DURING THE ARMED CONFLICT, THE MILITARY CAPTURED THOUSANDS OF CHILDREN IN THE AREAS WHERE APPLYED THE POLICY OF THE LOST EARTH. CONSIDERED AS ORPHAN CHILDREN, OR CHILDREN ABANDONED BY THE GUERRILLA, THE ARMY HAD TO FIND THEM A DEPARTURE, A DESTINY. TODAY CONVERTED IN ADJUDICATED ADULTS, MANY OF THESE CHILDREN ARE LOOKING FOR THEIR FAMILY. SOME HAVE RECONNECTED IT, AND THEY CAN TELL THE HISTORY OF THE CHILDREN THAT THE ARMY.

STORY OF 2 CHILDREN ADOPTED:

David (the name is fictional) and his sister are two children who were adopted by French families. One day, as an adult, David wanted to meet his biological family, discover its origin. I did not know Guatemala or any Guatemalan. He did not speak Spanish either. All he had to undertake the search was a folder with his adoption documents. These papers included the name and address of her biological mother, as well as a notarial document in which the woman renounced the parental authority of her children and accepted that they were adopted by the V family.

TRANQUILINO CASTAÑEDA HOLDS THE PHOTO OF HIS SON, WHO WAS TAKEN BY THE ARMY WHEN HE HAD THREE YEARS, IN TWO ERRES.

OLIVIA QUINILLA EMBRACES HIS SISTER PETRONA, AFTER 31 YEARS OF SEPARATION IN CHICACAJ, QUICHÉ.

David looked for Skype to a Guatemalan who wanted to help him. She met Lucía Pinto, a Guatemalan woman who now lives in Barcelona and has been collaborating since that day in finding the biological parents of adopted children. Pinto relates that he looked for the address that appeared on the photocopy of the mother's ID. It turned out that the place did not exist. The address was false.

The Guatemalan went to study carefully the adoption folder of David. It contained an exchange of letters between David's adoptive parents, the housewives Rafael Ayau, State institution, and a lady named Boucq, intermediary of a Belgian adoption organization, as well as all the legal documents that formalized the adoption of the child This reading revealed serious irregularities.

According to Pinto, David thought -his parents had told him- that his mother was a Guatemalan prostitute who, because he could not support them and his sister, had preferred to give them up for adoption. But his folder showed another story.

In 1984, David's future adoptive parents wanted Guatemalan twins. As in Rafael Ayau there were no twins, the staff of the orphanage chose to offer them a boy and a girl and said they were brothers. False. "In one of the letters they said that there was a child with a high degree of malnutrition in the orphanage ready to be delivered. In the following they said that they had obtained a baby with four days of birth that they brought from the border with Mexico, "recalls Pinto.

Two children, of different origin, would be handed over as brothers. But for this first you had to procure them identity documents. The staff of Rafael Ayau processed a birth certificate and a certificate, documents in which a woman who was a kind of front man was registered as a parent. Immediately afterwards, the alleged mother declared before a notary that she renounced the parental authority of her children and that she accepted to give them for adoption to the V family. She was the woman Pinto had sought without success, the one David had thought all his life was. his biological mother.

The staff of Rafael Ayau only had, to finish his work, to invent a credible story that justified the adoption. The alleged mother of David was turned into a prostitute unable to take care of their children. According to Julio Prado, of the Special Prosecutor's Office against Impunity, who has carried out several investigations into illegal adoptions, this ruse was one of the most used by the people who operated the adoptions. "They said that the mother was a prostitute, or that she was an alcoholic, or that she was poor," says Prado.

When David's adoptive parents paid the stipulated sum, three thousand dollars, the children were able to reach France via Belgium.

Pinto, noting all these irregularities, had no choice but to announce to David that almost everything contained his adoption folder, the name of his adoptive mother, his date, his place of birth and his blood relationship with his sister, It was a hoax.

