The inauguration in 2024 of Guatemalan president Bernardo Arévalo, a progressive politician who is the son of a former president, represented a glimmer of hope for the Central American country. For months powerful officials had worked to undermine the peaceful transition of power, and they almost succeeded in preventing Arévalo’s inauguration, but he had an unexpected ally supporting him from behind the scenes: the United States.

During his campaign Arévalo had vowed to root out corruption, a promise that unsurprisingly resonated with voters. (Outgoing president Alejandro Giammattei was plagued by allegations of graft, and his chief prosecutor was accused of hindering corruption inquiries. Both have been barred from entering the US by the State Department.) Arévalo placed second in the first round of voting in June 2023 and then triumphed over the conservative candidate, former first lady Sandra Torres, that August, pledging to strengthen civic institutions, tackle violence, reform the education system, and create jobs through public investment.

Almost from the moment of his landslide win, Arévalo was subjected to a litany of legal attacks from lawmakers and prosecutors, including attempts to strip him of his potential immunity from prosecution and essentially nullify the election results. He also faced death threats, surveillance, and smear campaigns, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, all aimed at preventing him from taking office.

Thousands of Guatemalans, particularly from the country’s Indigenous communities, took to the streets, flooding the capital to hold protests and sit-ins demanding that Arévalo’s inauguration go ahead. As documented by The Washington Post, American bureaucrats also spent months targeting “Guatemalan politicians and influential business people with a blizzard of sanctions, stern public statements and quiet arm-twisting” to persuade them to support the inauguration; US senators rushed to the Central American nation and pressed members of Giammattei’s cabinet to allow it to go forward; and the State Department announced in December that it was canceling visas for nearly three hundred Guatemalan citizens “for undermining democracy and the rule of law.”

On January 14, 2024, Arévalo’s opponents in the Guatemalan Congress delayed his inauguration by nine hours via a series of last-minute legal maneuvers, sparking further angry protests. Well past midnight he was finally sworn in. “For thousands of people these months suggested the resurgence of the dictatorship in Guatemala,” Arévalo said in his inauguration address. “I also express my deep gratitude for the solidarity and support of the sister nations that accompany us in this significant advance.”

But it was more than solidarity that inspired Washington to involve itself. Stemming migration was the guiding principle of the Joe Biden administration’s foreign policy in Central America, and Guatemala is both a transit nation and a source of migrants to the US border—on her first overseas trip, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the country and told potential migrants, “Do not come.” This trend would have continued under another corruption-plagued Guatemalan administration. When Arévalo traveled to Washington in March 2024 for his first meeting with Biden and Harris, the White House was keen to emphasize that tackling “the root causes of migration” was a top priority.

Of course much of this migration has been driven by the rotten remnants of earlier American interventions. From the 1950s to the 1980s, successive US administrations wrought havoc in Guatemala and neighboring countries, toppling democratically elected leaders and funding right-wing military and paramilitary groups as they committed acts of genocide. Much of what ails the region today—inequality, deep poverty, gang violence—are the lingering effects of US-funded civil wars.

Though many of the ways the US has interfered in the region have been widely covered or brought to public awareness, one intervention has received almost no attention: the systematic facilitation of international adoptions. As Guatemala and neighboring El Salvador were being torn apart by violent US-backed regimes, tens of thousands of children—many of them war orphans, others forcibly taken from their birth parents—were being adopted overseas.

Two books on the topic have recently been published. Until I Find You,by the Boston University professor of international history Rachel Nolan, is a sweeping investigation into the adoption industry in Guatemala, where an unregulated, privatized system allowed some 40,000 children to be adopted internationally, the vast majority to the United States. As a result, Nolan writes, “adoptions became an unrecognized, though much smaller, parallel migration of Guatemalans to the United States.” In Reunion, Elizabeth Barnert, a pediatrician and professor at UCLA, examines how the civil war in El Salvador left thousands of children orphaned or even disappeared, with at least some of them likely ending up in the US as well.

Nolan’s book, a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, offers a detailed history of how Guatemala developed a unique form of privatized adoption in which children were sometimes stolen or coerced away from their families and sold. She traces the origins of this exploitative practice to 1954, when a CIA-backed coup against the government of President Jacobo Árbenz installed a military dictatorship led by Carlos Castillo Armas. This helped ignite a thirty-six-year conflict in which leftist guerrilla groups attempted to topple a series of military governments backed by Washington; during the 1960s and 1970s, the US sent the country’s military $33 million in aid.

