Rachel Nolan: In the Best Interest of the Child

Years ago, I sat in the polished office of the notorious Guatemala City attorney Fernando “Skippy” Linares Beltranena alongside my best friend, Juan Carlos Llorca. At the time, Llorca worked as Guatemala City bureau chief for the Associated Press. He knew the ins and outs of every government system, and he was helping me as I reported a book investigating organized crime and corruption in adoption.

Our days consisted of tracking down people like “the lady who sold chicken on that street corner six years ago” and waiting outside certain government offices for hours to receive leaked files. We were scouring for the details we needed to describe and define Guatemala’s largest export industry in the years following 2004: sending children abroad via international adoption. Juan Carlos’s own research led to a stunning statistical analysis: one out of every one hundred babies born in Guatemala was exported for adoption, and nearly all of the adoptions were for-profit. It felt so dark. The players. The buyers. The sellers. Was everyone in on it? Why did no one act? Everyone knew about it, and it seemed like almost everyone wanted a piece of the pie.

The question seems simple: What are the best interests of a child? But it depends on who you ask.

At its height, the international adoption industry moved thousands of children each year, raking in millions in profit. It shut down fifteen years ago, after a variety of improprieties and fraud came to light. Since then, journalists and academics have attempted the mammoth task of unraveling what transpired. The modern, almost entirely privatized adoption system was a networked undertaking involving a cast of characters who oftentimes didn’t know each other. Even those intimately involved, those who comprised links in the chain —