why aren’t Americans who traffic in adoptions arrested and charged with this trafficking? Because there is no US law prohibiting it, only the scant protection of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which was reauthorized in 2005, and defines “severe forms of trafficking in persons” as either for the purpose of sex or labor. Facilitating adoptive placements doesn’t meet the letter of the law for trafficking.

Point #4

Guatemalan Mothers Are Still Waiting For Their Children’s Return.

This book also details the current human rights crisis involving adoptees residing in the US who have been kidnapped from Guatemala. Their biological mothers have been asking for their return for years, and the American adoptive parents lie, obfuscate, and deny any complicity—when in truth they are rank hypocrites.

Ms. Siegal states: “Loyda, one of the searching mothers helped by Sobrevivientes, had identified a picture of a child she believed to be her daughter: ‘Karen Abigail Lopez García.’” Karen Abigail had already left Guatemala in an adoption to an American couple, the Monahans, who’d been clients of CCI, with Marvin Bran as their adoption facilitator.

According to a damning paper trail, the Monahans knew the DNA testing had failed to establish Karen Abigail’s relationship to the woman posing as her birthmother in July 2007. Despite this, the little girl was brought before Judge Mario Perlata in Escuintla, who was the same judge known for falsifying abandonments and who presided over Fernanda’s and her sister Ana-Cristina’s paperwork. He issued an abandonment decree and assigned custody for Karen Abigail to the nursery Asociación Primavera, founded by the Guatemalan attorney Susana Luarca. Judge Escuintla was stripped of judicial immunity one year ago. Karen Abigail left Guatemala in December 2008 and has resided with the Monahans ever since.

Details of this terrible story, as well as those of the Emanuels and other wronged mothers of kidnapped children [the term birthmother is NOT ACCURATE for these cases] will leave readers gasping with incredulity. While several of the Guatemalans from this one, small operation have since been arrested, some of the players have not. CCI continues with business as usual—and they have, with seemingly breathtaking audacity, reapplied for Hague accreditation! The Monahans refuse to return the child they have no right to raise.

Finding Fernanda is a scathing page-turner. With meticulous attention to detail, Ms. Siegal clearly explains how adoptions from Guatemala went so terribly wrong. It shows how the US Embassy did NOT do their job, and how their willingness to look the other way coupled with the greed that fuels the adoption industry allowed the corruption to expand. Anyone with a heart will put this book down in despair. Let’s hope it is the call to action so desperately needed to clean up and reform international adoption.

Update: Interesting interview with author Erin Siegal.

http://womennewsnetwork.net/2012/05/25/guatemala-adoptions-poverty/

[Womens News Network 5/25/12 by Christa Hillstrom]

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