People who are adopted as babies do not forget their native language. Recent research by Radboud University, among others, shows that Korean adoptees learn Korean more easily at a later age. Even if they were only a few months old at adoption.

Language learning begins in the womb. In the last term of pregnancy, when hearing is fully developed, the fetus already hears its mother talking endlessly. The baby is especially sensitive to the rhythm of his mother tongue and recognizes it immediately after birth. A child only really starts experimenting with sound sequences such as dadadada when he is six months old, in the so-called babbling phase. Until then, listening is key.

This knowledge that a baby gains in the first months of its life is never lost. Mirjam Broersma of the Center for Language Studies in Nijmegen discovered this when she introduced 29 Korean adoptees in the Netherlands to their mother tongue. Together with colleagues from Australia and Korea, she published her results in Royal Society Open Science.

Subtle sound differences

With the exception of the control group, the participants in Broersma's study were born in Korea. They were adopted at a very young age by Dutch-speaking parents. Half of them were younger than six months at the time of adoption, the other half were older than seventeen months (but younger than six years). During the study, the participants were between 23 and 41 years old. The people in the control group were born and raised Dutch people of about the same age as the people in the adoption group. They were also comparable in other respects, such as educational level and number of times they had visited Korea.

Hundreds of Chileans adopted abroad have learned that they were trafficked. Investigators believe thousands of children may have been taken from their parents during Chile’s dictatorship.

Growing up in Minnesota, Tyler Graf knew almost nothing about his birth mother. And what little he knew, he said, stung.

His adoption papers listed her name, Hilda del Carmen Quezada; her age, 26; the date, March 2, 1983; and the hospital where she gave birth to him in central Chile. The documents also included a judge’s note saying Ms. Quezada gave him up because she had little money and “other children to support.”

“I never thought that any excuse would be good enough,” said Mr. Graf, who is now a firefighter in Houston. “I carried that animosity, that chip on my shoulder, my whole life.”

The claim that his mother willingly gave him up hurt, Mr. Graf said, until he learned this year that he is one of hundreds — possibly thousands — of Chilean adoptees taken from their parents without their consent during the country’s military dictatorship.

It seemed like a fairy tale ending: a poor Chinese couple who spent 14 years searching for their lost son are finally reunited with the boy as his kidnappers face justice. But it’s not that simple. As Sun Zhuo is reunited with his birth family in Shenzhen, he’s faced with the prospect of the family he knew as his own being sent to prison.

In 2007, then 4-year-old Sun Zhuo was abducted from the southern city of Shenzhen, setting his biological parents on a desperate search that would last 14 years. Sun Haiyang, his father, offered a 200,000 yuan reward for clues and changed the name of his steamed bun shop to advertise it. His story won national attention, and was adapted into a 2014 movie called “Dearest.” He has become an iconic figure in the field of anti-trafficking, and his account on microblogging service Weibo, named “Sun Haiyang Looking for Son,” has over 116,000 followers.

Meanwhile, Sun Zhuo was growing up with two older sisters in Shandong province, about 1,800 kilometers from Shenzhen, unaware that the couple raising him were not his birth parents.

Chinese police identified Sun, now 18, during a crackdown on child trafficking. The police arrested a total of nine suspects involved in abducting three children, including Sun Zhuo. His identity was later confirmed by DNA testing.

On Monday, Sun Haiyang finally met his son after 14 years, while the second family is facing potential criminal charges.

http://www.cna.gob.gt/Documentos/EstadoHogares.pdf

SURVEY "The channels of international adoption" (1/3). Over the past sixty years, hundreds of thousands of children from Latin America, Asia and Africa have been adopted by European or North American couples, sometimes in violation of the law. As adults, some seek the truth about their story. First part of our investigation: between Guatemala and France.

On the walls of the office, dozens of photos tarnished by time. People smile at each other, kiss each other. “This is the first reunion that we have organized, a dad with his daughter… In 2001.” Marco Garavito is still moved by these images, the fruit of more than two decades of labor. The 70-year-old man is responsible for Todos por el reencuentro (“All for the reunion”), one of the programs of the Guatemalan League of Mental Health, a psychological support organization specializing in the search for 5,000 children missing during the long armed conflict between the military and the Marxist guerrillas (200,000 dead between 1960 and 1996).

Marco Garavito shows us around the little house, built around a patio filled with plants, in the center of the capital, Guatemala. Four people work with self-sacrifice within this program, without any help from the State, paying out of their own pockets for translators of the twenty-two Mayan languages, covering kilometers of bumpy tracks to reach remote villages. “We currently have 1,300 cases,” explains our host. At the beginning, we were looking for the children in Guatemala; then it was necessary to expand abroad. Two hundred of them would be in Europe, especially in France, Belgium and Italy. "

Coline, Marie-Laure and Pattie-Maëlle were all born in Guatemala and adopted in Europe. But the first two were stolen from their birth families, and the last one grew up with a false mother name on her record. To help people in a similar situation shed light on their history, they created the Lost Roots Foundation.

Helping adoptees born in Guatemala to reunite with their families: this is the main goal of Lost Roots. The foundation was created in early 2021, created by people themselves born in this small Latin American country and adopted in Europe.

Some of them were victims of child trafficking during the Guatemalan armed conflict (1960-1996). This is the case of Coline , born Mariela in Guatemala in 1986, and adopted in Belgium when she was eleven months old. When she becomes a mother, she begins a quest for her origins to answer her daughter's questions.

Many times in her life she had tried to find answers, without success. "There was no structure to do research, so it was a bit like wild research," she explains.

Child trafficking involving the ex-sister-in-law of dictator Oscar Mejia Victores

On any given day in Antigua, a touristy colonial town in Guatemala, as many as a dozen American couples can be seen lounging with their soon-to-be-adopted Mayan children in the Parque Central or dining nearby in posh restaurants.