For the year in which the adoption took place (1984), Pinto believes that David and his sister are two of the children of the war because of the care they took to erase all trace of their origin. There is no proof of this, but David's story is very similar to other cases of children of war delivered to foreign families.

Today David runs a construction company and lives near Paris. People who know him affirm that he is a young man with many insecurities. Despite having received love from their parents, its adoption causes great internal conflicts.

Plaza Pública tried to contact David through Lucía Pinto. At first David seemed willing to grant the interview and agreed to provide his email. But he did not respond to the messages sent to him.

Julia Noblanc, who was also an adopted girl from Guatemala and who today is a member of a French association called La Voz de los Adoptados, explains: "It is not easy to talk about such a sensitive issue. Some have a deep anguish. Others have a poor relationship with their adoptive family. "

Irregular adoptions in Guatemala are a matter of great concern to the members of Guatemalan origin of La Voz de los Adoptados. "Some adoptees ask themselves whether or not they are children of war, since they come from orphanages that were related to the army. Some have an irregular adoption that occurred during the armed conflict, "says Noblanc. David's case is far from being the only one.

When Pinto explained that he could be one of the children torn by the army from his community, David recalled an anecdote from his childhood in Paris. It was a July 14, French national holiday. As is tradition, they took him to see the military parade that runs through the Champs-Elysees. What he saw were soldiers with bayonets, dogs, tanks, planes, helicopters in formation and troops of the foreign legion who, instead of rifles, carried axes. The march of the French army caused the child a violent panic attack and had to be immediately removed from the place.

According to the report of the Directorate of the Archives of Peace Adoptions and Human Rights of Guatemalan Children 1977-1989, two great reasons impelled this program. In the first place, "adoption was a mechanism of forced disappearance for children to survive, but with another identity and without knowing anything or little of their origin". Second, minors "became a source of substantial income, giving priority to international adoption."

The first step of the process was, according to Marco Tulio Álvarez, former director of the Peace Archives, "to create a bank of girls and boys that could be given up for adoption." The two SBS homes received minors from different sources, among them the Penitentiary System, the Treasury Guard, national hospitals and military structures such as the Military Hospital or the Civic Military Action program, branch of the intelligence apparatus.

The National Police also sent children to the Secretary of Social Welfare (SBS), through various bodies, such as the Special Operations Command (COE) or the Detective Corps (CD). These two police entities, pillars of the anti-subversive strategy in the urban area, were the ones that sent the smallest to the SBS. According to the report of the Peace Archives Directorate, this seems to indicate that the children victims of persecution against union leaders, university students and political opponents, as well as the dismantling of the guerrilla's urban bases, were transferred to the Elisa Martínez and Rafael Ayau homes. The suspicion is strengthened by the fact that the COE and the CD delivered the children to the homes without going through the competent courts where they should have been sent.

The next step was to invent these children new stories, new documents: birth certificates in which the children were assigned fictitious parents or in which they simply indicated that they were "of unknown father and mother". "It is known that some children whose parents registered as strangers did have at least one mentioned in the identification documents, but in the process of placement or adoption disappeared," says the report.

Then you had to ask a competent judge to declare the child abandoned. This was simple: a letter from the director of Elisa Martínez, a report from a social worker in which false or incomplete information was spilled and that's it. The judges did not ask for more to solve.

Once their identity and origin were carefully erased, it was only necessary to find new parents for the child. Or rather find the minor that would please the adoptive parents, who in some cases approached the SBS or communicated by mail. The latter could have their demands: they wanted children of such sex or of such age and sometimes even indicated the skin color they preferred. The SBS households went out of their way to please them. In a letter to a Dutch couple, a social worker Elisa Martinez attached photos of two children and notes: "... at the moment we only have these two girls. I send you the photos so that you can decide if it seems like one of them and adopt it (...) I also want to inform you that, if it did not seem like either of the two girls, they would confidently tell me and we would wait for other (...) " The client is king, says the adage.