Between 1949 and 1954, Guatemalan law had treated the child as part of the whole family, but under the Castillo Armas regime, the country shifted to the right and brought its laws more in line with the adoption legislation that was then prevalent around the world: a child’s individual rights superseded the interests of the family. Guatemalan adoption laws that enshrined the right of children to live with their mothers were revoked, “making it easy,” Nolan writes, “to justify moving children from a poor family to a richer family through adoption placements,” on the grounds that this was in the child’s best interest. This change laid the foundation for one of the world’s most extreme examples of large-scale coercive adoption, particularly of poor and Indigenous children.

An earthquake in 1976 left approximately one sixth of the population homeless and “focused wider international attention on Guatemalan children as readily adoptable,” Nolan writes. The country was flooded with foreign aid workers, particularly American evangelicals, who made connections that would later help facilitate private adoptions to evangelical families back home. International adoption had become increasingly commonplace—in the US, declining birth rates, increasing use of contraception, and the legalization of abortion, among other factors, meant that fewer children were put up for adoption, and many parents were waiting years to adopt. At the height of the cold war, international adoption was also partially framed as a way of fighting communism, with children ostensibly “rescued” from the likes of communist Cuba, China, and Vietnam. Sensing an opportunity, Guatemalan lawyers, including several who were also lawmakers, pushed a bill through Congress that gave them greater power over family matters such as adoption without state supervision, making it a much faster process than the one previously overseen by the Ministry of Social Welfare. In this way, Nolan writes, “Guatemala became the only country in the world to allow lawyers to match children to families and complete adoptions without judicial oversight.” Guatemalan lawyers “had [also] found a novel, lucrative type of client: foreign adoptive parents. And adoptions began a new phase as legal, for-profit business.”

With overseas couples paying up to $30,000 per child in the late 1980s, adoption became an immensely profitable industry, particularly in a country economically devastated by war. By 2002, Newsweek estimated, Guatemala’s foreign adoptions were bringing in over $50 million per year. At first Sweden and Canada were the top destinations for Guatemalan children; soon they were joined by other European countries including France, the UK, and Italy. But in the following decades, the United States became by far the most common destination country, particularly starting in the 1980s.

The rise of private adoptions also coincided with the intensification of Guatemala’s civil war, thanks partly to Washington’s aid dollars, which continued to flow during this period. By the early 1980s the Guatemalan military “was engaged in large-scale atrocities, genocidal mass murder, and scorched-earth massacres,” Nolan writes. The conflict left a quarter of a million children without one or both parents, feeding an industry that was already voracious. Around five thousand children were disappeared, in many cases taken from their villages by military officers. According to Nolan, an estimated five hundred of these missing children were put up for adoption and thus “presumed to be orphans or made to seem so through paperwork.” (Forcibly transferring children away from their communities and into another community is considered an act of genocide by the UN.) Taking children away from their decimated villages also implicitly meant removing surviving witnesses. Citing an article by the Guatemalan columnist and political analyst Carlos Rafael Soto, Nolan writes that adoption thus became “both a business and a way to cover up war crimes.”

Before long lawyers in Guatemala started finding novel ways to obtain more children. As Nolan relates, these lawyers began paying women known as jaladoras (pullers) to find potential adoptees and pull them away from their families, whether by convincing poor mothers of the benefits of adoption to a wealthy country or, in the worst cases, by tricking or threatening them into giving up their children. One strategy documented by human rights groups involved offering educational grants for the children of illiterate and Indigenous women. When mothers brought their children to the capital to supposedly claim the grant, they would be made to sign a blank document with their thumbprint, a document that could then be used as a consent form for adoption. In some cases children were actually kidnapped. In 2006 a two-year-old named Anyelí was lured from her house and onto the street in Guatemala City, where she was snatched away by a jaladora and then sold to a baby broker, who in turn sold her to an adoption lawyer. Falsified paperwork transformed Anyelí into Karen Abigail, and she was then adopted to Missouri.

