Kidnapped children return to Guatemala to find out the truth | International

On the soccer field in Futeca Cayalá, an elite area of Guatemala Citymotivational slogans are placed on the billboard: “To the last drop. Sweating is glory. Leave everything on the field.” Osmin Ricardo Tobar Ramirez, the 35-year-old defensive captain and midfielder for Los Toros and the Guatemalan U.S. soccer team, seems to take every one of those words seriously. Wearing a helmet, shoulder pads and knee pads, he trains diligently while his mother, Flor de Maria Ramirez Escobar, 52, watches him from the sidelines with a smile that lights up her face. She spent 14 years of her life without seeing her son. Today she uses every moment.

Tobar has been involved in sports since childhood. During his teenage years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he won a college wrestling scholarship. Physical activity is his escape valve, a way to “find balance” in an existence full of ups and downs.

Today, he works for a telemarketing company in Guatemala, thanks to his perfect English. He lives with his wife Lilian and son Christian. “With the life I’ve been leading, I never imagined I could have a stable home. It was a great plot twist,” Tobar admits to EL PAÍS. While he is speaking in Spanish, sometimes English words slip through.

More than 3,000 miles from that field, in Montreal, Canada, Ignacio “Nacho” Alvarado dreams of a new bike for his next project: pedaling from Mexico to Guatemala City to draw attention to his cause. “We want to raise awareness so that what happened to us doesn’t happen again,” he explains emphatically.

Alvarado and Tobar have a lot in common. They are two of the 30,000 Guatemalan children given up for international adoption between 1977 and 2007. According to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), most of these processes were marked by irregularities and corruption. In 2018, a judicial body condemned the Central American state in the case of Tobar and his brother.

The Tobar was adopted in the United States in 1998, while the Alvarado was adopted in Canada in the 1980s. As adults, they returned to Guatemala to learn the truth about the adoption and reunite with their biological families. Both are also human rights activists and advocate that the “legalized” theft of children in Guatemala is not forgotten.

That cursed day

“I will never forget January 9, 1997,” sighs Tobar. He was seven years old, and officers from the Attorney General’s Office entered his home and took him and his brother away after a neighbor filed a complaint that the children had been abandoned. “They told me they would bring us back after dinner… but that was the last time I saw my house,” he recalls.

At the time, Ramirez — who was raising Tobar and J.R. (the initials the court is using to protect the brother’s identity because he prefers not to be involved in the trial about his parentage) — was at work. In fact, she worked in a government agency related to the tax administration. “I was happy because I was earning 2,000 quetzals ($250 a month) and could provide a good life for my children. When I found out what happened, I lost control and tore up half the money in despair because I didn’t know where it was,” she recalls.

Ramirez went to juvenile court, where it was confirmed that her children had been taken. From there, a speedy trial began. In the end, a judge found her incapable of caring for them. The children — admitted to the Los Niños de Guatemala association — were declared “abandoned.”

“I never saw them again. I felt like a ship without a rudder. I was dead for life,” Ramirez recalls. Tears stream down her face after 27 years.

In April 1998, the rapid adoption process of two separated brothers began. Each was adopted by a different family. Tobar arrived in Pittsburgh on June 2 of the same year, already under a different name. Appeals were filed by Ramírez and later by Gustavo Tobar Fajardo — the children’s biological father — who emigrated to Mexico for economic reasons. Legitimate attempts were of no avail.

“I was beaten and abused in (orphanages). I too thought I had lost my brother. When I was adopted, I was excited to go…but I never really talked to my adoptive parents, and my life in the United States was miserable,” Tobar admits. He spent his life feeling uprooted. “I tried to escape from life. I drank, I smoked joined the gangand even spent several months in prison.”

Unlike Tobar, Ignacio Alvarado—abandoned at birth—was found by residents of a community in the east of the country, who cared for him with love and took him to a hospital for a medical examination. Shortly thereafter, he disappeared. It later turned out that he had been transferred to the Eliza Martinez Orphanage, which many years later was exposed as involved in child trafficking. “The residents were so upset that they started calling the river in the community ‘The Return of the Child,’ hoping that one day I would return,” says Alvarado.

