DREAMS OF AMERICAN ADOPTIVE FAMILIES FALLING VICTIM ...... TO SCHEMES OF BABY MERCHANTS WORKING EL SALVADOR
THE SEATTLE TIMES
Author: DOYLE MCMANUS
CRAIG PYESLOS ANGELES TIMES
The young Minnesota couple waited expectantly at the airport for their newly adopted daughter, flying to them at last from war-ravaged El Salvador.
After months of waiting, reams of paper work and thousands of dollars in fees, they seemed to have reached the end of an ordeal.
However, when the 3-year-old girl arrived, something was wrong.
Like many abandoned children rescued from Third World countries, she had scabies and lice. She was also visibly malnourished, and a pediatrician who examined her said that despite her small size she was not 3 years old at all, but possibly as old as 5.
What distressed her new parents the most, however, was a startling tale that emerged as they struggled to communicate with the distraught child: When she left El Salvador, the little girl had been traveling with a younger brother. Somewhere along the way, an adoption agent had abruptly separated the two children _ sending the brother to some other, unknown family.
Now, far from home, the child desperately wanted her little brother back. When her new parents asked the woman who had handled the two adoptions to contact the little boy, they were horrified to learn that his whereabouts could not be determined.
``She didn't know where he was,'' said a Massachusetts official who later investigated the case. ``She had delivered the boy to a couple in Massachusetts, but she had no idea where they lived. She had no records at all.''
From orphanages and squalid slums, through a secretive network of Central American adoption lawyers and American ``baby-brokers,'' a small tide of Salvadoran children is washing into the United States _ about 1,300 over the past six years.
For those lucky enough to pass through the hands of careful agencies and scrupulous lawyers, the result can be new homes with loving families and an escape from poverty and the brutality of El Salvador's civil war.
Yet for others, the road to a new life in the U.S. runs through a netherworld of profiteering, exploitation and neglect. It is a world tainted with fraud and indifference to the needs of vulnerable children, where rules against abuse are too rarely enforced.
In some cases, Salvadoran babies have been bought from their natural mothers. U.S. diplomats fear others have even been stolen.
Babies have been shipped into the United States with false birth certificates and adoption consent forms that their real mothers never signed.
Salvadoran authorities have convicted one baby-finder of kidnapping three children. The woman testified that she had turned the children over to the agent of a prominent adoption lawyer for $160 each _ a lawyer who has arranged U.S. adoptions at fees reportedly as high as $6,500 per child.
The lure of profits has turned El Salvador's tiny adoption-law community into a circle of fear and intrigue. Some lawyers have made small fortunes, while others have fled the country after receiving anonymous threats. Last year, a law clerk was killed by unknown assassins who proclaimed themselves the Salvadoran Protective Army, a new death squad sworn to guard the nation's infants against kidnappers.
In the United States, too, unscrupulous baby brokers have been drawn to the trade in Salvadoran children. Authorities in Massachusetts, Minnesota, California and other states have been attempting to crack down on adoption ``facilitators'' who charge would-be parents large amounts of money and promise them healthy babies _ but who then sometimes provide no children, children who are desperately ill or children whose availability for adoption is questionable because they carry fraudulent adoption documents.
A federal grand jury in Boston is currently investigating the largest Salvadoran ring, after more than three years of detective work by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
However, so far, authorities in El Salvador and the United States have taken little effective action against those involved.
The roots of the problem spring from the way international adoptions work, and from the tragic consequences of El Salvador's civil war between the U.S.-backed government and leftist guerrillas.
In the United States as well as El Salvador, adoption is largely a private business, virtually unregulated in some states, in others legally subject to regulation but actually little-scrutinized. No government agency in either country has sole responsibility or authority for supervising adoptions. Lawyers and private agencies do most of the work, matching couples with children and steering them through the legal maze.
Further, El Salvador is a difficult country to deal with, even for adoption agents who have worked in dozens of other countries.
Nonetheless, American couples have found themselves drawn into the thicket of Salvadoran adoptions for one compelling reason: There is a pressing shortage of adoptable babies in the United States and a terrible surplus of unwanted babies in El Salvador.
More than 2 million U.S. couples want to adopt children, but only about 50,000 healthy infants come up for adoption in this country each year, according to the National Committee for Adoption, a Washington office funded by private adoption agencies.
As a result, thousands of couples turn to Third World countries, especially South Korea, Colombia, the Philippines, India and El Salvador. Americans adopted 310 children from El Salvador in fiscal year 1985, the last year for which figures are available.
One attraction is that El Salvador's procedures for foreign adoption are looser than those of most other Latin American nations.
``It's one of the few countries where single parents can adopt, where people over 40 can adopt, and where the government permits people to adopt without coming down and appearing in court,'' a U.S. consular official said.
El Salvador offers another grim advantage for the adoption business: It has plenty of children who need new parents.
The country's 6-year-old war between the U.S.-backed government and leftist guerrillas, the collapse of El Salvador's economy and the disintegration of its social structure have produced thousands of orphans and abandoned children, and thousands more whose impoverished mothers are willing to give them up. And, in a society so stratified that the upper classes have long viewed peasants' lives as cheap, negligent treatment of poor children can pass almost unnoticed even by those handling them.