While the US government had no direct involvement in these kinds of unscrupulous practices, it certainly facilitated them by providing adoption visas even as rampant fraud became apparent. According to Nolan, the US embassy in Guatemala was aware of adoption scams and kidnappings as early as 1988 but did little to address them. Illegal adoptions were widely reported in local media, and in a cable to Washington in 1987 the US embassy wrote:

The recent confession of an alleged Guatemalan child trafficker revealed that at least two immigrant visas were issued by Embassy Guatemala to possibly stolen children based on falsified official Guatemalan documents.

However, Nolan writes, embassy employees complained that they “were too understaffed to deal with widespread fraud.” It was only in 1998 that the US embassy began requiring DNA tests that matched children to their alleged birth mothers. Meanwhile the adoption boom kept going: from 1995 to 2005, American families adopted 18,298 children from Guatemala.

It’s unclear from Nolan’s book exactly how much American adoption agencies and parents knew about the coercive practices in Guatemala; many families likely felt that they were doing a good deed by providing war orphans with a better life. However, given the widespread nature of the fraud, it’s reasonable to assume that at least some had an idea of what was going on. Nolan cites an embassy cable from 1988 stating that

many adopting parents have invested a tremendous amount of money and suffered emotional strain…. These parents are prime candidates for exploitation and in some instances are willing accomplices.

But even if parents were unaware of the exact circumstances of the adoption, what is evident is that American families applied significant pressure to make adoptions happen as quickly as possible, incentivizing the industry to prioritize efficiency above all else. Nolan notes that “one constant refrain in letters from clients to [a Guatemalan lawyer] was: could he please speed up the process?”

In 2000 the United Nations published a damning report on the abusive nature of the private adoption system. Another report, commissioned by UNICEF, found that private adoptions, which made up 99 percent of all adoptions in Guatemala, did not include even the most basic checks, like home visits by social workers. The reports confirmed what was already a growing national scandal, with mothers of stolen children calling for the end of private adoption amid continued allegations of abuse. In the first half of 2007, nonprofit groups found 230 cases of children in Guatemala who were kidnapped and put up for adoption. Stories about coercive adoptions also began appearing in American news outlets like The New York Times. Guatemala finally halted all international adoptions in 2008, by which time a total of 29,807 Guatemalan children had been adopted by families in the US. At the peak of the adoption boom in the 2000s, one in one hundred Guatemalan children was put up for adoption abroad.

In recent years Guatemala has begun to reckon with these crimes. In 2015 eight people were convicted for their involvement in the kidnapping of Anyelí, the young girl who had been snatched in 2006 and then adopted by a couple in Missouri. It was the first successful prosecution of its kind. New organizations are calling for justice for crimes perpetrated during the civil war, and some are working to reunite disappeared children with their birth families. In the United States, Guatemalan adoptees have begun searching for their families as well, with help from groups like Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots. As the nature of the industry becomes better understood, uncomfortable truths will no doubt continue to surface. At a reading of Nolan’s book I attended, an American couple was in the audience with their adopted Guatemalan son, listening attentively as Nolan described the widespread fraud in the industry. During the Q&A the couple admitted that the boy’s birth mother had signed her consent form with a thumbprint.

In Reunion,Elizabeth Barnert examines the issue of international adoption and family separation in El Salvador; during the country’s twelve-year civil war, approximately 30,000 children were adopted. As it had in Guatemala, the US threw its weight behind the country’s military regime, known as the Revolutionary Government Junta, as part of a region-wide effort to stop the alleged spread of communism. By 1982, Barnert notes, the tiny nation had become the fourth-largest recipient of US aid. With US support and training, the Salvadoran military launched a “‘scorched earth policy’ that deliberately targeted unarmed civilians” in rural areas, which were believed to be leftist strongholds. Throughout the war, “soldiers took hundreds of children from their families and gave them to the Red Cross, which handed them over for adoption to orphanages.” While the figures and stories are chilling, Reunion suggests that the Salvadoran adoption industry wasn’t as sophisticated or profitable as the one in Guatemala. That doesn’t mean that fraud didn’t take place. Barnert recounts the story of María Inés, a mother of six who escaped the horrors of the war and sent two of her children to Italy for what she thought would be a temporary reprieve. Instead she found that “she had been deceived into placing them in permanent adoption.”

