In Guatemala, the lives of adopted children stolen

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. "