The little Salvadoran girl who lost her brother was one of several victims of the adoption ring now being investigated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Internal Revenue Service and the Massachusetts attorney general's office.
``It is one of the largest, if not the largest, foreign adoption fraud that INS has ever seen,'' said William Granger, a senior official in the INS office in Boston.
It is also the second major ``orphan scam,'' in police argot, uncovered in Latin America in the last two years. In 1985, federal investigators broke up an Arizona-based ring that falsely promised to provide more than 40 couples with children from Mexico. Some U.S. diplomats and investigators believe the INS may have found only the tip of an iceberg and that questionable adoption rings may be operating throughout Central and South America.
U.S. officials say that INS has focused on what they describe as a ``baby broker'' in Massachusetts named Suzanne Champney and the man who supplied her with babies, a Salvadoran lawyer named Roberto del Cid Aguirre. Federal prosecutors are reviewing evidence gathered by the INS.
Although del Cid issued a general denial, both he and Champney refused to comment on the specific allegations against them.
Investigators and adoption workers say del Cid has worked on hundreds of adoptions for parents in California, Minnesota and Pennsylvania as well as Massachusetts, making him easily the biggest lawyer in the Salvadoran-U.S. baby trade. Many of the adoptions have been entirely normal, matching needy children with loving parents. But some, U.S. officials say, have been deeply flawed.
U.S. officials say del Cid has employed teams of women who went into the slums of El Salvador to persuade mothers to give up their babies. The officials said the women sometimes offered cash for the babies, a practice illegal under Salvadoran law. Del Cid has said that, if cash was exchanged, he did not know of it and would not have approved.
U.S. diplomats in El Salvador say some babies in adoptions handled by del Cid have been discovered to have false birth certificates and faulty forms registering the consent of fictional mothers, a violation of U.S. immigration law. When the U.S. Embassy tightened its rules and required the babies' mothers to appear in person, at least two ``mothers'' turned out to be women hired to play the role.
But as of now, U.S. officials and adoption agencies say, del Cid is still operating through a network of other Salvadoran lawyers _ still working on applications to the U.S. Embassy for the admission of adoptive babies to the United States and still collecting fees from hopeful American parents.
Del Cid has denied every charge against him and says he is no longer in the adoption business.
But adoption agencies and adoptive parents say otherwise.
Susan Kowalski and Patricia Brown of Bay Area Adoption Services Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., said del Cid has worked on three adoption cases for their agency this year.
Roberto del Cid Aguirre's role in processing Salvadoran children for adoption came to light largely by mischance, in a bizarre 1983 case heard in San Salvador's criminal courts.
Three women had come to police with the same strange complaint: A woman who had once employed them as maids had ``borrowed'' their children and then refused to give them back. Police arrested the woman, Aracely Urrutia, on kidnapping charges, and Urrutia led them to apartments holding dozens of children. The law student who seemed to be in charge, a young man named Ruben del Cid, told police the children were being collected for adoptions arranged by his older brother, the lawyer Roberto. The police contacted Roberto, who said he had no idea what Ruben was talking about.
Although Urrutia was convicted of kidnapping in the criminal case that followed, Ruben and Roberto del Cid were never charged. Ruben del Cid admitted, in testimony given under oath, that he had paid Urrutia $160 for each of three children, but said he believed they had been obtained legitimately.
After Urrutia was convicted, U.S. Embassy officials declared a moratorium on del Cid-handled adoptions and began examining all adoption applications more closely. They also began requiring that the natural mother of a child put up for adoption appear in person at the embassy to confirm that she was giving up the child freely.
And there have been even darker stories _ reports that the kidnapping of children for sale and adoption may actually have occurred on a wide scale, or that children may have been captured by army units and handed over to adoption brokers for a bounty. Such stories, especially those involving the military, could not be confirmed, but some U.S. officials say they take them seriously nonetheless.
Suzanne Champney acted as del Cid's chief American broker from 1979 until 1983 as he delivered at least 200 children, and possibly more, to the United States.
``I never really kept a count,'' she said in a sworn deposition to Massachusetts authorities filed in Boston's Suffolk County Superior Court in 1984. ``I would say probably two or three hundred.'' All but a few, she said, came through Roberto del Cid Aguirre.
The state of Massachusetts sued Champney in 1984, accusing her of ``unfair and deceptive acts.'' The state's complaint, based on affidavits from angry adoptive parents, included the case of the little girl in Minnesota who was separated from her brother.
The Suffolk County court agreed, and issued an injunction ordering Champney to stop operating an unlicensed adoption service in Massachusetts. Following that action, Minnesota's social welfare department instructed adoption agencies to stop dealing with Champney.
Champney, who has turned down repeated requests to discuss her activities, told Massachusetts authorities in her 1984 deposition that she kept virtually no written records of the hundreds of adoptions she handled. She said couples handed thousands of dollars over to her and she sent most of it on to del Cid, with no clear accounting of what the funds were used for.
Reached by The Times at her home, Champney refused to comment on any of the charges against her. ``There's nothing I want to say about it,'' she said.