The couples enjoy the leisurely Latin American lifestyle?–?constant spring-like temperatures, drooping bougainvillea plumage and stunning views of Volcán de Agua to the south. But lately, fear has set in among the Guatemalan adoption industry. The Guatemalan government is threatening to wrestle control of adoption away from the private sector and either slow it to a crawl or shut it down completely.

Last year, at fancy Antigua hotels or in the lobby of the Marriott in Guatemala City’s upscale Zona 9, Guatemalan foster mothers or adoption attorneys passed many of the 4,135 babies adopted from this country into the eager arms of teary-eyed couples from El Norte. In other words, one percent of all babies born in Guatemala in 2006 ended up in American cribs.

Guatemala is the only Latin American country that doesn’t exercise stringent state control over international adoptions. Adoptions there fall under the notary system, which means they are essentially privatized and run by attorneys who, critics claim, traffic in impoverished, malnourished and sometimes stolen babies.

Adoptive parents can spend approximately $25,000 to $30,000 to adopt from Guatemala, and most of them leave days or weeks later with their little ones cradled in their arms, and with no questions asked as to how the attorneys acquired their babies.

In May 1998, Casa Alianza/Covenant House Latin America reported that it had been working with the Procurator General's Office for more than nine months to stop the marketing of Guatemalan babies through illegal adoptions. Casa Alianza also reported that, since September 1997, it had presented, in conjunction with the Procurator General's Office, 18 criminal cases of anomalies in international adoptions. In August 1998, Casa Alianza issued a press release concerning the first case against an illegal adoption that had been won. On 18 August 1998 the baby boy was returned to his home after the fourth Judge of the First Instance of Minors delivered him to his mother. Casa Alianza considers it urgent that new laws be implemented in order to control and regulate international adoptions and recommends the ratification by Guatemala of the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. Accordingly, before any international adoption takes place, the authorities should exhaust all possibilities of the child being adopted within its own country.

On 27 October 1998, Casa Alianza reported that it welcomed a decision, by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in Guatemala, to introduce compulsory DNA testing for all babies being adopted from Guatemala. Casa Alianza reported that the change came into affect on 1 October 1998, in order to "ensure public confidence in the international adoption process in Guatemala", according to a written statement from the Guatemalan Embassy. "DNA testing will be required for all birth mothers and orphan children in cases submitted for adjudication," according to the same release. Casa Alianza further reported that the American Embassy in Guatemala processes some 1000 international adoptions each year, around half of the total number of babies being adopted from the country. This latest decision comes after the U.S. Department of State recently confirmed that "the trafficking of babies is a serious problem in Guatemala", and is part of a package of measures being made by the Embassy's Immigration and Naturalization Service in order to reduce the number of fraudulent adoptions being made from the country. Previously the embassy only undertook DNA tests where they suspected a fraud had been committed. "The US is now following Canada's lead, which has required obligatory DNA testing for several years. Being the largest market for Guatemalan babies, we are pleased that the United States has taken this important step," commented Bruce Harris, the Regional Director of

Casa Alianza.

Casa Alianza/Covenant House Latin America

a

Erin Siegal, Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, recently donated one bankers-size box of documents about US citizens’ adoptions of Guatemalan children and adoption fraud to the National Security Archive.

These documents are the result of over thirty FOIA requests Ms. Siegal filed with the Department of State, Customs and Border Patrol, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the CIA. The requests asked for information as far back as 1980 and cover a variety of topics, ranging from information on the Casa Quivira issue (in which 46 babies were seized from a Guatemalan adoption agency due to accusations of adoption fraud), to US embassy communications regarding Celebrate Children International (a US organization imputed to have acted in violation of conditions the Hague Convention set regarding the adoptability of children).

Of particular interest in the declassified documents is information on the extent of adoption fraud in Guatemala, what the United States knew about it, and the US’s attempts to combat the problem. According to Department of State cables dating back as far as 1987, adoption fraud in Guatemala had been a lucrative business for some time. Lawyers in the country turned huge profits arranging the international adoptions of kidnapped children, women were paid to masquerade as mothers abandoning their “children” so that the children could be put up for adoption, and by March 2010, 29,400 Guatemalan children had found their way into American homes. That meant that one in every one hundred babies born in Guatemala was growing up in the US, and the adoption industry in Guatemala had become a $100 million industry.

The documents also contain information on the involvement of US-based organizations in the problem. Certain US adoption agencies with operations or relationships in Guatemala became involved in the scandal, including International Adoption Resources, which was implicated in smuggling Guatemalan children out of the country, after three mothers came forward and attested to selling their children for 750 dollars apiece.

Some documents of note in the files include:

GUATEMALA CITY — Luciany Ball’s adoption file says she was born 14 months ago by cesarean section to a single mother who gave her up so she could be raised by a loving family in a six-bedroom Indiana farmhouse.

But now some of the documents appear to be fraudulent, part of a slew of irregularities at the agency handling Luciany’s adoption that have left dozens of babies at risk of being taken from their anguished American adoptive parents. The probe also casts a cloud of uncertainty over some 2,900 pending U.S. adoptions.

Prosecutors describe their probe of Casa Quivira — considered Guatemala’s best adoption agency — as their first serious attempt to investigate a $100 million industry that has made tiny Guatemala, population 12.7 million, the largest international source of American babies after China.

The system has delivered 29,400 Guatemalan children into U.S. homes since 1990 — so many that one in every 100 Guatemalan babies born each year was growing up in an American home.

But after a months-long investigation that began with the seizure of 46 babies from Casa Quivira last August, prosecutors say they found fraud cloaking the true identities of at least nine children and that many biological mothers couldn’t be found at all.