At the age of three, he was adopted by a Canadian family. By the age of 17, he had already changed families three times. His life was as difficult as Tobar’s. “As an adult, a friend showed me an article about child trafficking in the orphanage where I came from. I asked myself, “Did this happen to me?”

Market for children

Tobar and Alvarado were taken in context internal armed conflictwhich left at least 200,000 people dead and missing in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996. Amid institutional chaos, Guatemala passed a law in 1977 that allowed notaries and lawyers to manage adoptions without judicial authorization. This contributed to the creation of child trafficking networks. Hospitals, the army, the judiciary and orphanages were involved.

Many notaries have become rich by facilitating international adoptions without finding out whether the child is really an orphan or an abandoned child, or whether the family that is going to adopt him is suitable. They often took advantage of people’s poverty: experts consulted by the IACHR estimated that foster families could pay between $30,000 and $80,000. “An amount (of money) that could be used to support families in Guatemala without removing children from their homes,” Tobar and Alvarado said.

According to a report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur, these legal options have made Guatemala one of the four countries that have placed the largest number of children for adoption in the world. And in 2008, the majority of children who came to the United States for adoption were of Guatemalan descent, despite the Guatemalan Adoption Act of 2007 establishing intercountry adoption as a last resort. In 2010, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) concluded that human trafficking networks used a variety of strategies to obtain children, from threatening mothers to engaging in so-called “baby-laundering,” which consisted of presenting stolen or allegedly abandoned children children a judge to recognize them as suitable for adoption.

Tobar and his family became victims of this child laundering. Alvarado wasn’t, but they were “sold to families who were dying to have a baby,” Alvarado explains.

Return to Guatemala

With the legal support of organizations such as Casa Alianza (now La Alianza, or “The Alliance”) and later El Refugio de la Niñez (“The Children’s Refuge”), Gustavo Tobar fought throughout his life to restore his parental rights, locate his son, and speak out against child theft. In 2002, a journalist from Newsweek found Tobar and showed him photos of his biological parents. “I cried and wanted to go back,” he says. But at that time he was only 12 years old.

“When they told me that my son was alive, I had hope again,” recalls Gustavo Tobar, his voice breaking with emotion. The story took a turn in 2009 when a father contacted his son on Facebook. In 2011, they finally met again. And in 2015, Osmin Tobar decided to return to Guatemala forever.

Thanks to Gustavo Tobar, the case of his children reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In 2018, a judicial body condemned the state of Guatemala for the illegal adoption of the brothers. According to the decision, these adoptions “occurred in a framework of corruption in which a group of public and private actors and institutions acted under the guise of protecting the best interests of the child, but with the real goal of achieving their own enrichment. .” In July 2024 Bernardo Arevalo became the first president to officially apologize on behalf of the Guatemalan state.

“For the first time I felt that my life had meaning. I quit drinking because I was a public figure and had the responsibility to represent the interests of illegally adopted people,” Tobar emphasizes.

For his part, Alvarado began researching his origins during a trip to Guatemala in 2019. “Walking down Sixth Avenue, I saw pictures of those who disappeared during the conflict. I had the idea of ​​putting up posters with my image to see if anyone was looking for me,” Alvarado tells EL PAÍS. With the support of the non-profit organization HIJOS Guatemala, he managed to have his photo posted in several places to draw attention to the problem of child trafficking.

A DNA sample allowed him to contact his cousin. Little by little he learned that he came from a community in the east of the country. And in 2022, he was able to meet his mother with the support of the Mental Health League of Guatemala. “It was a very strong feeling… but there’s no need to romanticize it. You can’t go back 35 years: it’s like adopting a second time. It takes time to build a relationship,” Alvarado admits.

In 2021, he founded the collective Estamos Aquí. Tobar is also a member. Any adoptee who has doubts about his past or is looking for his biological family can turn to them. For this, the organization uses DNA samples, birth certificates or hangs photos on the streets. In three years, they reached eight meetings. “It’s important for biological parents not to blame themselves, even though it can be difficult,” emphasizes Alvarado.

He was about to end the video call with EL PAÍS when he suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to mention something important: “You know what? In the community where I was found, the name of the river has already been changed. Now it’s called ‘The Boy’s Back,’ because I’m back,” he laughs, smiling in French-accented Spanish.

Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more English-language news from EL PAÍS USA Edition