The last step was the legalization of the adoption by means of a notary. The notaries attested to having all the relevant documents before them and resolved to give the child to the foreign couple for adoption. Were they aware of the multiple irregularities that had preceded the signing of the documents? Marco Tulio Álvarez says: "I talked to some of these lawyers. They say: 'We do not investigate the past of those children, but, being unprotected, we thought it important to give them up for adoption.' I do a reading. What mattered to them was business. They did not care where the child came from. "

The fact of not having ascertained the veracity of the reports that were sent to them by the households can be classified by itself as a breach of duties. "Having in your hands the future regularization of a human life, it is important to be clear about the past, the real story of that child," says Alvarez.

But there is more. One of the findings of the Peace Archives Directorate is the number of adoptions that some lawyers processed. They were real adoption specialists. Some even focused on certain countries: those who sent children to France and Belgium were not the same as those who worked with Italy and Switzerland or those who had contacts with Canada or the United States.

According to Prado, special prosecutor against impunity, the line of defense of the adoptive lawyers has always been to say that they simply resolved based on documents presented to them. If the stationery was in order, what else was necessary but write the corresponding notarial documents of adoption? The number of adoptions that each one made, as well as the geographical distribution of these adoptions, invalidates this defense. In effect, this betrays the existence of international networks in which lawyers were central figures.

There was nothing left but to send the children abroad. For this, the adoptive networks enjoyed the full support of the migration authorities. It is probable, although no investigation has been done, that they have also had the complicity of the European and North American embassies. It is hardly credible that these diplomatic representations did not know that the flow of children running to their countries was made up of victims of the war and that adoption processes were, in many cases, irregular.

PART III

Question: What is the search for missing children for? And specifically, what is the "Todos por el reunion" program?

Marco Antonio Garavito: After the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, the possibility was opened of starting to talk about some issues that had previously been prohibited during the time of the armed conflict. We begin to talk then about the horrors of what war was; issues such as massacres, scorched earth, enforced disappearances come to light. But in that framework there is a topic that has been talked about and to this day there is still very little talk: the childhood disappeared during the conflict. In the great tragedy that was the war, missing children are not a priority. In the reports of the Commission for Historical Clarification and the REMHI, the subject is touched, but always in a secondary way. That is why from the Guatemalan League of Mental Hygiene, in 1999 we began an effort to know if there could be missing children in the country who might be alive, or that their families would like to look for them. Specifically then, on May 20 of that year we started the program that is now called "Todos por el reunion".

The beginning was not easy, because when the proposal was born, contrary voices were raised to develop a work of this type. There were those who said that it was not worth doing that search, because in Guatemala there could be no missing children since the scorched earth campaigns carried out by the army had done away with everything. And also, it was considered that the families of the eventual disappeared children would be very afraid of what happened, and therefore would not want to be involved in an effort of this nature. Despite these two negative premises we decided to go to work in the field, and after a year of searching we had 86 well documented cases where families wanted to follow the process of clarifying what happened. Something that helped a lot in our proposal and that it was widely accepted was that we did not do it from a political-ideological discourse or inciting the population with whom we contacted ourselves in order to seek punishment for those responsible for the disappearances. Although the proposal, obviously, has a very clear political and ideological background, what we prioritized was the human part. Our intention was to mobilize who had a missing relative, a son or a brother for example, and wanted to know what had happened. Having raised it from that human side, as a way to try to overcome the pain with which they lived, the people contacted began to get involved in the program.

The program "Everyone for the reunion" is a process of psychosocial accompaniment of relatives who have disappeared, being together with them providing support to overcome the pain of loss while the search is developed, with the idea that if you reach a happy term there may be a reunion. The program, in that sense, has a beneficial action for those who approach it, because even if the missing family member is not found, being able to work the frozen duel that each family supports has a high value in terms of health. Of the more than 80 cases that we contacted in year 99, to this day the great majority continues being part of the program, even though many times they have not found their missing children. In fact, participants find here a series of collateral benefits, such as being with other people who have gone through or are experiencing similar hardships. That has been very useful, so from the program we were looking for the implementation of spaces where people could converge who were in similar situations so they could share and help each other from similar experiences. This led to the fact that in 2006, the Association of Relatives of Disappeared Children could be legally registered in Santa María Nebaj, in the department of Quiché. Today it has a structure at the national level and displays important work on the subject. The organization of relatives in their search for their disappeared is in fact a mental health strategy.

