DNA tests confirm first stolen baby in troubled Guatemalan adoption system
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DNA tests for the first time have confirmed that a baby was stolen from her mother and adopted for profit in Guatemala.
The baby, Esther Zulamita, was taken by armed men in 2007 at her family’s shoe shop. Her mother, Ana Escobar, has spent the last year searching for the child.
Read more about adoptions from Guatemala here.
The apparent confirmation of an actual case of ‘baby theft’ raises doubts about a law passed in December by Guatemalan legislators to overhaul the nation’s poorly regulated adoption system, ‘in which poor mothers were paid to turn over their children to American couples,’ as the New York Times reported last year.
The New York Times reported that:
‘The new law, pushed by the United States government, allows thousands of pending adoptions, most to Americans, to proceed. Guatemala sends more adopted children to the United States than any other country except China; this year [2007] it has sent 4,700. The new law also creates a government authority to handle future adoptions, bringing Guatemala in line with the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption and wresting the system away from lawyers who charge as much as $30,000 per child.’
Photo: Antonietta, held by a lawyer, awaits adoption by a Pennsylvania couple at a Guatemala government office. Credit: Daniel Hernandez-Salazar for The New York Times