Guernica: You describe the “roughly five sets of circumstances” for children that led to adoption. What are they, and how did you come to frame and define them?
Nolan: The first group were children forcibly disappeared during the civil war. Sometimes children who survived army massacres were put up for adoption within Guatemala and abroad. The social workers who ran the state program for adoptions were connected to the army.
A second set of circumstances was kidnapping. This is well known, in part because of your work and also because kidnappings caused scandals. As far as I can tell, this is an important but small subset. While it is a fact that many children were trafficked, and these cases are important to write about, the available evidence shows kidnappings were the smallest group.
A third set of circumstances were women forced to give their children up for adoption. You can read in the files that women were coerced into giving up children rather than relinquishing them freely. That’s a very large category.
A fourth group were the women whose children were willingly relinquished — consent, in the usual legal sense. This group might include Guatemalan women whose partners were working as migrant workers in the United States, and who became pregnant while their partners were gone. These women include those who could not have a child without facing serious consequences, like no more remittances being sent home, or domestic violence. These women likely saw relinquishing a child really as their best option. It opened a door and gave them a significant amount of freedom. But I’ll put an asterisk next to this group. Abortion is neither legal nor freely available in Guatemala. So even when I’m talking about meaningful consent given willingly, you still have to keep in mind the kind of misogynistic structures in the country.
The last, fifth category are children who were truly abandoned. A lot of people in the Global North think this is the vast majority of international adoptions: children who are found on the street, in a box, at an orphanage. I did find some of those cases, but they’re not the majority in Guatemala. They don’t even reach 10 percent. The journalist E. J. Graff uses that fabulous phrase “the lie we love” because people would like to think that they’re adopting purely abandoned children.
Guernica: Throughout the book, a steady, transparent amount of care is taken to prevent flattening the narrative threads into black and white, victim and perpetrator. This always matters in storytelling, but why does it matter specifically to a book about Guatemala and Guatemalan history?
Nolan: I think there’s a real temptation to narrate history in terms of bad guys and good guys. Calling out abuses either in the present for journalists or historically for historians — well, that’s important.
In Guatemala, because of the genocide, there can be a tendency outside the country to narrate the ladinos, the non-Indigenous people, as perpetrators and Maya Indigenous people as victims. It’s much more complex than that. It was important to me to say at the outset that there were Indigenous women working in the for-profit adoption system as jaladoras, effectively as baby brokers.
But that said, because of the unequal conditions in the country, most of the people who were making money from for-profit international adoptions were not Indigenous and were members of the elite.