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Guatemala:
Dirty War Orphans Put Up For Adoption
Guatemala:
Dirty War Orphans Put Up For Adoption
By JUAN CARLOS LLORCA
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Guatemala's government
said Monday it has uncovered evidence
supporting a long-held belief: Children
whose parents were killed during the
country's 36-year civil war were put up for
adoption.
Human rights groups have long accused the
government of offering the children for
adoption rather than reuniting them with
surviving family members. Officials had
never acknowledged that.
A government investigation, however, has now
found at least one case in which security
forces killed the parents of a boy and a
girl and then turned the children over to an
orphanage, declaring them abandoned,
investigator Marco Tulio Alvarez said.
It is unclear what happened to the siblings
after that, and Alvarez wouldn't release
their names because he said they haven't yet
been located or notified.
Evidence suggests that hundreds of other
children were likely taken to orphanages,
and most were probably adopted by Americans,
Alvarez said.
He is part of a team of government
investigators analyzing the files of missing
adults and children who were declared
abandoned between 1976-86, the most
repressive years of Guatemala's civil war.
The team's final report is due next month.
Human rights groups estimate that some
40,000 people disappeared during the
fighting. Peace accords in 1996 called for
the whereabouts of children still missing
after the war to be clarified.
In Argentina, the government confirmed that
hundreds of children were taken from
dissidents and raised by military families
or others that supported the ruling military
junta in the 1970s and early 1980s. El
Salvador has worked to reunite children who
were also separated from their families
during that country's civil war and adopted
by foreign families, often in Europe.
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