We are in the year 2000 or 2001, I don't remember well. The legal team of the association for which I work in Guatemala City, Casa Alianza, handles cases of children stolen and given up for illegal adoption during the eighties and nineties. Guatemala has become a country that exports girls and boys and the network of illegal adoptions that destroys families and snatches babies from mothers in vulnerable situations is in full swing. I am sent to support a journalist from National Geographic magazine who is investigating the issue. After seeing white couples carrying babies from Guatemala in the lobby of the Camino Real hotel, the NatGeo journalist and I headed to a home in the historic center of the city run by Orthodox nuns. It seems there are babies there to give up for adoption, we want to investigate. I had never seen Orthodox nuns in Guatemala. The nun who takes us from one home to another is afraid of the street and she accompanies us with an armed man. I'm walking in line, in zone 1, with an Orthodox nun and her imposing black headdress on top of her head, her leading the way, I think I'm a second in Greece or Russia. The American journalist, blonder than the sun, walks behind her; Then me, looking like a foreigner too, and bringing up the rear with an armed man. The situation borders on the ridiculous, ubuesque and painful, similar to everything that will be investigated. I, who walk very often in zone 1, make myself uncomfortable having a man with a machine gun escorting me.
That childhood torn from their families in those years is now 30, 40 or 45 years old. We are in 2023 and I know Javier on Facebook. A Frenchman born in Guatemala in 1977, stolen from his mother in zone 18 in 1980 and adopted by a European couple.
On October 11, 2023, the day of his 46th birthday, Javier – a pseudonym he chose for security reasons –, after a report he filed for having been robbed in his childhood, is in his native country, Guatemala. It is his first time in Guatemala since he was robbed. In January 2024, Javier returned to Guatemala, I wanted to meet him in person, as well as his story, and I invited him to have breakfast at my house. I am moved by his questions: «So this little package that says “Ducal”, are beans?», «But beans are also eaten in another way, right?» It makes me a little sad that the new Guatemalan doesn't see beans cooking in the pot, but rather packaged beans. But I told him about the difference between strained beans and standing beans. “And when is mango season?” he asks. Then he tells me, very happy, that he took Guatemalan cooking classes and that he already made his first pepián.
Javier tells me about his two different identities and I get a little lost there, but he explains: «I have two identification documents, a French one and a Guatemalan one, with different last names. Precisely because I am one of the stolen children of Guatemala. It's not just having several different surnames, it's having two very different identities, each with its own nationality. In 1980, my brother and I were stolen from my mother through a Casa Canada home, now Casa Guatemala, making us believe that we were so sick that only a stay in a hospital in the United States could cure us. This subterfuge took us out of the country, and in reality they took us to France. "We have never been to the United States and in France they have never treated us for a serious illness."