Guatemalan Soldiers Sold Children In War -
Government
By Sarah Grainger
GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - At least
333 children and probably thousands more
were taken by Guatemalan security forces and
sold abroad during the country's 36-year
civil war, a government report said on
Thursday.
Soldiers and police killed children's
parents, lied about how they had been found
and handed them to state-run homes for sale
to adoptive parents in the United States and
Europe, said the report, which was based on
government archives.
The archives in the Guatemalan presidency's
social welfare department show hundreds of
children whose parents were killed by the
army or who were forcefully taken from their
families and were put up for adoption with
false papers.
"Some of the people involved in organizing
these adoptions made the process into a very
lucrative business for themselves, and with
that in mind they gave priority to
international adoptions," Marco Tulio
Alvarez, the report's author and the
director of the archives, told a news
conference.
By the end of the war in 1996, Guatemala was
the second largest source of children
adopted internationally after China, but
numbers have dropped after the government
tightened regulations in 2007.
Investigators studied 333 cases for this
preliminary report into adoptions during
some of the most violent years of the war,
between 1977 and 1989, after the archive was
opened by President Alvaro Colom last year.
Around 250,000 people, mostly indigenous
Mayan Indians, died in the war between
successive right-wing governments and
leftist insurgents, which ended with the
signing of UN-backed peace accords in 1996.
Human rights groups hope that dozens of
people could be prosecuted based on the new
report. There may be thousands more cases
but little paperwork survives as proof.
Bernabe Gutierrez was 3 years old when his
mother was killed by soldiers and his father
fled to Mexico in 1980.
He and his three siblings were taken by a
local pastor and then split up. Gutierrez
and his sister remained in Guatemala and a
brother was adopted in Italy. Gutierrez'
youngest brother has never been found.
"(I'm) very sad, devastated, because it's
unacceptable that armed men can come into a
home and take the lives of defenseless
people like they did," said Gutierrez, who
has been reunited with some members of his
family.
Experts are also working on digitalizing and
making public a massive police archive of
millions of documents that were discovered,
covered in dust and bat droppings, in a
warehouse on the outskirts of Guatemala City
four years ago.
The huge paper trail contains everything
from parking tickets to arrest warrants and
could help prosecute former police officers
who killed activists and union leaders
during the civil war.
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