When we started with the program, in 1999, we asked ourselves if we were really going to find someone, and in 2001 we had our first reunion -don Tomás Choc with his daughter Julia- in the community of Santa María Samacox, in the south of Ixcán Today, 13 years later, we are already going through reunion number 351, and we have several more already scheduled, with 11 reunions that are currently in preparation. Without a doubt, we can say that the program is very successful in terms of results. The number of people linked to the program, that is, relatives and respondents, is around 1,300. Almost a third of the cases undertaken have been resolved. That, we believe, is a great success.
Question: What is the value of these reunions, both at the individual and / or family level, for the disappeared person who is reunited with his family, or for the latter who is reunited with his disappeared child so many years ago, and what is the value of all this in social terms, for all Guatemalan society?

Marco Antonio Garavito: From the point of view of families there are two phenomena, which would be the most typical reactions. On the one hand, the families that lost the little one, from the very moment of the disappearance, have a very strong sense of guilt. That is what is most worked on since the case is documented, and in general they are always able to recover from that guilt. That creates a lot of healing. On the side of the disappeared we also find, almost with a pattern value that is repeated, the feeling of having been abandoned. A child, with or without a memory of the specific event, can not understand why his parents abandoned him. All the children, already adults when we work, have that feeling of having suffered a lot, even though they can not measure what the war was and why they separated from their parents. They are, therefore, with that feeling of having been abandoned, that they did not want them. We always find that, even with the cases of children who are now living in Europe, where they were taken during the war as adoptees. There is always the question of why their parents gave them, did not protect them. All this, then, has great value for both parties: for the family, to be able to work the feeling of guilt that accompanied him for years, and for the missing child, to be able to work on his abandonment syndrome. Working on that has a restorative value in terms of mental health.

On the other hand, in addition to the great value that the program has in terms of personal subjectivity, it is a great contribution to work on the issue of citizenship. Before the start of our program, in many communities where we are working now there was no interest in participating in political-social-community terms; sometimes they did not even know that in the community there was a child who disappeared during the war. Therefore, when we move forward with a process and a reunion is reached, the whole community participates; everyone gets involved. What we want to convey is that these are not individual problems, only of the family members of the disappeared person, but that it is a problem for everyone, for the whole society. This should interest and touch everyone, the State, the media, society as a whole. That is why the name of the program is "Todos por el reunion"; that has a very clear meaning. It is a symbol. If a family can be reunited 30 years after their suffering, society can also do so. That is why we work hard for the recovery of the concept of citizenship. In the meetings in the communities we do not only talk about the disappeared children: we talk about the concrete problems of the country. That is citizen participation.

Question: Of course working on missing children, in addition to the personal subjective value that can have in the family, has that social value, restitution of citizenship, to return to participate collectively, all and without fear. And in many cases coming to terms with a reunion, which is an achievement for an entire community. Now, what to do with all the missing people that they will not be able to find? What to do with all those families, or with a whole social fabric, that will never have a reunion with the person disappeared during the war?

Marco Antonio Garavito: There are several lines of action. It is publicly known that in Guatemala there are many thousands of disappeared: 45,000 to be exact. And it is also known that the peace agendas did not do much about this point. There are several elements that can help in this field: on the one hand, in the Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification, in its Recommendation No. 24, it is proposed that the State create a National Search Commission for missing children. But that has never been done. Even: on the contrary. Despite the creation of some structures, such as the Secretariat of Peace or the National Reparation Program, where there is a mandate for the issue of missing children, this was used only in clientelist terms. We, with a program that can undoubtedly exhibit important achievements, never receive support from the State, with no government. They have even blocked us. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights also said something about the issue: when the conviction for the massacre of the 2Rs came out, he recommended creating a web page to search for missing children. But again we see that nothing has been done, being that something so simple to implement

Question: Why does the State have no interest in supporting the issue?