Barnert’s book is filled with accounts of families torn apart by the war and children sent thousands of miles away. But while Nolan’s book untangles the intricacies of the adoption system, Reunion is ethnographic, focused on specific cases of children forcibly separated from their families and on Barnert’s own journey to meet the people affected by the war. She first traveled to El Salvador in 2005 as a young medical student; as a volunteer at a local NGO, she helped create a DNA bank to match disappeared children with their biological families.

Reunion provides an important window into the tragedy of family separation and adoption during and after the war in El Salvador. Yet where Nolan’s narration is steady and almost clinical, Barnert’s is effusive, verging on sentimental—“It was the love shared that mattered most,” she writes, and, “In community, there is power.” Interviewing a former gang member, Barnert admits that “I am naive, curious, and a little embarrassed to admit my fascination.”

The final section of the book, in which Barnert recounts the story of a young American woman who reconnects with her biological mother thanks to a DNA match and travels to El Salvador to meet her, is more nuanced. As this story demonstrates, family reunification can be immensely fraught. When the woman, Angela, first meets her biological mother and brother, it’s a mostly joyful reunion. But later her biological mother starts asking her for money. “I feel like a whore,” Angela tells Barnert.

Barnert notes that the United States issued 2,300 adoption visas for Salvadoran children to be brought stateside during the conflict. As in the case of Guatemala, we can suppose that Washington at the very least provided some kind of tacit bureaucratic approval for these family separations. And while this number is dwarfed by the tens of thousands of Guatemalan children adopted to the United States, or the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans who fled the conflict and journeyed north, the phenomenon of coercive adoption remains a noteworthy but little-known aspect of the civil war. Describing the sentiments of Father Jon Cortina, a Salvadoran activist who sent a letter to Congress requesting reparations, Barnert writes:

Since the United States financed the war that tore families apart, it has a moral obligation to assist El Salvador’s disappeared children. Reparations from the US government would also signify something beyond money: an apology.

The US government, however, has done little to make amends for its actions during the civil war in El Salvador or even to acknowledge its part in the atrocities committed. And American criticism of the country’s recent descent into authoritarianism has been much more muted than criticism of Guatemala. Under El Salvador’s charismatic young president, Nayib Bukele, the country’s civil liberties and democratic norms have eroded dramatically. After steadily undermining the independence of the country’s judiciary, in 2021 Bukele was able to toss aside a constitutional ban on serving a second term, paving the way for his reelection in 2024. Last July lawmakers abolished term limits altogether. Meanwhile, as part of a crackdown on the country’s escalating violence, Bukele has arrested tens of thousands of suspected gang members, which according to Amnesty International has led to “massive arbitrary detentions; forced disappearances; commitment of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.” According to Human Rights Watch, Bukele’s detention program has also arrested around three thousand children. This brutal campaign has succeeded in drastically lowering crime rates, making Bukele immensely popular. The Biden administration was initially critical of Bukele’s abuses but later softened its position. Meanwhile the Trump administration has developed a cozy relationship with Bukele, including a reported $4.7 million deal that allowed the US to send Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center.

In 1999 Washington admitted that it had been “wrong” to support Guatemala’s security forces during the country’s devastating thirty-six-year conflict. Yet it has so far failed to acknowledge its involvement in the deeply problematic process of international adoption or to provide any meaningful help to adoptees trying to reconnect with their families. President Arévalo, at least, has begun to make amends. In a ceremony held in July 2024, he offered a public apology to the family of two young men who were taken from their parents as children and then adopted to the US in 1998. It was the first time the Guatemalan state had offered such a public acknowledgment of its part in coercive adoptions. “It hurts us, Guatemalans, as a people, that our history is marked by the unjustified, involuntary and forced separation of children and young people from their families, consented to and even facilitated by the State,” Arévalo said.

“We are a group of people who were bought and sold all over North America and Europe,” said Osmín Tobar Ramírez, one of the two young men who was adopted and has since been reunited with his birth family; the whereabouts of his younger brother remain unknown. Tobar Ramírez added that he was sharing his story to raise awareness about the dangers of human trafficking and to advocate for laws focused on family preservation. “This apology is more than symbolic,” he said. “It recognizes the pain endured by those affected and will pave the way for healing and progress.”