Briton who spoke out over 'illegal' adoptions faces prison
A British man faces up to five years in a Guatemalan prison after accusing the former wife of a high-ranking judge of being involved in illegal international adoptions.

Bruce Harris, OBE, the executive director of Casa Alianza, a non-governmental organization that campaigns for children's rights in Latin America, says his organization has proof that Susana Saracho de Umana was one of a group of local lawyers who had built up a profitable business in international adoptions.

In 1997, Mr Harris singled out Ms Saracho de Umana at a press conference in Guatemala City and accused her of using improper influence with the judicial authorities to move her adoption cases forward more quickly.

Mr Harris has accused local adoption agents of tricking scores of pregnant women in Mexico and Guatemala into giving up their newborn babies. He claims that agents promised pregnant women free antenatal care and a place in hospital for the birth of their children. The majority of the women were illiterate and did not realize that contracts they accepted bound them to give up their babies, most of whom were destined for new homes in the United States and Europe.

"Some of them couldn't even sign their names. They just put their thumbprints," Mr Harris said from Costa Rica where he moved several years ago after receiving death threats related to his advocacy work.

"We may never know how many women were caught up in this scandal. Certainly scores, maybe hundreds.

"Two years ago, the adoption business in Guatemala was worth US$59m (£40m). That's more than major exports such as snowpeas or cauliflowers.

"The going rate for a baby is around US$20,000 or double that if it is brought in from a neighbouring country like Mexico or smuggled out to Costa Rica where it will get a false birth certificate so the adoptive parents may never even know where the child originally came from."

In 2002, the last year for which figures are available, almost 3,000 Guatemalan children were adopted abroad. Of those, 2,548 went to the United States, 238 to France and 15 to the UK. Several countries including Ireland and the Netherlands now operate a moratorium on adoptions from Guatemala following concerns over irregularities.

Mr Harris said: "People think we are against adoptions but this is not true. What we want is a transparent adoption process with DNA testing which will avoid heartache for parents, adoptive parents and the children who are just seen as commodities by greedy lawyers."

In spite of the fact that Casa Alianza was investigating illegal adoptions at the request of the country's Solicitor General, Ms Saracho sued for defamation.

In Guatemala, truth is no defence against a defamation claim. Amid allegations that Ms Saracho de Umana was using her influence to pursue her case against Mr Harris, the Constitutional Court - in an apparent misinterpretation of the law - ruled that only members of the media were entitled to freedom of expression.

Ms Saracho de Umana, whose former husband was president of the Supreme Court, is also asking for substantial damages.

She has never been charged in relation to her activities and is still working as an adoption lawyer in Guatemala City where her website offers to help "parents, professionals, and adoption advocates".

Today's hearing will be seen as a test case as it will be the first since the new government of centre-right president Oscar Berger took office last week.

Fred Shortlands, director of Casa Alianza UK, said: "We hope that the court will throw out the case as it has no legal basis."

 

Colombia DEA Chief Discusses Targets
Big criminal gangs specializing in the cocaine and heroin trade, crushed by the government with U.S. help, have spawned what the new top American drug agent in Colombia calls "baby poisonous snakes" — microcartels specializing in individual sectors of the narcotics business.

"The head of the mother snake was chopped off...but now we have to chase the baby poisonous snakes, which can be...just as venomous," David Gaddis told The Associated Press.

In his first interview since taking over the Drug Enforcement Administration's operations in Colombia at the turn of the year, Gaddis said many smaller criminal cells — subcontractors of a sort — have taken control of phases of the drug business once handled as a whole by the huge Medellin and Cali drug cartels.

"In many cases it is specialized, another one of these evolving dynamics you see in the industry," Gaddis said in the interview Tuesday.

"It takes a certain expertise to get the drug from where it grows in the soil into the streets of Cincinnati, Ohio," he said. "You have to have people who are organized in the production area, you have to have people who are organized in brokering the transportation, the transportation hand-off to the distribution cells."

Gaddis, a 42-year-old North Carolinian, was based in Miami in the 1980s when Colombian cocaine smuggled by Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel began flooding the city and drug-related killings soared.

Now he is trying to crush the narcotics business at the production rather than the consumption end of the drug trade.

Earlier this month, Gaddis flew to the southwestern city of Cali to monitor raids by Colombian authorities that captured eight suspected drug traffickers wanted in the United States.

Speaking from inside the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy in this Andean capital, Gaddis said he is certain that Colombia's two leftist rebel groups and their right-wing paramilitary foes also are directly involved in drug trafficking. The outlawed groups have long been known to "tax" cocaine production.

Gaddis said the DEA will continue to target an umbrella paramilitary group even though its leaders — who are wanted in the United States on drug charges — have conditioned the demobilization of their forces on guarantees that would avoid lengthy prison sentences.

"What we're focused on is working and assisting our Colombian law enforcement counterparts to continue ... discovering their operations, ending their operations, putting them in jail and taking their assets," said Gaddis.

Gaddis takes over from Leo Arreguin Jr., who retired last year during a wider leadership change among the 100-plus DEA contingent here.

Assistant Bogota DEA director Javier Pena, who helped hunt for Escobar until he was killed in a shootout with police in Medellin in 1993, recently transferred to Texas and George Spaulding, in charge of operations along the Caribbean coast, retired during an emotional ceremony where U.S. Marine security guards presented him with the embassy's American flag.

Gaddis — who has served as deputy chief at the DEA's international operations bureau in Washington and in North Carolina, Mexico and Costa Rica — said his mission is critical, particularly given the high rate of drug addiction in the United States.

Up to 150,000 people die from drug abuse in the United States each year, Gaddis said. An estimated 5.7 million cocaine users in the United States spent $35.3 billion on the drug in 2000, according to a report by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy released in November.

The amount of cocaine entering the United States appears fairly steady as one cartel is destroyed and others rise to take its place. Estimates sometimes vary because of the clandestine nature of the smuggling business.

The National Drug Intelligence Center's "National Drug Threat Assessment 2003" estimated 387 tons of cocaine were available in the U.S. market in 2002, up from an estimated 363 tons the previous year.

The estimated amount of cocaine in the United States from 1996 through 2000 varied from 330 to 285 tons per year, according to a report prepared for the White House drug office.