Marco Antonio Garavito: Because, of course, there is a political-ideological background in this. But there is also the idea that it is best to leave the past and think about the present and the future: do not go about stirring up what happened. Even the supposedly left-wing people who occupied the spaces of the Secretariat of Peace and the National Reparation Program have not supported our program at all. We have remained exclusively from the cooperation of people to people, of grassroots churches, of popular organizations of other countries; We have almost received nothing from the great international cooperation.

Another important element to consider here is the National Commission for the Search of the Disappeared. There is a bill in this regard, which was brought to Congress at the time, but to this day is shelved. And something else in this matter is that in 2006 the General Assembly of the United Nations approved the International Convention against Forced Disappearance. 103 countries approved it, including Guatemala; but that did not help to unravel the treatment of the law in Congress. That led to the creation of an International Coalition against Forced Disappearance from popular organizations; We, as the Guatemalan League of Mental Hygiene, are part of that effort, to promote in the parliaments of each country the approval of these laws, which are now being stopped. Here the law is stopped, although we have tried to move it. At the time we managed to gather some 4,000 signatures, mainly in the interior, asking for the initiative to be unraveled. In other Latin American countries it has already been ratified. Not here. The Convention entered into force, because it was already more than 20 countries that ratified it. Today we believe that more than creating the Search Committee for the Disappeared, it is important to ratify this Convention. It does not have a retroactive effect, but in any case it is very important, because with this it can be ensured that the country does not enter again into the logic of enforced disappearances. That is to say: it has a preventive effect towards the future.

Question: Speaking of the reunions proper, what happens from the moment that the relatives return to see after years of separation? How does the dynamics of reunion work?

Marco Antonio Garavito: The "Todos por el reencuentro" program has five work areas. From the beginning we saw that the question was not only to search and rediscover. That, so alone, does not make more sense. The process is much more complex. The program has a research area, which is responsible for finding documentation and making the necessary inquiries. Then there is an area that we call grassroots organizations, since to function, the program needs to have links with many community organizations, approximately 80, which are what ultimately make the task possible. They are the primary organizations of the community. There is then a third area that is organization, which is what led to the creation of the Association of Relatives; There is an organizational dynamic that goes beyond purely investigative work. It has its structure and meets periodically. Then we have a specific area of ​​reunions, which is the one that is in charge of the reunion process itself, and that works with the biological family, the adoptive family, the disappeared person, preparing all the necessary conditions to carry out the process. But to arrive at a reunion, which of course is very important, would be short if the work is left there: only with the physical reunion at a certain moment of the disappeared and his family of origin. At the moment of the reunion, which are always very emotional episodes, things do not emerge that then will appear. In general, the disappeared is the firstborn or firstborn. After the moment of emotion of seeing each other again, problems can arise. For example: the piece of land that belonged to the disappeared, the father already divided it with the other brothers, and when the disappeared appear, things change in relation to the inheritance of that piece of land. That is to say: with the reunion a number of topics that previously did not appear, such as the inheritance that I mention, and many, many others, are opened. All that must begin to work healthily after the first emotionality. Today, the reappeared are all adults, and the family landscape is something very different from 30 years ago, when the disappearance occurred; all that has to be worked on. In general, they do not live together again. Therefore, first of all this new panorama, we must make a special approach; that's where the fifth area of ​​the program comes in, which is what we call integration. The program seeks that after the reunion the links are maintained, that they continue visiting among these families. The vacuum generated by several decades of dis

At some point in the program we held a national meeting of rediscovered people. We spent four days interacting and drawing conclusions from the experiences of many families that had been reunited, trying to see how they had worked, what had happened after the reunions. Product of that, and a systematization that we were already doing, came out a book: "Hearts in party". There we try to elaborate theoretically the conclusions of what happens after the reunions. At one time there was much interest in supporting all this, and international cooperation generously financed. There were 11 organizations that dealt with the issue of missing children. Now there is not any left except our program. And it is necessary to say that many times he fell in search and rediscover, period. But the most important question is what happens after that reunion.

In all the work we do from the three areas, we have three axes: one is mental health. That is not a punctual part of the program but an axis that crosses it completely: the mental health of the population is always involved, at all times. There is another transversal axis that is social communication, there is a third axis that has to do with the legal. The program has a whole integrality, because all the components are united and go hand in hand. Now we have some financial problems, that is why we have lost some collaborators. But we keep going, of course. There is a lot of commitment to what we are doing, and there is a lot of response from people in the communities.

Question: On what principles is the "Todos por el reencuentro" program based?

Marco Antonio Garavito: The program created from its beginnings some ethical and ideological principles. We understand that the issue of missing children is a responsibility of the State. Many times NGOs end up dealing with problems like these, since no one is taking care of it; but it is the State that must truly take responsibility for this. Another principle we have is that this is an eminently human problem. This seems obvious, but it is not so obvious. We say it because many times the victims themselves have been instrumentalized for political ends, leaving aside their suffering as people. We never manipulate a family member nor have we taken him anywhere to protest. There is a very strong political background in all this, of course, but basically it is a human problem. As this is what we prioritize, that has made people in the communities remain engaged in the program for so many years, because they see that there is no political manipulation but that their pain is treated as human beings who suffer.

Another principle that encourages us is to know that these are long-term issues, sometimes of a lifetime. These things can not be solved with one-year projects, as they are often encouraged. It is not just about documenting a disappearance; that, in short, does not serve much. The question is to rediscover, and fundamentally, work what begins to happen later. That is why we work with humility what we can and as far as we can, knowing what we really are able to accompany in time. That's why we also work only in some areas of the country, not in all of them. It is not just about going to document and get information from people. That does not work. The important thing is to accompany a whole process, which of course takes a lot of time, a lot of effort. We are in the northern area of ​​Huehuetenango, the Ixcán, the Ixil region, the queen zone in the department of Quiché and Alta Verapaz. And we also have some cases scattered throughout the country. Of course there is still a lot of work to be done, because the issue of missing children is a problem at the national level. But for that, funds are needed. And it should be the State that gets involved. But even this is a very silenced subject, very prejudiced.

It is important to highlight that in the legal field we have recently begun the presentation before the Supreme Court of Justice of some cases under the habeas corpus, when we have sufficient evidence to say who was the one who kidnapped these children. That is why we say that it must be the State that gives an answer in these cases, explaining what happened to those disappearances. We have already presented a first case, that of Baudilio Monzón, in Ixcán, which was taken by the army. At the end of last year we presented another case, that of the girl Elvia Gómez, kidnapped in San Pablo El Baldío. But at the moment the Supreme Court of Justice has not given any response. And now we are about to present a collective case, that of Finca Sacol, in Alta Verapaz, where 60 children were kidnapped at the same time. Some of them have already appeared, and were adopted living now in Italy, with legally questionable adoptions; but 9 of those children do not appear. Now, through this habeas corpus, we are looking for the State to give answers. The program seeks and rediscovers itself, and then legally goes as far as the relatives want to arrive. We do not impose any decision on the family; It is she who decides what she wants to do, if she wants to act legally, and to what extent. And if he wants to desist from doing it, his decision is respected.

Archaeologists have been prohibited from excavating at most military bases. The Army refused to speak of any exhumation and refused to deliver important documents of the war. Then, in the year 2000, an organization called Famdegua, dedicated to finding the disappeared of the war, interviewed two witnesses (currently included in a witness protection program) who saw that they were taking civilians to the base of Cobán.

Initially the local authorities did not approve the group's request to find the bodies, but more than a decade later, in 2012, a judge issued a search warrant and the exhumation began.

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